#activist-investors

#activist-investors

On one side stood Dell, fighting to take his eponymous company private and rebuild it away from the merciless glare of quarterly earnings calls. On the other stood famed activist raider Carl Icahn, who aggressively peddled a proposal amounting to purely destructive financial engineering at the cost of the company - a scheme involving stock buybacks, warrants for future shares, and ruthless plans to carve up Dell's creation for quick, extractive cash.

Carl Eschenbach has stepped down as Workday CEO and been replaced by co-founder and executive Aneel Bhusri following a round of job cuts and share price volatility. In a statement [PDF] to investors, the company said Eschenbach is set to get an aggregate lump sum cash payment of $3.6 million, including cash severance benefits. Workday provides enterprise HR and finance software as a service. Like many SaaS vendors, its value has been hard hit over the last week as investors consider the impact of AI on the market.

The company said that since Third Point and D.E. Shaw's first letter last year, it has conducted extensive engagement with its shareholders including Third Point and that the feedback gained helped inform the meaningful steps it has taken to deliver shareholder value. Some of these actions include the appointments of John Berisford, Rachel Glaser and Christine McCarthy to the firm's board of directors, replacing Michael Klein, Christopher Nassetta and Laura Kaplan, who all retired from the board;

HPE's $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks faces renewed scrutiny as a federal judge may review its public interest due to conspiracy theories and political objections.