Mark Ames and Yasha Levine offer a detailed history of Whitman at eBay.
How Meg Whitman Failed Her Way to the Top at eBay...
Typically:
The full extent of Whitman's wasteful $4 billion acquisition only became clear last year, when the real company that owned Skype's technology, a shady firm called Joltid, decided to stop letting eBay play with its technology. Guess who owned Joltid? The same guys who once owned Skype before selling it (sans Skype technology) to Whitman for $4 billion. Investors were shocked -- and eBay's stock plummeted on the news to near penny-stock status. eBay informed the SEC that if the matter wasn't resolved (i.e. if Joltid wouldn't agree to lease them the Skype technology that Whitman forgot to include in the $4 billion purchase), then, in eBay's own words, "Skype would be adversely affected and the continued operation of Skype's business as currently conducted would likely not be possible." In other words, Meg Whitman spent $4.1 billion of eBay's money to buy literally nothing.
There's also evidence of a $2,000,000 kickback from Goldman, Sachs.
Crazy as Angle or O'Donnell ??? More BTF :::
Yeah, Meg got to buy a ton of eBay stock at $ 0.07 a share in 1997/1998 and then sell it at prices running from $80 to $170. Today eBay closed at $ 29.28.
One typical detail: Whitman blew $4-billion buying the no-profit SKYPE system. Skype's never made a dime.
Apparently, even when the GOPers go for business people, they get losers such as Fiorino and Whitman.
Typical note from investment due diligence:
...by October 7, 2007, investors were already getting fed up with Whitman's helmsmanship. This was the high-point of the last bull market bubble, and yet eBay's stock on this day was slightly lower than where it was in September 2005, when the Skype deal was first announced. Meanwhile, eBay's biggest competitor, Amazon.com, saw its stock price soar 122 percent over the same two-year period as Amazon made smart investments and wooed clients and customers away from eBay in droves.
Seems, now, that Whitman also got a $2-million kickback from Goldman, Sachs for using them to run eBay's IPO.
Too late. Out of the statute of limitations. But still a felony, chargeable if the accounts had been public any time through the early 2000s.
Welcome to modern GOPer morality and ethics. And losing your company $4-billion at a whack. Similar to Fiorino.
Gotta love all of 'em...............
The Koch brothers. Offspring of the Birch Society's largest contributor. Bred to wack-job paranoia....