So Larry Page, Sue Decker, Terry Semel and Bill Miller go into a bar...
Insert your own punch line here. <i>The New York Times</i> says they were chatting at the Sun Valley conference, but we don't know what they said.
It must have been a sight to set even the jaded billionaire hearts attending Allen & Company's Sun Valley conference fluttering: Spotted at a barroom table Wednesday night were none other than Google co-founder Larry Page, his new business partner, embattled Yahoo president Susan Decker, former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, and Bill Miller, who manages a fund at Legg Mason that's one of Yahoo's biggest shareholders.
Unfortunately, we don't know what they said. But, according to The New York Times, the consensus among lip readers in the room was that Page and Miller were dominating the conversation (Miller, by the way, has intimated he would be happy to sell Yahoo to Microsoft at $33 per share) while Decker and Semel chimed in from time to time.
Also at the bar were Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch's wife, Wendi, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, various and sundry money types, and Google's Sergey Brin, who strolled in at one point. It's not clear how many wicked big body guards were also in the room.
The Times has been following the Sun Valley conference on its Sun Valley Diary. Among other highlights of their coverage so far:
• Ning's Marc Andreessen delivered some over-the-top advice to divest of all non-digital media, including print, television and movie studios. (Note to Marc: The international box office take for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull so far has topped $737 million. That's just a tad more than almost-as-hyped Facebook is expected to make this year. So let's not write off everything non-digital quite yet.)
• The Yahoo price game: The endless, passive-aggressive, Mean Girls, Jerry's so-out-of-the-club, fight between Yahoo and Microsoft and its new friend, Carl Icahn, has plenty of people talking about how much money the embattled (there's that word again!) Internet company could fetch.
Who wants to make a bet that's what Page and the gang were discussing over cocktails (assuming they were cocktails) Wednesday night?