The New ‘Odd Couple’

The New ‘Odd Couple’: Microsoft and Icahn
By Vindu Goel
In the latest salvo in the proxy fight for control of Yahoo, the company is urging shareholders to beware of the “odd couple” — Microsoft and the corporate raider Carl C. Icahn — who are locked in a “marriage of convenience” but have no clear plan for what they would do if they took control of the board.
Who’s Oscar and who’s Felix in this scenario? Yahoo didn’t say, and frankly, we can’t keep track of all the analogies in this fight. Last we heard from Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s chief executive, he thought Mr. Icahn was a fox, Yahoo was a henhouse and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was, well, just trying to undermine Yahoo’s business (perhaps that makes him a rapacious farmer).
Read more about Thursday’s filing on The Times’s DealBook blog.