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Microsoft Offered $40 a Share For Yahoo
fistfullast33l writes "Bloomberg is reporting that a recently unsealed court case by shareholders against Yahoo reveals that Microsoft offered $40 a share for the Internet search company in January 2007 and Yahoo turned it down. We've extensively discussed Microsoft's bid for Yahoo earlier this year for $33 a share, which was rebuffed. Investor Carl Icahn has launched a proxy fight against Yahoo over the spurning of the Microsoft deal." CWmike notes Computerworld's coverage of the revelations: "The complaint places much of the blame on [Yahoo CEO Jerry] Yang, describing him as someone with a 'well-known' antipathy toward Microsoft who acted out of a personal interest to keep Yahoo independent. Something wrong with that? Oh, yeah... public company."
Who hasn't already written off both of these companies? Anyone holding either of them for the long term simply does not grok where the internet and personal computing are going, or how desperately inept these two companies have become due to their size and age.
Microsoft's asset is an OS that people are still locked into, but becoming violently sick of. Yahoo's asset is a rapidly diminishing brand and user base. Combine them and you just get an even faster and more epic fail. This is the next AOL/TW.
The guys who will eat their lunch are the Googles and Apples of the world, who are both innovating and listening to their customers. Size alone won't help you compete with that, you need to get back to innovating. I think people are being way too slow to jump the sinking ship here - if I were a YHOO shareholder, I'd have dumped as soon as the offer hit the table and the stock hit $30. Why on earth would you hold out for $31?
And isn't that what it's all about, folks?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If he had a 'well known' antipathy for Microsoft then it was known when he was hired as CEO. Presumably the board of directors considered it a good thing or they would have hired someone else. Investment is risk. If you can't accept that risk don't invest.
Fair warning: Rant
Public companies are now being run by the shareholders that take out payday loans, refinance their houses so much they owe money when they sell, cannot build traditional savings since all their income is treated as disposable. Basically the get rich generation with no long term goals other than their next big "fix".
Why does it surprise anybody that the driving force behind these companies is to sell out no matter what the cost to the business, the employees, or even the customers?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
It's about taking your January share price of $19 and doubling it into $40 over the course of a few short months, not to mention your shareholders, and perhaps most importantly vested employees. Sure, Jerry has a lot of cash with or without Microsoft but employees with shares could literally double their investments overnight with this deal. I'm sure theres a good bit of internal angst.
People used to speak of Microsoft Millionaires, this could have made a few Yahoo Millionaires. Chances are Ichann will get a shot to do what Jerry should have done.
Well, since you asked why:
Maybe not too far off the mark...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Yahoo isn't going away. Its better for everyone in the long haul in terms of overall wealth creation to have both Yahoo and Microsoft alive. If you don't like it, hedge and buy both stocks. I'm sick of seeing investors want money NOW, and so they kill their golden goose. But these days its not surprising.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
.... He made a long-term decision instead of thinking about short-term profits. He's being sued for looking beyond the next few quarters.
If you think Yahoo can't turn it around, then yeah. He fucked up big-time. But if you think (as I'm sure he does) that Yahoo can be an innovative company that can step in to fill the gap as Microsoft declines, then he did the right thing. Hardly matters either way though. (Some profit now > Lots of profit over time) in the eyes of wall street.
Microsoft who acted out of a personal interest to keep Yahoo independent. Something wrong with that? Oh, yeah... public company.
There's nothing wrong with acting in personal interests if there's a reasonable argument that it coincides with shareholder interests. And in this case, there certainly is.
Look at Google's value. Which companies are in any position at all to grab any significant share of what they're doing in the market? It's a short list. Yahoo's on it.
If you were holding onto a significant chunk of one of those companies, would you want to (a) sell it now for a quick but small profit or (b) figure out what changes you need to make in the company to have it better compete with Google and acquire value on that level?
Some shareholders might choose a. But b is certainly reasonable.
Frankly, so is the Microsoft antipathy. People like to talk as if the haters are just irrational folks who got up on the anti-MS side of the bed. Nevermind that there's a significant real technical and business history that would make any sane and competent person wary of them.
The web as a platform is open and expanding. Windows as a platform is stagnating and closed. Which do you want to be invested in for the next 10 years?
Tweet, tweet.
What hurts me most about this Microsoft/Yahoo deal is what would happen to Zimbra. I fear the worst. Can someone tell me any serious contender to Zimbra that is just as good and free?
Any course of action that increases Microsofts monopoly in any market is, by definition, a bad thing.
Kudos to Mr Yahoo for stopping this. Now I wonder if Facebook, Myspace and Amazon would do the same.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Yahoo would not have survived to 2009 if all it's employees quit. That's why Yang made sure $2 billion of the purchase price would go to employee severance plans. There's probably been some disruption anyway. Wouldn't you have a resume on the street with all of the FUD and BS being flung? The severance plans gave employees a reason to stick around and be fired by M$, or just keep on working if the deal fell through.
Painting this to be a personal thing by Yang is nuts. Yahoo and M$ were getting along famously until M$ decided to launch a hostile takeover.
trading stock of Yahoo for stock of MS? I think that I would rather have Yahoo. Yahoo is much more likely to expand into new areas and expand. MS already had as much as they could get and are headed for a massive shrinkage. Yahoo, by working with Google, will come out ahead. Look at what Gates did for Apple by helping them back when keeping them around helped the monopoly issue that MS has.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I hope everyone realises that Carl Icahn isn't a long-term shareholder upset with how the company is being run. He thought he could run it better when Jerry Yang rebuffed MS, and AS A RESULT, bought a significant number of shares. In other words, he bought into the company for the sole purpose of getting Yang tossed out.
In the world of billionaires, not always the most friendly of folks, Icahn is about as pleasant as a rabid shark with PMS. If he gets his way, he'll install a new board, sell Yahoo to MS at $40, help gut the company, and then leave with a few more dollars in his pockets. Yahoo staff will be out of work, the search engine market will become a battle of two titans, and basically everyone will lose except for Carl and his board.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
unfortunately they are the most damaging factor for the vision and progress of any company.
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Yeah, it's a public company, but if he really feels it's in the best interest of Yahoo's long term survival to stay independent from Microsoft (which it is) then YES it is ok he turned them down. He has NOT neglected his fiduciary duty to the company merely because this won't give Yahoo a big boost NOW. By looking out for the long term viability of the company he has an even STRONGER argument in his defense, because next quarter's numbers are irrelevant if the company folds, or is turned into a ghost of their former glory as a subsidiary, and his shareholders get crap in the end. I applaud him for NOT giving into the lethal tendency of business in this county to only look at next quarter's numbers, and instead do what's right for his company's (and thus shareholder's) long term interests. I'll gladly give up $40 a share now if it means I'll be worth 50 or 60 a share later. Just because most people wouldn't these days doesn't make them right.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
If apple were listening to its customers, it would be building open systems with less DRM.
And Office is a *major* asset for Microsoft.
Honestly I don't see people getting sick of Windows, there is no alternative on low end machines that people will flock to because there is no software for them. It is human nature to complain and the biggest target is Microsoft. I use Windows and OS X at home. I am strictly restricted to XP or NT at work on PCs. It doesn't get in my way, it doesn't do anything wrong. If anything the same problem I have with OS X I have with Windows; OS X handles it better; and that is bad software. Hell even my iMac wasn't immune to bad video drivers.
Of course the real monster is Office. I know Mac fans who did not move to Intel versions until Office was native. It is more important long term than the OS under it is.
Apple to me seems to be moving away from the desktop trying to redirect us to the living room; one place I refuse to allow a PC to enter (apple or ms or linux)
I know its accepted to ridicule Ms and speak of imminent doom and gloom but its been the same for ages here. I remember day one here for me and it was always Microsoft is going to die. There are just too many smart people there to write them off.
Now Yahoo, yuck. I can't even stand going to their clutter of a page. If anything they probably are the loser here, they need someone to use them because the public isn't
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I have been reading about this and for teh record icann is not a long term shareholder at all.
He only bought teh company after teh failed deal in order to raid it. Read his record here? He will be more than happy to fire 100% of the employees and all assets for pennies on the dollar and then cash out.
The man is a mennace and I am shocked what he did to Time Warner is legal? To me this is gross negligence but I am no lawyer.
Yasng beleived in a couple years he would own more markets in advertising and software development and the internet is still growing in many poorer countries.
The shareholders mostly agree and Icahn has been known to buy up software companies to enforce sales. He pushed several software vendors and fired CEO's to sell to Oracle only to raid and dump later at teh expense of the other shareholders.
Also its been mentioned MS only wants to trade stock and there is no growth for MS. Every market is losing money they are in. Even Vista is barely making them money and they are heavily overvalued. Why else would Bill Gates leave?
http://saveie6.com/
It's interesting considering the first offer was kept secret, that the stock peaked and then rapidly tanked right before Microsofts second offer, it like someone quietly bought the shares and then sold rapidly to provoke a fall in price at which point MS stepped in and made an offer for 60% per share .. :)
davecb5620@gmail.com
Some billionaires would take over other companies and sell off the pieces just to make a buck. Some would give a token amount of their money away to charity. Me, I would shoot a guy in public with 50 witnesses. Because clearly the laws of this country do not apply to people of such wealth.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
So that the best business minds in the country can explain to me just how much they know about...
Sorry, I couldn't keep typing that, it hurt my strong sense of reality.
If it came as a surprise to anyone that Yahoo's founders and high-level managers have an antipathy towards MSFT then they must've been living in a cave, or are total morons. From Yahoo's inception there has been little love for MSFT--if they ever cooperated it was grudgingly, in their own self interest. There is a cultural gap bigger than the Grand Canyon there.
It doesn't help that there is a giant impedance mismatch when it comes to technology and infrastructure. A Netcraft search is telling: Yahoo is almost universally FreeBSD, and what is left is Linux. Yahoo has ZERO Microsoft in their data centres. MSFT, of course, is almost universally Windows Server.
Remember what happened to Hotmail when MSFT bought it? They ripped out all the FreeBSD over the first couple of years, subjecting users to regular periodic disruptions. "To hell with users, we eat our own dogfood dammit!". Not only that, I'd say most of the hotmail employees were abandoned too--wandered away or pushed out.
Hotmail still exists today as a cornerstone to MSFT's "Live" initiative and is probably the biggest webmail provider out there so it wasn't all bad of course, but there is a difference here: MSFT had no webmail service of note before buying Hotmail. In the case of Yahoo, what have they got that MSFT doesn't have? They both have an IM platform and client, a search portal, webmail, advertising services, etc...except NONE of Yahoo's runs on MSFT technology! Within 2 years, the yahoo portal will be gone, the IM client will be gone, the webmail will be gone, everything will be gone. Yahoo is coveted for its customer base and advertising presence. It'll live for awhile as "MS Yahoo! Live" for awhile then it'll be gone. It's employees will be gone. It'll be a footnote in history.
It doesn't matter all that much to me; I have no great love for either company and think they both offer mediocre service and crappy software. However, if Yahoo's directors and Yang himself care about the company and really believe it would grow, they've made the right decision to resist a buyout by MSFT. You'd have to be a fool to think there'd be anything of substance left of Yahoo after MSFT slayed them and feasted upon the corpse. Some of us would cheer to see that, but I'm betting the founder, directors and loyal employees would understandably NOT want to see that.
Anyways, who is to say that Yahoo shareholders would be better off with the MSFT shares tossed their way in a buyout? Right now, I'd say NEITHER stock is going anywhere exiting in the next 2 years. By the way, if you just go by the charts, Yahoo did the right thing; in the past year, YHOO has lost just over 9 percent, but MSFT has lost over 10 percent. If you extend where things have been out to 2010, if you think YHOO is heading towards $11, then MSFT will probably be $10.50.
It seems to me that many of you do not have your fingers on the pulse of the day to day users in a corporate enviornment. That is why you fail to see why companies use, and will continue to use, Windows as a base OS for their client systems.
It's true, I've been out of the cube farm for about a year and a half. And I think it's true that there, Windows still has significant penetration.
But consider the following:
(1) Even in the corporate world, users are ready to get off the upgrade treadmill at Windows XP. Precisely for the reason you mention "It works just fine for what these users need to do." Nobody needs the next version of Windows, nobody really cares, and Vista really isn't that great.
(2) There exist increasingly capable alternatives that also "work just fine for what these users need to do."
(3) More and more work is done on web apps.
It does not 'break' as often as you would like it to, or believe it to break
I'm sure that somewhere, there's a place where seasoned Windows sysadmins correctly administer Windows boxes built from well-selected reliable hardware so well that your statement is true. However, it certainly has not been the case in the business and home environments I've been a part of. And "as often as I'd like it to?" I'd be a happier man if it broke under my use not at all.
But even assuming your statement is truer than I think it is -- the other three points are what I really mean by "Windows is stagnating." Microsoft's licensing revenues certainly aren't going away overnight. But right now, in the main, Windows is pretty much headed to the ignominy of just another commodity.
Tweet, tweet.
Anyone who could defend Vista and DRM is a huge ass, given the number and quality of people who say both suck. Everything you don't want to know about Ou and Gutmann is here. and I'll reproduce it entirely.
Just for fun, Vista IS a power hog that will contribute to global warming if used, so even that charge is vindicated. Here, though, is a thorough account of George Ou and Ed Bott's harassment of researcher Peter Gutmann:
Windows DRM: A Response to the Disinformation
This is a response to a series of articles by George Ou and Ed Bott of ZDNet stretching over a period of more than a month. I'll try to stay away from the assorted personal attacks in George and Ed's articles and just outline the details.
It all started with an email from George Ou, who decided, without ever hearing my talk on content-protection issues or seeing the slides for the talk, that what I'd said in the slides was wrong. I offered to send them to him, but by then he'd gone ahead and posted his conclusions anyway, still without ever actually having seen the slides that he's commenting on. Later he changed his story to claim quite emphatically that he wasn't attacking the slides at all, which seems a bit contradictory since the material wasn't present anywhere but the slides.
Dealing with him was quite weird in a number of other ways as well. For example whenever anyone anywhere posted something that happened to agree with his position, I'd immediately get a gleeful email from him crowing about it. I never even saw the articles, because George would beat me to them every time. It's as if I had my own personal "news about George Ou" news-clipping service provided for me by ZDNet.
He even went so far as to lodge a formal complaint about me with the University, although since I'd been trying quite hard to ignore him (both he and Ed even mentioned this in their blogs), I'm not really sure what he complained about (details of complaints are treated as confidential). Maybe he was upset because I wasn't paying any attention to him.
Ed's tactics were slightly different. He posted his initial comments on a blog whose existence I wasn't even aware of (and therefore had no way of responding to) and then summarily declared victory in a later blog posting based on the fact that I didn't reply. The only communication I had from him in that time was a long lecture that he sent me about professionalism (!!).
In this entire time, neither George nor Ed ever tried to obtain the slides from me ("I never asked for his slides" - George Ou), the actual material that started this whole thing. I've sent out copies of the slides to every single person who asked for them, but neither Ed nor George ever bothered contacting me to get the slides that they were attacking or to do any fact-checking whatsoever for the material they were posting to their blogs. Indeed, all I got from Ed was a long sermon on professionalism.
Ed's most recent missive came in multiple instalments, since most of it makes for somewhat tedious reading I've provided a brief commentary on the main points as an appendix for people who really feel the need to go through it all, but I've just included a quick summary here to save space. So let's see what Ed's justification is for claiming that "Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong":
Look: Microsoft and Yahoo compete for the Icy North. What does this say? They've been competing with MS for many years now and they know who their enemy is. Furthermore: Yahoo is run by /. type people with /. ideas. I suspect that they simply bought into the Anti-Microsoft trend of anger, fear and loathing that permeates our sector of the internet. I'll bet that Yahoo people can browse /. without exciting too much attention; Microsoft people have to keep a low profile and wear asbestos.
I mean to say... would you like to be bought by Microsoft?
MS made it clear they felt they NEEDED yahoo to continue and ever be competitive in the field. Now they don't have it, their shit is stinking and they're going to be forced to stop wasting their public corporate money on a dog that won't hunt. Yahoo wins by knowing a major competitor out of the game. Smart move on their part. shareholders should be glad.
Even Slashdot's fortune program is on to you, Twitter! It must have been hacked by Microsoft. They are out to get you, you know.
...how desperate Microsoft is than anything else. ...and MS interest in them is in fact a confirmation of this.
Yahoo management just believes in their company and its ability to survive.
Informative +5 IMHO.
Of course they are, and they continue to innovate. The iPhone interface isn't an innovation? And are you fucking kidding me about the so-called "Best Page In The Universe"? Anyone who could have such a shitty-looking website doesn't have the least goddamned clue about design, or its importance, especially when it comes to human interface. Microsoft and Dell have also introduced dramatic innovations, and I'm fully aware that that statement is heresy on Slashdot, but give credit where it is due (and I'm saying this as a Mac user). The problem is that the word doesn't mean what most people think it means (apologies to Inigo Montoya). From Dictionary.com:
innovate : to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.
People usually mistakenly conflate "innovate" with "invent", and to say that any of these three companies has not innovated would be wrong. Apple's innovations were to bring geeky technology to the masses in a way that made sense and were useful (GUI, CD-ROM drive, USB, Unix); Microsoft of course were the ones who spread computing far, wide, and deep; Dell's innovations were in manufacturing and sales, and they can be fairly credited with commoditizing the personal computer. In my opinion Michael Dell has done more to drive down the cost of computers, thereby bringing heretofore artificially expensive gadgets into the mainstream, than anyone else. Like him or loathe him, his place in computing history is secure.
If there is, I think you just crossed it.
Part of my underlying implied point, and the GP's point too I think, was that in holding out for $31, investors could well wind up getting that extra push over the cliff, and ultimately get much less than even $30. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
For all the Google slander articles, I've yet to see any proof that Google is suddenly evil. People bemoan they are in China, but so are AOL/MS/Yahoo, etc. Google was the only one to fight the censorship. They are the only one that shows "These search results are censored" on their page.
In the end they said, "it is better to create in roads in China and hope to fight censorship down the road than to not be in China at all."
Massive corporations get attacked all the time, but while Yahoo and MS were volunteering your private search results to the government, and Yahoo was handling over journalists who talked about democracy, Google was telling the government to screw off and protecting your privacy.
Google did cave once, on repeated orders from a judge to hand over incriminating photos on a kiddie-porn ring in Brazil. Clearly that makes them evil.
I'm sure this all comes across like I'm some slavering fan-boy, but I just want to see some facts. If everyone wants to call Google evil, please provide some.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
and they care for nothing but more profits, even at the expense of destruction of the company, and vision it holds and service it provides. because they can just capitalize on their profits, sell out at the right time, and jump to another ship. that is how it is happening for a long time in wall street now.
its time we admit that current shareholder concept is not working very well. we are not in 17th century anymore, when a shareholder of a west indies expedition had to stick with his shares until make or break of the company on the return of the ships sent. people are just buying and dumping shares like cabbages.
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basically everyone will lose except for Carl and his board.
Worth emphasizing. See Icahn's history with TWA.
Tweet, tweet.
He is rich and did something right I must presume, but bemoaning and belitting the company you are so heavily invested in doesn't boost investor confidence. If you want to raise your stock price how about you say:
"To be honest, it is hard not to see dollar signs when someone offers you $40 a share. For Yahoo to remain independent, they must be pretty confident about their place in the industry and their future. Perhaps Jerry Yang knows something the rest of us don't."
You get your back-handed compliment in, vent some steam, and at the same time hopefully try to convince investors to drive your stock price up.
Creating a split within Yahoo isn't going to help your wallet. At best, you drive the price low enough, and oust the leaders to the point that Microsoft does buy you, but likely it will be at a price lower than where you're at today. If that is your best case scenario, you're just better offer dumping stock today.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
People seem to forget what a disaster HP/Compaq was, and what a money sink-hole AOL/TW was.
Yahoo has been known to do most of their web development on open platforms and languages. Microsoft's web services often come in third place. By purchasing Yahoo, you either allow Yahoo to remain Yahoo and abandon existing Microsoft services (never going to happen), or you force Yahoo's users into Microsoft services they didn't want (wasting what you just spent billions on), or you basically keep the two companies as seperate companies.
These two companies were not meant to be merged.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I owned Yahoo stock for 10 years, and finally got sick of it not going anywhere and dumped it at the beginning of the year. YHOO is not a golden goose, and is showing no indications of ever becoming one. And please, Yang is in it for the money. He made that choice when he took the company public in exchange for making him rich. There's nothing wrong with that, but the die is cast, and that's the way he needs to run it - for the benefit of the shareholders. If he has a personal agenda that is something else, he needs to leave.
yet the years i invested in the stock market taught me that big players always magically sell out before things take a down turn.
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hi twitter
Who said maximizing shareholder value means maximizing shareholder value in the short term? Is it better to double your investment in one day, or to triple your investment in a week? If you believe rates of change are all that matter, then doubling overnight is better. But if you believe that shareholder value is somehow supposed to be connected to the real economy, then Jerry is doing exactly the right thing. Greedy selfish pigs vs. forward thinking executives who are considering the welfare of the entire company. That's the difference. Anyone who thinks that cashing in on a marriage of completely opposite cultures is, in the long run, going to make the world a better place for anyone other than assholes like Ichann needs to pull their head out of their ass.
Some long term some short term, but you can't "invest" in the stockmarket. The stock is already there you are just buying it hoping it will go up substantially by the time you need to sell it.
n/t
Might that be because they started paying dividends?
One thing, off the top of my head, is that you can lose $2 billion and still have a lot of money. If you only had $1 billion, you couldn't do that.
Uh, you could also fund some kind of big project that requires a lot of people to work on for a long time. Like maybe an x-prize shot, or a giant hospital/relief ship.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Well, can't blame shareholders for being pissed.
He may be CEO, he may be a founder, but when he took the company public, he made a boatload of dough, AND made millions of others part-owners while reducing his ownership stake. Now he wants to make arbitrary decisions without consulting the other owners?
I personally like Microo better, but google has microo at 64k to microhoo at 598k. Microhoo is a mouth full if you ask me.
IP Finding
tm
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as much as you're into the software that runs on them. And really, not so much the software (as in quality), as the amount of software (quantity). You have a big software collection. Yippeee!!
even the penny-ante ones or the employees who have share options. Heck, even himself.
And although big investors that have a lot of money will have more mobility of investment will get a better deal for short-term gain, shareholders who own fewer shares (and so the cost of brokering them is a greater proportion of the money they would make) see no or reverse value in the short-term gutting of the company.
Where does it say that shareholders must be listened to in proportion to the number of shares held?
The shareholders are all shareholders and Ichan isn't even a large shareholder.
Okay, which is a better outcome for the company?
(1) Shares steadily decline to $10 in 2010. (Assuming management has no magic to bring it back flat or back to growth.)
(2) Shares shoot up to (almost) $40 for a week, drop below what they are now as I-cahn't-keep-my-fingers-out-of-other-people's-pockets and his ilk sell theirs off, then essentially disappear completely as Microsoft mismanages the merger.
You think Microsoft can properly manage it while keeping Yahoo as a separate company? You think Microsoft can inflate their search company's "value" with Yahoo's customers?(Sans tech. Be serious.)
But as far as the customer base goes, should Microsoft ever take Yahoo over, I'll be one ex-customer. No way I want Microsoft mishandling my mail. And I'm not particularly unique about that, either. I have some relatives who are ex- hotmail.com, now on Yahoo, who would also move in a heartbeat.
Buying the Microsoft "bail-out" had only one possible result for Yahoo -- being bailed entirely out of the industry. Permanently.
I-cahn't is just a financial bully thinking he has a chance to abuse the courts to his profit.
And, yes, it was a no-brainer. Just say no.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
kudos to you, but for millions that are on the same boat as we, and i believe we are on the majority, it is the other way. thats the way it is - bigger fish always eats smaller fish.
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means maximizing shareholder value in the short term?
Nobody said this. It is a deliberate misinterpretation of the function of corporate reporting.
He didn't buy those shares for $0.