Internet Company Founders/Billionaires Gone Wild

As a Stanford graduate (especially from the Computer Science Department), I guess I’m supposed to think of Jerry Yang as infallible. He’s part of this group of incredibly-successful entrepreneurs to come from the School of Engineering at Stanford. You know the ones.

But in reading all the press coverage of this Microsoft-Yahoo madness, I can’t help but thinking: “Good Lord, I kind of wish the Stanford guy wasn’t running Yahoo! right now.” After all, let’s make sure we’ve got the whole scorecard filled out:

• Microsoft proposes an acquisition at 60% over Yahoo!’s market value.
• Yahoo! stock immediately flies up to the proposed acquisition price. Good times for day-traders.
• Jerry and company basically do everything humanly possible to thwart acquisition attempts. This of course includes testing out what it’d be like to sleep around with Google (Microsoft’s new gang rivals) by basically taking the Yahoo Panama Search Advertising product (which, by the way, Yahoo spent millions of dollars on in the name of catching up to Google AdWords) and lighting it on fire.
• Meanwhile, Yahoo! employees are still busy trying to interview for every possible job in the Silicon Valley.
• Saturday: Jerry goes back to Ballmer with a “counter-offer” $6/share over Microsoft’s offer of $31/share, weeks after the original offer
• Ballmer and Microsoft, presumably exasperated (or maybe just having second thoughts about acquiring a company and management team that could fuck up this scenario so badly), decides to walk.
• Yahoo! comes back with a press release that sounds nothing short of a declaration of victory. Hooray! Jerry speaks: “With the distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history.”
• Monday: the Yahoo! stock predictably tanks like mad and suddenly all of Yahoo!’s institutional investors call Jerry and The Board bad names. Apparently the “most important transition” Jerry spoke of was the transition from patient, waiting investors to angry, bloodthirsty investors. Mission Accomplished!
• Jerry comes back with the not-often-seen “Hey hey hey! It’s not our fault, we wanted to negotiate!” ploy, which is promptly followed up by the “Fuck, we didn’t even know they were offering $33/share! Can we take backsies?” strategy

Hmm, yeah, and that’s where we are now. Is anyone else thinking that maybe Jerry wishes he’d just hung out and booked a couple extra speaking gigs instead of re-inheriting this mess from Terry Semel?

I’m sure Jerry has many more pressing issues on his mind, but hopefully he’ll “get it together,” as they say in the biz. If he keeps it up at this rate we’re going to have to start mentioning him in the same breath as that other type of Stanford celebrity: Condoleezza Rice.