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Tom Cruise to speak at Yahoo

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
Elinor Mills

Actor and scientologist Tom Cruise will be speaking at Yahoo's campus on Tuesday, the company has confirmed. Cruise's talk is part of Yahoo's "Influentials" speaker series, which previously featured Tom Brokaw, Thomas Friedman, Suze Orman, "The Governator" and Steven Spielberg, a spokeswoman said. "This is a program initiated and maintained by the most senior executives and is intended to be yet another very fun, interesting and uniquely Yahoo aspect of working here," the spokeswoman said in an e-mail. "They try to have one Influential speaker a quarter and aim for a variety of viewpoints/backgrounds."

The news was first reported on the new online gossip site Valleywag.com. "I plan to get there early though. It should be a fun train wreck to watch," a tipster wrote in to the site. Another tipster complained: "As you can imagine, this is getting a lot of laughs at Yahoo Inc. right now. We work pretty hard here to generate revenue for this company, which then goes and spends it on lining some scientologist (deleted expletive)'s pockets."