Carl Icahn is a billionaire investor that has agreed to cap his investment limit on Dell Inc. He will be able to team up with other shareholders on a potential bid for Dell going forward. As part of an agreement, Icahn will not be able to bring his Dell ownership to over 10% or sign deals with other shareholders that would bring the collective ownership to over 15%.
Private equity company Silver Lake Partners is close to raising a new $10 billion fund, which is about 25% bigger than originally expected. Silver Lake Partners is the company that is working with Michael Dell to take his Dell Inc. private and sold Skype to Microsoft.
Carl Icahn is going to fight the sale of Dell. Icahn hinted at “years of litigation” if Dell does not cancel the $24.4 billion deal to sell the company to the founder, Michael Dell. Michael Dell bought out the company with private equity company Silver Lake and a loan from Microsoft. Icahn did not disclose how much stake he owned in Dell, but claimed that his holdings are “substantial.” Supposedly Icahn owned a 6% stake in the company, which was acquired in recent weeks.
Dell has gone private and is being taken off the stock market. The company is being financed with cash and equity from Dell founder Michael Dell and funds from Silver Lake and MSD Capital. Microsoft is giving Dell a $2 billion loan.
Dell is currently in talks to go private by private equity companies. Several large banks were contacted about financing an offer to buy out the company. Dell is currently valued at about $23 billion and they reported $13.7 billion in their most recent quarter’s revenues with a net income of $475 million. The company also has around $11 billion in cash.
Zynga’s stock is currently trading at $3.09 per share, which is well below their high point of $14.69 in March 2012. Zynga’s market cap back then was over $8 billion and now it is at around $2.27 billion. A couple of days ago, Henry Blodget at BusinessInsider.com wrote an article about insiders at Zynga that cashed out right before the stock crashed.
A consortium of investors that are being led by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Silver Lake are submitting a plan to buy a minority stake in Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO). TPG Capital is another company that will be making a proposal for Yahoo! Both of these proposals would lead to taking a stake of around 20% of the company.
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It has been confirmed that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion in cash from major shareholder Silver Lake. The Microsoft and Skype board of directors has approved of the deal. As of the end of 2010, Skype had 170 million users and accounted for 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations.
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