The documents unsealed this week in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo confirmed earlier reports that Microsoft privately offered about $40 a share to acquire the company in January 2007. That earlier offer is also one of the details cited by investor Carl Icahn in his open letter to Yahoo's chairman today. In raw numbers, of course, the offer was significantly higher than the $31 per share that Microsoft bid this past January, and the revised $33 per share offer that Microsoft made in early May.
But Microsoft's $31 per share bid actually represented a higher percentage premium than the offer it made a year earlier, because of the subsequent decline in Yahoo's share price. See the chart below for a look at Microsoft's offers in relation Yahoo's shares. For the January 2007 scenario, I've used Yahoo's average closing price for the month, $28.05.
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