So the big news yesterday was Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo! “quit” his insanely lucrative position (he made $500 million in six years). He was a Hollywood transplant (with Warner Bros. for 24 years) and he symbolized the Hollywood attempt to invade Silicon Valley. It turned out to be unsuccessful. He’s being touted as one of the worst hi-tech CEO in history. As one blogger said, “It only took 6 years for Semel to take the greatest Internet company around and make it an also-ran.” Jerry Yang, one of the original founders, has taken over as interim CEO.
There is DEFINITELY a back story here, and the blogosphere is running amok with theories. Here’s a summary of a few:
- The company is going to be sold/restructured. This rumor is not helping Yahoo!’s stock price. But Semel’s quitting did give it a boost.
- Will this moment of weakness allow Microsoft to swoop in and acquire Yahoo!? They were unsuccessful in a previous attempt.
- Mark Cuban brought in to be CEO.
- Larry Ellison steps in and buys Yahoo to create a powerful motto “Yahoo runs on Oracle’s Money.â€
- eBay and Yahoo mega-merger, and then an acquisition of the combined entity by Microsoft.
- Yahoo outsourcing it’s search to Google if Fox hands over MySpace for a stake in the company.
