Activist investor Daniel Loeb, who succeeded in ousting Yahoo’s CEO and many of its board members on Sunday, has made a name on Wall Street for his financial savvy and his withering criticism of corporate executives who are unfortunate enough to stumble in his sights.
The 50-year-old founder and CEO of Third Point, a New York-based hedge fund, is a Southern California native who reportedly owns a $45 million penthouse off Central Park and an extensive collection of contemporary art.
He’s also an avid surfer, according to an account by Business Insider, which said he was raised in the Santa Monica area and attended the University of California, Berkeley, for two years before earning an economics degree from Columbia University. Earlier this year Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $1.2 billion.
Loeb has been active in liberal politics, serving as a major fundraiser for Barack Obama in 2008 and helping raise money for gay marriage legislation last year in New York. But he threw his support behind a Republican last year, when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was considering getting into the presidential race; Loeb has publicly expressed frustration with what he views as the president’s “class warfare” against the corporate sector.
In the business world, Loeb is best known for running a successful hedge fund, which now manages about $8 billion in investments, and for not being shy about pushing for changes at companies in which he invests.
He called one unlucky CEO “one of the most dangerous and incompetent executives in America,” according to a 2005 report in the New Yorker magazine. In 2007, Loeb criticized the management of a Fremont biotech firm, PDL BioPharma, so incessantly that the CEO resigned and blamed the attacks for taking “a personal and professional toll.”
Loeb’s blunt tone irked Yahoo’s departing board chairman, Roy Bostock, enough that Bostock reportedly hung up on Loeb during a phone call last year. And earlier this year, Loeb accused Yahoo’s board of living in “an illogical Alice-in-Wonderland world.”
Yahoo is not a new target for Loeb, however. He backed another activist investor, Carl Icahn, during a proxy challenge to Yahoo’s board in 2008, after Loeb’s firm bought more than 4 million shares in the Sunnyvale Internet company.
Icahn subsequently reached an accommodation with Yahoo’s board and sold most of his stake in the company. Third Point is now Yahoo’s biggest institutional investor, with 70.5 million shares, or 5.8 percent, of Yahoo’s common stock.
Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022; follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey
