Yahoo founders David Filo and Jerry Yang own 80,833,066 and 54,110,564 shares of Yahoo, respectively. At Microsoft's offer price, the pair have made almost $1.6 billion since yesterday's close and stand to cash out more than $4 billion total if the deal goes through. More amazing? Ousted CEO Terry Semel stands to…
Like a child actor, Yahoo has always lived its life in public — and suffered for it. Its April 1996 IPO, when the company had a mere 49 employees, cast it in the spotlight long before it was ready. And like Hollywood, the stock market looks coldly on a fallen star. Microsoft's offer of $44 billion is less than the…
Terry Semel has stepped down as chairman of Yahoo and will leave the board of directors, more than six months after he left his post as CEO of the company. Board member Roy Bostock will assume his role as non-executive chairman. Don't think they let Terry leave without some lovely parting gifts though: Valleywag has…
Former Yahoo CEO and Warner Bros. cochairman Terry Semel wants another job in Hollywood, Deadline Hollywood Daily reports. New Line Cinema is Semel's most likely destination; he's already met with the studio's Time Warner bosses. But the site says Semel is telling friends, "I'm looking at everything." Sounds like…
Terry Semel is still Yahoo's chairman, but the company is rapidly erasing his mark on the business — chiefly any push into original content, a business Wall Street views as expensive and unrewarding. He's clearly not interested in carrying on that argument in the Yahoo boardroom. Instead, PaidContent reports, he's…
The New York Post likes to run "blind items" — a gossip-column tradition where just enough details are given to help readers guess who's being talked about. Here's the latest:
Is Yahoo censoring hot gossip about its Hollywood ex-boss's family? Page Six and other LA gossip rags tell us Lindsay Lohan's lastest BFF with benefits might be none other than Courtenay Semel. That's right, former Yahoo topper Terry Semel's daughter. Reportedly, the pair were seen together at a housewarming party…
MarketWatch, ahead of Yahoo's third-quarter earnings, said the company was looking to "start fresh." In other words, kindly ignore the drop in net income, the rise in expenses, the continued problems in display ads the company just reported — that's all in the past. How many fresh starts does a company need — or…
Remember how Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse, in his now-famous "peanut butter manifesto," complained Yahoo, under former CEO Terry Semel, spread its resources too thin over too many projects and too many ideas? Turns out Semel doesn't just have trouble picking business projects to fund.. The man is just as unable to…
Yahoo executives keep touting the company's deal with a "consortium" of newspapers. But from what we hear from insiders, the "consortium" is just a bunch of paper, with no real technology designed to power Yahoo president Sue Decker's grand vision. Newspaper partners are growing increasingly skeptical that Yahoo…
It really doesn't matter that Yahoo's "interim" CEO Jerry Yang doesn't have a 100-day plan. Even if he had a plan to execute, he can't attract the engineers to build it. Why? Google simply pays more, and engineers follow the money. According to MyDanwei, a salary-tracking site, the average Google software engineer…
Mark Rubash, the Yahoo finance executive who recently left the troubled Web giant — this, despite having the favor of new president Sue Decker — emailed Valleywag to deny that he lost a turf war with Rachel Glaser. If anything, he won the turf war, he says, getting offered a job in which he would have overseen…
Yahoo has decided to lump the hosers in with the Eurotrash, adding Canada to the Yahoo Europe team now headed by exec Toby Coppel. Why? Ostensibly because "Canada's multicultural diversity parallels Europe; and Canadian sites operate in English and French," Coppel claims in an inadvertently hilarious memo sent to…
Kara Swisher notes that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch quietly confirmed a rumor: His company's talks with Yahoo about swapping MySpace for a large stake in the online portal were real, but derailed by Terry Semel's departure from the CEO spot at Yahoo. [AllThingsD.com]
Like a summer-fair wrestler extricating himself from a sweaty sumo fatsuit, Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang is finding himself in a sticky situation. Yahoo's second-quarter earnings have come out. Without much of a track record as a manager, and an exceedingly short tenure as CEO, it's hard for Yang to take credit for…
Rumors that Ed Zander may step down as CEO of Motorola caused the stock to rise nearly 2% today. Whether or not the rumor is true, it demonstrates investors are no longer confident in Ed Zander's leadership of the chip and cell phone manufacturer. It also shows the growing power of the grassroots shareholder…
"Whoa, was that Terry Semel leaving the Disney offices?" So says Twitter user Michael Sippey about the recently deposed Yahoo CEO (who will soon visit banker Herb Allen's annual mogul retreat). Could be business, could be a social call for the former Warner Brothers exec who never really left Hollywood.
Sun Valley, the quiet Idaho ski resort town, is about to get a charge from Silicon Valley. Allen & Co., the New York investment bank, has been holding an exclusive conference there for 25 years, but until recently, the invite list has been limited to old-media moguls. On the invite list for this year's conference,…
How is Terry Semel recovering from his recently ended and embattled tenure as Yahoo's chief executive? Apparently, he is hanging out with Hollywood buddy, Tom Cruise. Nobody can cheer you up like the laughing, smiling, and hypnotic movie star and Scientologist (if you aren't personally repulsed by the actor). And…
LATimes.com uses the occasion of former Warner Bros. head Terry Semel's recent ouster from Yahoo! to assemble a handy, clip-n-save-quality scorecard helping you stay current on how your favorite former studio bigwigs are keeping themselves busy. While the group's fortunes range from Peters' tragically…
