Icahn! goes! double! or! quits! on! Yahoo!

Lost a billion? Spend another $69m

By John Oates, 27th November 2008

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Troublemaking investor Carl Icahn has doubled his stake in Yahoo! despite sitting on a billion dollar loss from his first stake in the firm.

Icahn built up a huge stake in Yahoo! in May when shares were floating around $25. He tried, and failed, to get the board to accept a $33 a share offer from Microsoft.

According to an SEC filing Icahn has bought another 6.9 million shares - for less than $10 each.

Founder Jerry Yang is taking a back seat at the firm and it is looking for a new CEO. Icahn wanted Yang out in order to push through the takeover by Microsoft.

Talks with Microsoft are rumoured to be still going on - possibly just for its search business. And presumably Steve Ballmer is offering a lot less than $33 a share.

Yang's supposed preferred response, an ad deal with Google, has also fallen through. ®

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Posted Friday 28th November 2008 12:39 GMT

Kit Temple

I don't understand the numbers

"Carl Icahn has doubled his stake in Yahoo! despite sitting on a billion dollar loss from his first stake in the firm."

Icahn built up ..when shares were floating around $25.

..bought another 6.9 million shares - for less than $10 each."

I don't get the mathematics here. If he has doubled his stake, that means he initially bought 6.9 million shares for around $172 million. So how can he lose $1 billion from owning $172 million worth of shares?

Posted Thursday 27th November 2008 15:10 GMT

Anonymous Coward