Marketing Pilgrim

The single biggest PITA for Yahoo has decided to leave his board position.

If you’re not aware of just how disruptive the self-labeled "activist investor" Carl Icahn has been, a quick review of our archives should bring you up to speed.

It appears that Carl Icahn isn’t happy unless he’s getting his way, and for all intents and purposes, he’s had his way with Yahoo. After criticizing the company for not selling to Microsoft, forcing his way onto the board of directors, then dumping a bunch of shares, our prediction that he was about to bail, has come true.

Carl Icahn’s recent Yahoo stock dump didn’t cause too much alarm—although he took a $125M loss, he still retains 4.5% of the company (and his board seats). But now Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz looks like she’s dumping stocks—and investors are none too happy.

As The Guardian reports, when Carol Bartz took the helm, she was given a $1M salary and $5M in stock options, as well as a promise of a $4M bonus if things went well. In two sales during these last nine months, Bartz has already unloaded $2M in Yahoo stock options.

Remember all the drama between Carl Icahn and Yahoo last year? As a major shareholder, he lobbied for Yahoo to take Microsoft’s buyout offer (any offer!). And then there were some I’ll-replace-your-whole-board-of-directors threats, and some nuh uhs. And some I’ll-get-you-yet,-Yang!s and some “what-ever”s and some pbbbts and “You’re nuts”s. . . . Yeah, for a while there it was a little ugly. Eventually, Yahoo tried to placate Icahn with a luxurious spot on their board for him and two of his closest friends!

Just a day after their massive layoffs began, Yahoo’s in the news again—and again, it’s not really the kind of story you want about your company. This time, Yahoo has reduced their severance stipulation for a merger or takeover, removing a possible barrier to acquisition.

According to the AP, the new plan will make it significantly more difficult for any employees laid off after a merger to receive the generous severance packages that were guaranteed to all of its then-14,000 employees while Microsoft was vying for the company:

Today is practically a national holiday: Britney Spears’s birthday. Celebrate.

• Something’s going on ’round here: Carl Icahn has bought up more Yahoo, increasing his stake to 5.5% of the company. Ten guesses what he wants to do with it—oh, wait, Jerry Yang is already out…
• How was Black Friday online? comScore reports that eCommerce spending was up 1 percent YOY. Time to celebrate?
• Did you know that Alexa was also a search engine? Yeah, well, not anymore. The Alexa service we all know and love to hate, website traffic rankings, will not be affected (and, as TechCrunch puts it, neither will anyone else).

From proposal to almost-marriage to messy breakup, their love affair dominated tech news for the first half of the year. Now that the Yahoo/Google deal has supplanted the proposed Yahoo/Microsoft merger in the public attention, it looks like Steve Ballmer’s getting a little lonely again. In a keynote earlier this week, the Microsoft CEO said:

We offered $33 bucks (for Yahoo) and it’s $11 today. It’s clear Yahoo didn’t want to sell. They probably still think it’s worth more than $33 a share.

I still think it makes sense for their shareholders and ours.

How about a little game of Jeopardy? Here’s your "Mergers & Acquisitions" question for $500.

"He owns shares in Time Warner, was just named to the Yahoo board (along with two cohorts) and appears to be behind a new talks with Time Warner’s AOL unit."

If you answered "Who is Carl Icahn?" then you and I are on the same page.

The eternal disrupter, Carl Icahn’s rear end is barely warming his seat on Yahoo’s board, and we’re already seeing reports that the company is once again interested in negotiating with AOL.

UPDATE: The votes are in and there are no surprises from the annual meeting.

On the surface, it appears newly appointed Yahoo board member Carl Icahn, is staying away from the company’s annual shareholder meeting for the good of the company.

On his blog, Icahn states:

I will not be attending. The proxy fight is over and it will not do shareholders or Yahoo! any good to have the annual meeting turn into a media event for no purpose.

It’s those words that have the rest of the media praising Icahn for knowing the difference between “activist shareholder” and troublemaker. But this Pilgrim’s not convinced Icahn’s motives are all selfless.