Well, for one, the board and its most senior leadership are inept and borderline white-collar criminals.

But more importantly (since in Western capitalist cultures few seem to mind working with borderline and actual criminals) Yahoo!’s mishandling of Microsoft’s offer made one thing clear:

Yahoo! - the stock - is not worth a warm bucket of spit… and for its executives, this means YHOO’s is worthless.

A stock price is the reflection of a company’s current income-generating ability plus the growth potential.  In Yahoo!’s case, growth has been stagnant and its income somewhat abysmal considering how many users and market share it has.

Basically, if you are to plunk money in a stock, there is better places to do so.

I owned YHOO shares but Jerry Yang’s douchebaggerie made me sell everything between $28-30 recently.  I feel sorry for anyone holding YHOO stock because Yang makes the criminals at Enron, Worldcom and Arthur Andersen seem like shareholder activists.

But back to management: why are they leaving?

Like many stocks: Yahoo! had embedded in its stock price a takeover premium.  Given YHOO’s high valuation ($25B to $45B in the past 6 months) there were only two options:

- private equity

- MSFT

In today’s credit climate, private equity is a non-starter… the only option then was MSFT.

And how did that fare?  Not well.  Tack to that YHOO’s disgraceful capitulation in search to Google and any self-respecting YHOO executive will see no reason to stick around.

YHOO down the road will most probably be worth less than YHOO today, no matter how much revenue it generates because the takeover premium had left the building.