Icahn Wins, but Shareholders Still Lose

Inside the tent and compromised? That's how I feel about Carl Icahn being asked to join the Yahoo! (YHOO - commentary - Cramer's Take) board. But that's pretty much what had to happen when you take the proxy route and not the takeover route.

Think about the difficulty that Carl Icahn faced. If he says no to the board, he looks like just a long-winded raider, who by the way DID NOT HAVE THE VOTES, courtesy of the insiders plus Bill Miller, the beleaguered Legg Mason manager with the giant Yahoo! position. Without the votes, what's the point? He accomplishes nothing. Inside, he can see what's really going on and agitate for a sale.

He will fail, of course. But he would fail either way, because he doesn't have the money to do more than he has done.

Yahoo!, with Icahn on the board, becomes a turnaround play, kind of like eBay (EBAY - commentary - Cramer's Take), which faces similar challenges from other players. The entrenched interests won -- it is incredible to think that they did, but they did -- and the triumph of Jerry Yang is a sad one for a public company and a throwback to the early '80s when the guys who run the company get their way even though they don't do what's in the interest of the shareholders.

Yahoo! is now investible only if you think that it can get more traction, more pageviews and more ads.

I don't think it can do that. I don't think the stock is cheap.

I think the story's over until we see a turn in earnings.

If we don't, we will no doubt one day see a sale, but it will be nowhere near what Microsoft (MSFT - commentary - Cramer's Take) offered.

Random musings: I simply don't believe that Google (GOOG - commentary - Cramer's Take) was all that bad, but the return on the interest was way down and that really crushed the quarter. Obviously if business were more robust it wouldn't have happened,. Then again, I'm hard-pressed to see how the business could be more robust than it was. ... You should check out Doug Kass' report card -- self-graded, critical but really positive. .Don't forget, his Lehman (LEH - commentary - Cramer's Take) call paid for a lifetime of subscriptions.

At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in the stocks mentioned.

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