Yahoo! boss Marissa Mayer and Dan Loeb (above), who just bagged a fortune in profit on the revived Internet company, both have reasons to celebrate. (Amber De Vos/PatrickMcMullan.com)
Dan Loeb’s profits on his two-year play on Yahoo! reached $1.2 billion yesterday — one of the largest scores in Wall Street history on trades of a single company’s shares.
The New York hedge fund mogul, whose Third Point fund started accumulating its 7 percent stake in the third quarter of 2011, pocketed a cool $300,000 an hour by successfully agitating for change at the then-troubled Web portal, according to calculations by The Post.
The Loeb profit was underscored yesterday when Third Point and Yahoo! agreed that the Sunnyvale, Calif., tech giant would buy 40 million shares held by the hedge fund for $29.11 a share.
Loeb had amassed a 73-million share block of Yahoo! at an average price of $11.09 a share.
In February, Third Point sold off 11 million shares for a total of $216.7 million — or an average of $19.70 a share.
The deal with Yahoo! yesterday will leave Third Point with 22 million shares.
As part of the deal, each of the directors nominated by Third Point — Harry Wilson, Michael Wolf and Loeb — will step down on July 31.
Yahoo! shares were worth about $11 apiece when Loeb first waded into the company’s path — just about when it fired CEO Carol Bartz.
Loeb won a corporate campaign against the leadership of chairman Roy Bostock in early 2012 by discrediting the seemingly permanent CEO replacement, Scott Thompson, who was recruited from PayPal and was found to have fudged his resume.
Thompson’s quick ouster paved the way for Marissa Mayer to join Yahoo! and implement a new, tech-focused regime a year ago.
For Mayer, the agreement is also a victory because she gets to remove a shareholder agitator from the board.
Also, Yahoo! finalized a deal that returned a boatload of cash from overseas investments, reinvigorating the stock.
“Since our board’s rigorous search led us to hire Marissa Mayer as CEO, Yahoo!’s stock price has nearly doubled,” Loeb said in a statement yesterday that announced the deal.
Yahoo!’s announcement that it would buy back Third Point’s shares sent its shares tumbling. They closed at $27.86, down 4.3 percent, but are still up 40 percent in 2013.
Most of the gains in the stock have been from Yahoo!’s partial ownership of Alibaba Group, a fast-growing Chinese e-commerce company that is likely headed for an initial public offering.
Yahoo! stands to gain from the IPO just as it profited last year when it sold part of its stake for $7.6 billion.
It is still a question if Mayer’s strategy, including a shopping spree on Tumblr and a focus on mobile apps, can build value beyond the Alibaba investment.
“Daniel Loeb had the vision to see Yahoo! for its immense potential — the potential to return to greatness as a company and the potential to deliver significant shareholder value,” Mayer said in a statement yesterday.
An investor source says this is the biggest Third Point win ever.
“You can probably count on two hands the number of investors who have made more than $1 billion on a trade,” the source said.