Was Jerry Pushed at Yahoo!?

We'll perhaps never know the answer to this question but was Jerry Yang pushed out of Yahoo!(YHOO) or did he leave on his own accord?

It's just speculation on my part, but I suspect that Jerry looked ahead at the possible scenarios facing him and the board in the coming months and decided it was better for him to leave now with his head held high.

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What Jerry was facing about a month from now was the possibility of a major proxy battle from Dan Loeb. Loeb is Yahoo!'s second largest stock holder and has previously called on Yang to step down, along with Chairman Roy Bostock. Next month, Loeb -- as well as any other Yahoo! shareholder -- could have given the company notice that they were running an alternate slate of directors to replace Yahoo!'s current board.That vote likely wouldn't have happened until June, but there was a very real possibility that Loeb's slate would have won, given the anemic stock price and the years of quiet neglect by this board.In that case, Yang could have been summarily tossed out of the company he founded.Over the past few weeks, I've wondered whether Jerry was willing to take a chance fighting Loeb. After all, Jerry and the Yahoo! board faced Carl Icahn in a proxy battle in 2008 and won. That was after they turned down the Microsoft(MSFT) offer, so you would have thought shareholders would've supported Icahn in droves.They didn't, because ultimately they didn't trust Icahn would do a better job than the status quo. Yang might have gambled that Loeb would be as ineffective as Icahn. He wouldn't have been, and I'm sure Jerry understood that.This way, he goes out with his head high and the major shareholders of the company will always appreciate that he took the high road instead of trying to fight against their interests.

The rest of the company's board will now be significantly changed. Kara Swisher of AllThingsD is now reporting that at least four other directors will follow Yang out the door.

The new board will have one objective: To maximize shareholder value. And most of them sitting around the table will have some very clear ideas of how to do that, with some very real skin in the game.

At the time of the publication of this article, Eric Jackson was long on Yahoo!.

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