Business Insider has announced an “offer” for Yahoo.
CEO Henry Blodget has posted a bare-bones plan with more details promised for “when the time comes” for Yahoo to purchase Business Insider for $150 million then appoint BI acting CEO (he says “us” not “me”) of Yahoo so they can implement their “plan”.
Publicity stunt? Perhaps. We’ll bite. Should Yahoo?
@jeffjarvis: @hblodget we disagree about whether media’s necessarily a good business
Yahoo is a lot more than media RT@EpicureanDeal Nope. Wouldn’t be an advisory relationship. They’d have to buy us and give me line authority (No interest in “advising”)
@nancefinance Yes, happy to take stock. But didn’t want to limit their flexibility.
“Given all the private-equity firms circling around Yahoo, we expect we would have little difficulty raising the $20 billion or so we would need to buy Yahoo outright,” Blodget writes. “But we’re busy, and that would take time and be messy. It would also involve paying several hundred million dollars to investment bankers and other “strategic advisors.” And there’s no reason for Yahoo to waste that kind of money.”
He says BI’s plan will “unlock the value embedded in Yahoo’s clobbered stock, and it will restore compelling organic growth to Yahoo’s core business,” and that it doesn’t necessarily involve BI’s remaining CEO of Yahoo.
“We live in New York, not California, and this is not a power grab,” he says. “The plan involves our hiring the right CEO, something Yahoo’s board has had a tough time doing over the past 11 years. We think there are only a handful of great candidates who have the combination of talents and experience necessary to succeed in this job. And part of our plan would be to quickly bring the best one of them on board). We’re not going to waste a lot of time putting a book together and hiring advisors to help pitch Yahoo’s board on our offer (we have our own business to run). But if Yahoo! would like to entertain our offer, we would be happy to discuss it.”
Yahoo, as you may know just fired Carol Bartz as CEO and is looking for a new CEO while Timothy Morse fills in in the interim.