Herb Allen kindly invited Ning's Marc Andreessen up to Sun Valley to bump elbows with the biggest of Big Media moguls. And look how he behaved! DealBook:
In a morning panel session titled “Looking Around the Corner to the Future” – which, like all meetings here are closed to the press – Mr. Andreessen told the audience, which included many executives from the so-called “old media” world, that non-digital businesses are toast.
“He said, ‘If you have old media, you should sell,’” according to one attendee, who spoke anonymously because the sessions are off-the-record. “If you own newspapers, sell. If you own TV stations, sell. If you own a movie studio, sell.”
By the way, we'd like to note how happy we are to have DealBook's Andrew Ross Sorkin poking around Sun Valley this summer. We very much enjoyed reading David Carr's fill-in efforts last year, when ARS was on his honeymoon, but Andrew was pretty much bred to sniff out stories at events like this. Like this one, extracted from a "barbecue dinner – after a hay ride on a horse-drawn carriage":
The early verdict? The emerging consensus is that Yahoo shareholders may be prepared to take even less than the $33 per share previously proposed by Microsoft, with some whispering that they might even accept as little as $31.50 per share. And the feeling is that Carl Icahn, the activist investor who wants Yahoo to sell itself to Microsoft, would be likely to accept at such prices.
“He just needs a number that starts with a three,” one mogul said of Mr. Icahn, who paid about $25 a share for his Yahoo stake.
