Icahn's Eleven: Yahoo Board Slate as Clooney Flick
Must amusing take so far on the proposed Icahn board slate for Yahoo comes from Breakingviews this morning. The folks there have done it as a winking take on the George Clooney flick, Ocean's Eleven, with Icahn in the starring role. The semi-serious point, of course, is that Icahn's board nominees are doing this is as a quick caper: They want to make their money and get out quick.
I would post an excerpt, but the Breakingviews site has an irritating feature that prevents copying of even portions of stories.
Update: Jeff at BV has helpfully allowed me to repost some text here:
Consider the squad:
* The Loudmouth, Icahn: An experienced loudmouth activist whose success measured in billions of dollars makes him hard to ignore.
* The Boss, Frank Biondi: a former movie studio and Viacom boss. His operational experience in the business could help Yahoo in its cooperation with content partners.
* Snake Oil, aka Mark Cuban: An entrepreneur with a history of creating companies that he then sells for far more than they are worth to sucker corporations. Cuban sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7bn at the height of the dotcom bubble - useful experience for selling Yahoo to Microsoft.
* The Figleaf, Lucian Bebchuk: The Harvard Law School professor is one of the foremost experts on corporate governance and a strong advocate for aligning executive pay to performance. Shareholders rejecting a seat for Bebchuk would be protesting motherhood and apple pie.
