Earlier this week, Yahoo"s board of directors fired its CEO Carol Bartz after nearly three years. While the web content company has said it is looking for a new CEO, Yahoo"s co-founder Jerry Yang told employees this week that the company is not for sale. But that talk may be premature. Bloomberg reports, via unnamed sources, that AOL is now talking with financial advisors that could lead to an offer to merge AOL with Yahoo. But not so fast, says CNBC. A post on its Twitter page says that their own unnamed sources claim that Yahoo has "no interest in a deal with AOL"
The Bloomberg story said that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong had submitted an offer to Yahoo to merge the two companies in 2010. However, his proposal was reportedly turned down by Bartz. Now that she has been unceremoniously terminated (which she clearly didn"t care for) Armstrong might bring up the merger offer once again. The story claims that if a deal is in fact struck, Armstrong would likely want to be the new CEO of the combined company.
One of the problems with kind of agreement between the two web companies is that AOL is a much smaller organization, in terms of market value, compared to Yahoo. AOL is said to be worth $1.6 billion, while Yahoo is currently worth about $18.2 billion. That factor, combined with AOL"s continued revenue and profit losses, could halt any merger with Yahoo.