The Life of a Silicon Valley Rockstar

…And that move is Checkmate. On top of of the official Yahoo response to Carl Icahn’s letter, Jerry Yang felt the need to add his 2 cents. His advice? Ignore it and it’ll go away! Taken from his email to all employees:

What can employees do?
We ask you to continue to put aside all rumors and speculation you may be hearing.

Kara Swisher has been on this since the beginning and has a great analysis of CARL ICAHN’s intial letter of intent to Yahoo with the best part being:

Nonetheless, I must ask: What are you smoking over there on the Left Coast?

When someone dangles more than $40 billion to anyone on Wall Street, we’d throw our mother under the wheels of the bus if we needed to to get it. Frankly, we would do it for $12.43.

In any case, your break with reality is my golden opportunity.

Regardless of Yahoo’s Roy Bostock’s posturing it seems Roy, Jerry and the rest of the board are soon to be in the unemployment line. Michael Arrington put it most bluntly in his post “Dear Yahoo: You’re Fired“. The key is, he’s dead on. Valleywag’s analysis of who own how much of Yahoo shows Bert and Ernie, I mean Roy and jerry, are virtually powerless to stop Carl from doing whatever he wants; including bending them over a table while Steve Ballmer comes in for the kill. (In the picture on the left, Steve and jerry do their best impression of playground “mercy“. photo credit to Kara Swisher and Boomtown)

Is Ballmer playing the role of Icahn’s puppeteer or is it just a convenient alliance in light of a win-win situation involving billions of dollars? I’d vote the latter, but they do make a formidable team!