Buffett is no fool. Berkshire is providing the financing to Dan Gilbert's group and will receive guaranteed interest as well as an option to convert to equity. I'm sure that financing is jammed packed with warrants and covenants.<p>Buffett has basically parlayed the prestige of his name into sweetheart deals with provisions that no other company could get (eg. his investment in Goldman Sachs).
I find these things amusing "according to people who aren't authorized to speak publicly" except that they are talking to a reporter so that's kinda public. But really what they want to do is let potential other players know that "oh yeah, its real, we're bringing it and we're gone sell this thing, if you want a piece of this you better wake up and call us or your going to lose out." kind of vibe which attempts to incent other buyers to please make a bid and bring the price up. According to the Credite Suisse banker who helped with a transaction I participated in the ideal number of buyers is 3, and it helps if at least two of them both know each other and are competitive (think Benioff and Ellison for example).<p>I can see Microsoft's goal, add it the Bing group and give Bing the portal as well as it already has all the search traffic. Not so clearly on Berkshire though, breaking it up works if you can get it at the right price. I could also see IAC wanting to play, they could use a portal property to link all their front ends together.
Looking forward to a redesign of Yahoo! to match Berkshire Hathaway's website: <a href="http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/</a>
It's not obvious what the acquiring group mentioned in this article would do with Yahoo after they've bought it, to make it worth the price. They'd have the 5th most visited domain name on the Internet, but as Yahoo has demonstrated, visits don't automatically turn into money. (Twitter has a similar problem, and sits at #8, but they have a social aspect that Yahoo doesn't.)<p>Unless Alibaba comes with the purchase at a discount, or someone wants to acqui-hire whatever talent hasn't already fled, an acquisition doesn't seem even remotely sensible.<p>A few quick checks suggest that Yahoo's searches-per-day traffic is still decent, at 12.4% of the market (2.2 billion searches/month); perhaps redirecting that to some competing search engine might be worth it for a cheap enough price.
This is the emotional Dan Gilbert who enjoys Comic Sans<p><a href="http://deadspin.com/the-cavaliers-finally-took-down-dan-gilberts-insane-com-1601145301" rel="nofollow">http://deadspin.com/the-cavaliers-finally-took-down-dan-gilb...</a>
Buffett is a fan of the “cigar butts with one last puff left” [1]. It seems like he's applying a similar philosophy here.<p>[1]: <a href="http://basehitinvesting.com/warren-buffett-letter-on-walter-schloss/" rel="nofollow">http://basehitinvesting.com/warren-buffett-letter-on-walter-...</a>
As a shareholder, I welcome the competition. :)<p>Also interestingly: Bain Capital is in the running. In the past, Yahoo has used Bain Capital as consultants to reorg, restructure, etc. It would almost seem like a conflict of interest, since they are acutely familiar with the innards of Yahoo.<p>Edit: as /u/mcmoose75 mentions below, "Bain Capital" and "Bain Consulting" (the one I was thinking of) are two separate entities.
Sue Decker, ex-Yahoo CFO & President sits on the Board of Directors for Birkshire Hathaway. I'm sure she has plenty of insight to the value of the company, and the complexities of its business.
I've been following Buffett since the 1990s and his reputation for shunning tech seems to be based on his wise choice not to play in tech in the late 1990s. This seems to be based on relatively simple valuation techniques as well as asking the important question "Do I understand the business?". Of course he missed some winners as a result of this but overall it helped his results. His two tech moves so far, IBM and Apple, don't violate that approach at all so it makes sense.
When I consider Yahoo's value, I think of email, fantasy football, news, and tumblr. All four seem to be struggling when compared to their alternatives, but each of the products appear to have great potential value. It's hard to determine the quality of Mayer's work as CEO; some decisions were good, some look bad. I'm not confident she is a product person, and this is based on her management of Tumblr and the lack of development in email functionality and UI.<p>I could be wrong. I do go to Yahoo news everyday and it's not a bad service. It's fun to think about what the world would be today if Yahoo acquired Facebook LOL.
I'm weary of this. As a Detroiter I'm not a fan of Gilbert.<p>Though the prospect of bringing a large tech co to Detroit is nice, Gilbert and his people are very unpleasant to work with. They pay lip service to the importance of technology but generally don't respect tech people, or know how a real tech company operates. Not to mention their questionable morals (politically manipulating the State of Ohio so they could have a casino monopoly, instant mortgages, reverse mortgages, etc.).<p>Firstly, the Bizdom incubator was a mess. Very poorly run. Not a single successful business came out of it. No actual founders taught students. Just ex-QL people or trusted friends; the only thing in common was that none of them had ever started or ran a startup. Most of the startups that gained any traction did so by selling to Gilbert's other companies rather than proving that they have a real market - lots of incest going on.<p>On top of that, some entrepreneurs got straight-up screwed. At a minimum, by highly abusive investment terms (such as Bizdom owning 67% of the company and having the ability to modify operating agreements at will) - and to top it off, multiple founders in their system have had their ideas ripped off by Gilbert's people.<p>That's on top of their ridiculous real estate ventures. Such as offering startups hip, beautiful office space in Downtown Detroit - in exchange for a percentage of their company (I hear it's over 10%, with very few people biting). The startups that went through their investment funnels were "heavily encouraged" to get space there.<p>My guess is that if he gets Yahoo, he'll open up an office in Detroit, try to QL-ify it (i.e. make it a sales company that is a fairly close parody of Glengarry Glen Ross), it will flounder for a few years, and either get sold again or just die.<p>I really wish Detroit had a better advocate.
I don't know what is going on here but my bet is it has more to do with rich people doing tricky stuff with money than a vote of confidence in Yahoo, its products or potential to make money<p>If I was saddled with a dinosaur like Yahoo I would split it up and try and get some cash then rename what was left and I still think you would just be delaying the inevitable. The Yahoo name has about as much value as Netscape or Novell. It pretty much says outdated, failed technology company that has been overtaken by the competition.
This is Buffett, so he must be thinking about this in terms of business, not tech.<p>Maybe they have calculated they could break Yahoo up and sell the pieces for more than they bought as a whole?<p>Otherwise I'm out of ideas.
Idea which I find interesting, but is probably not on target, is BH leveraging their investments in Yahoo and Apple to have Apple take over Yahoo. The sense of style which Apple cultivates applied to digital content curation, combined with a personal digital assistant tweaked for librarian reference desk responses (Viv-ianne the Librarian).
I remember to read a lot of times that Warren does not invest in technology, because it's too risk and he only invest in what he understands. So, now it seems he learned.
every time I missclick a New York Times link in my no-JavaScript mobile browser the site manages to redirect me back to the referrer url I was at. it's really uncanny. I click a link on HN, and after a page load, I'm back at hacker news.<p>except this one link. what should I think of that? why that single link is different than ever other nytime.com links?