Investor Yahoo! I caught the CEO of the company forging a resume. But I don’t want to thank him for this

“God, the house is gone... What will happen to the steam heating?...” Professor Preobrazhensky said doomedly, having learned that Shvonder and his comrades had moved into Fedor-Palych Sablin’s apartment. Actually, this was the last link in the chain of events that pushed the professor to a sad conclusion. The same can be said about Yahoo: “The company has disappeared.” It was taken on by a new kind of moralizer, shareholder rights activist Daniel Loeb. Thanks to his efforts, the CEO - the fifth in five years - will obviously be fired in the near future.

Of course, faking a resume is no good. Scott Thompson, the current CEO of Yahoo, indicated in his CV that in addition to a bachelor's degree in accounting, he has the same degree in computer science. This is not true, and he was exposed by the same Lob, an elegant stockbroker in his forties, a surfer and a yogi, the head of the hedge fund Third Point. Looks like a great guy! Who else will protect the rights of minority shareholders?! But for some reason you don’t want to take his side; you even involuntarily begin to look for an excuse for the hapless Thompson. After all, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison didn't have any degrees at all.

God-given speculator Dan Lob began his brilliant career with a small fund, the capital of which amounted to just over three million dollars - money from friends and relatives. Things were going extremely well, he provided an annual return of more than 20%, gained strength, as a result, his hedge fund grew stronger and today accumulates almost $9 billion, and Forbes estimates Lob’s fortune at $1.2 billion.

However, he made his name not with brilliant operations on the stock market, but with poisonous letters that he bombards CEOs and boards of directors of the companies in which he invests. In these letters, which are not hidden from the public, he makes one complaint again and again: CEOs are not generating enough share price growth. The forehead brands the wastefulness and incompetence of managers, and sometimes he really manages to bring out the presumptuous leader. He once caught a CEO hiring his 78-year-old mother to serve tea during board meetings. He was forced to resign.

But more often than not it all comes down to mockery. In his characteristic florid manner, Lob denounces the “inexplicable serenity” of CEOs and hands out epithets like “the brightest light in the firmament of bad management.” The New Yorker called Lob a “hedge fund populist” and described his style as “a deliberate moralizing that masks the swaggering egoism that characterizes Wall Street.”

In the case of Yahoo, Lob decided not to limit himself to letters, but to join the board of directors and introduce three of his people there to influence the management of the company, but he encountered strong resistance from the company’s management. Then he launched an attack and - what luck! — I found a note in the CEO’s resume.

Alas, Yahoo has been slowly but surely losing ground for several years now. In the search engine rankings, it dropped from second place to third. Deals with Facebook and Google did not take place, in addition, Microsoft’s offer to buy the company at $33 per share was rejected; today the price has dropped to $15. Scott Thompson, who joined Yahoo four months ago, proposed a plan to revitalize the company by reducing its activities and staff. According to his plan, he needs to concentrate efforts on key competencies and launch a couple of unique services. Dan Lob does not like Thompson's strategy, he believes that he needs to focus on growing advertising revenue and cooperation with content providers, and he is also against launching new services.

Essentially, there is no such radical difference in strategy, and since Lob's fund is the largest shareholder of Yahoo, why bother with not allowing him on the board of directors? Apparently, the reason is that Lob is spiritually alien to the company’s culture. As Richard McManas, founder of the site readwriteweb , notes, Lob is driven only by the greed of a stock speculator who wants to increase the value of shares in the short term at any cost, while Yahoo management cannot give up the mission to create a useful service, sustainable, oriented to the future company. This is perhaps the essence of the conflict and the main ethical aspect of the story.

Be that as it may, a huge, bureaucratic organization is generally difficult to turn around, even if it is moving in a dangerous direction. Only a miracle can save it, that is, a bold strategy coupled with a positive market reaction. But to do this, the CEO must have enormous confidence, unlimited freedom and time, not to mention talent and luck. But freedom in such conditions is a priori impossible.

Yahoo shares, meanwhile, lost 1.5% in a few days. And considering that out of Third Point's $9 billion, one is invested in Yahoo, it seems Lob's luck has run out.

Minority shareholder of a new kind