Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and Carl Icahn traded shots at each other over the last couple of days. Icahn for one sent a rather inflammatory letter to the Yahoo board. In it he basically accuses Yahoo of creating the severance plan that I have previously reported on to act as a poison pill:
“Until now I naively believed that self-destructive doomsday machines were fictional devices found only in James Bond movies. I never believed that anyone would actually create and activate one in real life. I guess I never knew about Yang and the Yahoo Board.”
Come on Carl, don’t hold back. Tell us your true feelings on this issue.
Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock clearly didn’t like that, so he fired a few shots of his own:
“Conspicuously absent from your letter is any credible plan for Yahoo! other than a repetition of your insistence that the Company should sell itself to Microsoft. Indeed, your stated view that “the only way to salvage Yahoo! in the long if not short run is to merge with Microsoft” demonstrates that you have no other plan and causes one to wonder what exactly would happen to our Company if you and your nominees were to take control of Yahoo!.”
I’ll translate that paragraph for those of you who don’t get corporate-speak. He’s saying “You have no clue. FOAD.”
The war of words is likely to continue until the company’s general meeting on 1 August. That’s when I expect guns and bombs to come into play.