Shareholder activist kingpin, once known as an unrelenting corporate raider in the 1980s. As of late May, Icahn owns 59 million shares of Yahoo! stock. He frequently uses his vast fortune of nearly $15 billion as an army to storm into shareholder takeover battles. Those battles included household names such as Motorola, Blockbuster, and Time-Warner. In the mid-1980s, Icahn won a hostile bid for TWA, and he sold off its assets. He recently nominated a 10-member dissident board to replace Yahoo's current board. Known to be a ruthless negotiator, Icahn was born poor in Queens, New York. He partly paid for his tuition at Princeton with money he won at poker.
";
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i++] = new Array("","Jerry Yang","","http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photo_StoryLevel/080527/080527-brill-biz-jerry-yang.htease.jpg","","Image: Jerry Yang", "", "", "", "", "left", "", "AFP - Getty Images file", "110", "86", "#000000", "", "", "", "");
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i-1].body = "
Age: 39
Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Yahoo. He's worth more than $2 billion. He and Stanford University classmate David Filo started Yahoo in 1995, while working on their doctorates. Originally, the site was a directory called Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web. Yang continued to be the chief visionary at Yahoo and brought in the company's previous CEO Terry Semple. Semple was charged with expanding Yahoo's reach, widely considered a failure. Yang's current annual salary is $1. When Yang came to the U.S. from China at age 10, he reportedly only knew one word: shoe.";
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i++] = new Array("","Mark Cuban","","http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photo_StoryLevel/080527/080527-brill-biz-ark-cuban.htease.jpg","","Image: Mark Cuban", "", "", "", "", "left", "", "AP file", "110", "86", "#000000", "", "", "", "");
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i-1].body = "
Age: 49
Flamboyant and loud-mouthed, Mark Cuban is the wild card in the Microsoft/Yahoo saga. On his blog (www.blogmaverick.com), Cuban wonders if there's anything better than thinking of ways to unseat Google. Ironically, Cuban sold his own start-up, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for nearly $6 billion in 1999. Cuban now owns the Dallas Mavericks of the NBA and is the chairman of HDNet. A larger-than-life figure, Cuban hosted a reality show called \"The Benefactor,\" appeared on \"Dancing with the Stars\" and owns Magnolia Pictures. Cuban, a name shorted from Chabenisky, was born into a working class family in Pennsylvania. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Cuban was a bartender, disco dancing instructor and stamp collector.";
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i++] = new Array("","Steve Ballmer","","http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photo_StoryLevel/080527/080527-brill-biz-steve-ballmer.htease.jpg","","Image: Steve Ballmer", "", "", "", "", "left", "", "AFP - Getty Images file", "110", "86", "#000000", "", "", "", "");
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i-1].body = "
Age: 52
The hard-charging CEO of Microsoft has been with the company since 1980, and was the first business manager hired by company founder Bill Gates. Though Ballmer has headed several divisions, Gates always handled the technical vision. Ballmer adamantly touts Microsoft's innovation, but laughed at Apple's iPhone introduction and called the Linux system a \"cancer.\" He is also one of the world's wealthiest men with nearly $15 billion in net worth. Ballmer has been called obsessive, passionate and ebullient. Ballmer was born in Detroit, Mich., and his dad was a manager at Ford Motor Company.
";
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i++] = new Array("","T. Boone Pickens","","http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photo_StoryLevel/080527/080527-brill-biz-T-Boone-Pickens.htease.jpg","","Image: T. Boone Pickins", "", "", "", "", "left", "", "Reuters file", "110", "86", "#000000", "", "", "", "");
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i-1].body = "
Age: 80
A legendary oilman, Pickens founded Mesa Petroleum in the 1950s. By the early 1980s, it was one of the largest independent oil companies in the world. Pickens is also a consummate dealmaker. He has tried to muscle in at a number of oil companies, including Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum and Unocal. He bought 10 million shares of Yahoo in May, piling on after Carl Icahn. Pickens now runs a the multi-billion-dollar hedge fund BP Capital. He also owns Mesa Water, which buys ground water rights in Texas. Pickens' father was also an oilman, and Pickens was born in Holdenville, Okla. He honed his acquisition skills by expanding his paper route from 28 papers to 156 as a kid.
";
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i++] = new Array("","Roy Bostock","","http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photo_StoryLevel/080527/080527-brill-biz-roy-bostock.htease.jpg","","Image: 24846217", "", "", "", "", "left", "", "Getty Images file", "110", "86", "#000000", "", "", "", "");
Biz_MicrosoftYahooPlayers_460[i-1].body = "
Age: 68
Bostock was elected Yahoo's chairman of the board in January. Bostock is also the chairman of once-bankrupt Northwest Airlines, which merged with Delta Airlines in April. For many years, Bostock headed up the advertising agency D’Arcy, Masius Benton & Bowles.Investor Carl Icahn has charged that Yahoo's board \"acted irrationally\" in letting Microsoft walk away from Yahoo. Bostock shot back to Icahn that there is a \"significant misunderstanding of the facts.\"
";
// END editorial data