Friday, May 16, 2008
Memo to Jerry: Mark Cuban, Jethro Tull and Thee!
It’s clear that some Yahoos and its CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang have got to be a little more than miffed that billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban is on billionaire investor Carl Icahn’s board, as he begins a proxy fight for control of the troubled Internet company.
As BoomTown noted in a post yesterday, there is no love lost at Yahoo (YHOO) for Cuban (pictured here).
He sold the Web 1.0 star, Broadcast.com, for $5.7 billion in cash to Yahoo at the peak of the bubble in 1999, skedaddled quickly and then made bank by hedging his Yahoo shares and enjoying the proceeds extravagantly.
As one longtime Yahoo, who has left the company recently, emailed me in a typical sentiment: “You don’t even know how much they hate Cuban over there.”
Oh, I do.
But, while I get the emotional part, it is actually quite unfair realistically, given it was Yahoo that did precious little with Broadcast.com’s assets after paying so much for the company.
