yahoo
The last time Yahoo shares traded before Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced an offer to buy Yahoo, they cost $19.18. Today, for the first time since that offer, Yahoo shares sank below $20 to a low of $19.59. Even with the credit markets a complete mess, if Yahoo shares drop much further, we could soon wake up to news that some private equity firm
tech's thriving investment banking sector borrowed enough cash to take Yahoo off the market and clean house — with or without Jerry Yang's consent.
stocks
Yahoo shares are down 3.4 percent to $20.72 per share, nearing the $19 per share price when Microsoft made its unsolicited $31 per share offer on February 1. That means its time for Microsoft to forget how poorly Yahoo handled its offer and
revisit its bid and buy the company on the cheap, argues BoomTown's Kara Swisher.
Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider says if this were June 2007, not 2008, private equity firms looking to raid and break up the company "would have been circling like pack wolves." How so? It turns out that after factoring in Yahoo's Asian investments and cash, $21 per share values Yahoo's core business at around $11 per share or $15 billion total. That's cheap, considering that Facebook is valued at $15 billion and only expects $300 million in revenues this year and Yahoo will pull at least $8 billion.
private equity
Known best in the Valley for co-founding PayPal and serving on the board of highly-valued Facebook, on Wall Street Thiel is becoming better known as a hedge-fund wunderkind — Clarium Capital, the fund Thiel manages, is well past $3 billion may have already hit the $6 billion mark. The fund's take for taking care of all that business? $500 million by the end of the year,
according to estimates by 1440 Wall Street. But then you need that kind of money for retirement if you plan to
live forever on a
man-made island.
(Photo by David Orban)
geeks gone wild
How awesome is the private-equity business? Private-jet awesome. That's the message that Bertram Capital vice president Michael Chang likely hoped to send to friends when he posted an
album of photos to Facebook from his firm's trip to Cabo San Lucas. Slightly less awesome reality: Bertram had to borrow the jet from Benchmark Capital, and investors who put money in Bertram may not be that impressed with the firm's goofy display of extravagance. Selections from the photos, which show Bertram executives behaving like high-schoolers on a museum field trip:
More »
venture capital
Private equity management fees, the percentage these fancy financiers charge merely to hold onto the riches' money,
reached $33 billion in 2007, up 83 percent from $18 billion in 2003. Venture funds charged investors $6.8 billion during the year. These fees do not, of course, include the fund managers' share of profits. They're just a nice slice of a very large compensatory pie. London-based Private Equity Intelligence says the fees leave investors irked — 80 percent of them have turned down deals due to high fees, they say. But it doesn't take a Stanford MBA to tell you 83 percent growth indicates there's more demand than supply for what these people sell.
Valleywag
private equity
venture capital
Asian markets tanked this morning and the U.S. dollar fell to lowest level in three years, but private equity investors — including venture capitalists — are still looking to spend at least another $820 billion, according to Preqin, a London-based research firm. [OhMyNews]
