Activist investor Carl Icahn develops strange taste for bleach

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Well, as long as he doesn’t drink it. You use Clorox, right? You use it to spray stuff? To disinfect surfaces? To bleach your clothes? Well, Carl Icahn, who doesn’t exactly carry the best reputation for company turnarounds but was a real-life influence for Gordon Gekko (seriously — read up on Trans World Airlines and consider how much it compares to the plot of the original “Wall Street“), recently put up an insane, unsolicited buyout offer for the cleaning-supply country, which (think about this next time you eat a salad) also makes Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing. Slowly but surely, Icahn became the company’s largest shareholder, and now he’s gunning for a whitewash. We could keep going with these bleach jokes all day, so don’t tempt us. source

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10 May 2011 20:42

Microsoft really wanted this. Microsoft right now is trying to do things to keep up with other faster-growing technology companies.
Bahl & Gaynor Inc. money manager Matt McCormick • Explaining why Microsoft went after Skype — offering a reported $8.5 billion for the company. They offered that much because they had to. Skype reportedly rebuffed any offers that were less than $7 billion. Steve Ballmer, during the announcement of the deal, suggested that the technology would be used for, among other things, its Xbox console, Office technology, Windows Mobile phones (where they could gain a real advantage, by the way) and corporate phone software. Skype is so widely-used that Microsoft could be sitting on the next generation of phone technology — something they need to stay in the game. (Also, a side note: Google was the only other serious bidder, but they didn’t get close to $7 billion.) source

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» The deal is close: Reports suggest a deal could be reached by Tuesday, which of course would be big. See, Skype has a huge userbase — around 663 million users — and they make billions of minutes worth of VOIP calls each year. Clearly Microsoft would be a better choice to own this company than eBay, but then again, anyone would’ve been a better choice than eBay.

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what Groupon, the quickly-growing deals site, reportedly declined a buyout offer from Google for a whopping $6 billion over the weekend. That’s a lot of money to turn down.
why The company’s CEO, Andrew Mason was concerned about the strategic direction under Google and what would happen to his loyal staff. So an IPO’s next. source

» A mixed record for startups: Some tech companies that have passed on the major buyout offers, like Facebook (which passed on a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo! way back in 2006), have only gotten much larger on their own. Other tech giants that missed the buyout opportunity – Yahoo! turned down an epic deal from Microsoft in 2008 and nosedived ever since. Other companies who have taken the buyout have had success stories (YouTube, which is a cornerstone of Google’s offerings) and precipitous declines (MySpace, which is trying to make a comeback; and Bebo, which sold to AOL and then lost nearly all of its value when it was sold again a couple years later). Which is to say, it’s too soon to know whether Groupon screwed up here.

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