Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Blackstone Group, Carl Icahn Working on Offers to Buy Dell

It looks like there’s going to be a bidding war for Dell.

Private equity firm Blackstone Group has made a bid for the computer company, according a report from Bloomberg News that cited unnamed sources.

Dell’s go-shop period, under which a special committee of its board of directors is seeking superior offers to the $24.2 billion Michael Dell/Silver Lake buyout offer announced last month, technically expires today, so if an offer has been submitted, it is coming in at the last second. No offers had been confirmed as of the close of business Friday.

Dell will announce the results of the go-shop period on Monday, at which time we’ll get a look at Blackstone’s terms. Also ahead in the Dell-buyout process is a deeply detailed proxy filing that will lay out the reasoning behind the original buyout offer as well as explain the valuation.

Update: Activist investor Carl Icahn is also getting in on the action. The Wall Street Journal reports that Icahn is working on a bid. Notifying Dell’s special committee that bids are coming should extend the go-shop period by four days, the Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the situation.

Icahn stepped into the Dell buyout frenzy on March 6, announcing that he had taken a 6 percent stake in Dell and that he opposed the Dell-Silver Lake offer, and arguing that a better way to use Dell’s cash would be to pay a special dividend amounting to $9 a share. He also threatened Dell with “years of litigation” if the board refused his offer.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald