Yahoo! Open your golden parachutes
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Shortly after reports surfaced on Tuesday about Microsoft preparing for a proxy fight to convince Yahoo shareholders to agree to a takeover deal that the Web pioneer’s board has rejected, Yahoo announced a new severance plan for its employees if the company was sold.
Under the new plan , any Yahoo employee who is dismissed without good reason within two years of a change of control in the company will receive their annual base salary and certain benefits for at least four months and up to 24 months depending on position. Vesting of stock options and other equity-based compensation will be accelerated if a Yahoo employee is laid off after a sale.
Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget thinks Yahoo’s new severance plan could cost Microsoft between $1 billion to $3 billion if they seal a deal. There are a lot of assumptions baked into how he gets to this figure, but it’s an interesting figure nonetheless. If the former Wall Street analyst’s math is correct, then Microsoft’s estimated $1 billion in “synergies” it expects to wring out of Yahoo from cost cutting and revenue benefits doesn’t look so hot anymore– at least not in the first year.
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bingo – here is a remeady to kill poison pill
Yahoo! will survive, ’cause Good prevails … in the long run. Thinkers are never good at money games, they innovate, they contribute to mankind … the same way Yahoo! does to Internet.
Yahoo can delay but not stop the inevitable.
Hehe .. Yahoo’s downfall .. they write it themselves. Yahoo isn’t running so hot lately and they already had to lay off people. A simple way around this would be to force Yahoo to lay the folks off before the takeover announcement would be made.
HENRY BLODGET?! Isn’t that the guy that made millions off of lying to Americans for years during the tech bubble? People still pay him for his opinions?
Yahoo has not performed and has outlived its usefulness. Microsoft will come to realize this once the merger is in place. I do not doubt Microsoft will give it a good run for 2 years at most, but ultimately, the company will loose much more in order to pay for this mistake. Mark my words, google is much better positioned and will win this battle.