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A 'Benedict Arnold' In Icahn's Board

Only one name in the "amazingly Internet-experience-free" proxy slate served up by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, actually has a lot of related Web experience, said BoomTown's Kara Swisher, and that would be Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, the man who sold Broadcast.com to-yes-Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999.

A man with an impeccable sense of timing, Cuban sold the Internet broadcasting company a year after its "faux blockbuster" IPO, just as its shares were starting to slip. Then, just before the Internet bubble burst in 2000, Cuban unloaded all his Yahoo stock, becoming one of the biggest Web 1.0 success stories. Broadcast.com, meanwhile, never became much of anything; it's now just another domain that redirects to Yahoo.com.

It's sweet irony indeed that Cuban should now come back to Yahoo as "the only major Internet figure apparently willing to turn on the iconic Yahoo CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang"-the very man who made Cuban a billionaire. As Swisher said, "Calling Benedict Arnold!"

Read the whole story at D: All Things Digital »

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