The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

2. Irrational Exuberance

Dow Jones (DJ Quote) is crying out for help.

The New York company has been shopping itself since it got a $5 billion buyout offer from News Corp. (NWS Quote) back in April. This week, the Dow Jones board took control of the sale talks from the controlling Bancroft family. The board pledged to "take the lead" in the "exploration of strategic alternatives."

Alternatives to the News Corp. deal look scarce, though. The rumor mill has churned out possible suitors ranging from Warren Buffett to a team of GE (GE Quote) and Pearson (PSO Quote). Yet so far, Rupert Murdoch's only rival for the publisher of The Wall Street Journal is Brad Greenspan.

Greenspan, the self-described founder of the MySpace social networking site, offered Wednesday to buy a quarter of Dow Jones for $60 a share. He said he aims to "keep Dow Jones independent and able to firmly hold on to its culture of integrity and high quality reporting."

Yet Greenspan's not the first guy you might associate with the culture of integrity. He founded a tech company called eUniverse back in 1999 and became its CEO a year later. But Greenspan was ousted in a 2003 proxy battle after the company restated earnings to fix accounting problems.

He didn't go quietly, accusing some directors of having "embarked upon a scheme to entrench themselves in office."

eUniverse then hired new management, changed its name to Intermix and started promoting MySpace. Two years later, News Corp. bought the company for $580 million.

Greenspan still owned Intermix shares, so the deal made him rich. But it didn't make him happy. He sued to stop the sale, claiming management had "defrauded shareholders of more than $20 billion." A Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismissed the suit last October.

Something else that should be dismissed is Greenspan's habit of wrapping himself in MySpace's glory. eUniverse issued plenty of press releases during Greenspan's tenure, but a search of the Factiva publications database shows not one of them mentioned MySpace. News Corp. sniped last year that Greenspan was pushed out of eUniverse "while MySpace was still in its infancy."

Maybe that's why he acts like such a baby.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 93. A spokesman says Greenspan "always realized the value of MySpace" and "wouldn't agree" with the notion that he's freeloading on its success.