(gigaom.com) -- Dell may have more than one serious suitor come Monday. After weeks of rumblings, the Blackstone Group and investor activist Carl Icahn are preparing their own rival bids to the Michael-Dell-and-Silver-Lake-Partner $24.4 billion buyout offer, according to reports on Saturday. There has been grumbling since that proposition was made public that Dell is worth more than the $13.65 per share that Mr. Dell et al. are offering. And now some potential purchasers are presumably ready to put money where their mouths are.
Bloomberg News, which has been on top of this story from the get go, now reports that the Blackstone Group made a tentative offer for Dell late Friday, in time for the midnight deadline. The Wall Street Journal subsequently posted that activist investor Carl Icahn, who has a 6 percent stake in the PC-and-server maker, is likewise making a bid. Both Blackstone and Icahn have been reportedly in the hunt for weeks. Icahn and others have said Dell is worth up to $20.00 per share.
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None of the reports named their sources and none of the companies offered comment.
Dell management has connections to both Blackstone and Silver Lake. Dave Johnson, who Dell poached from IBM in 2009 to head up its acquisitions strategy left Dell for Blackstone in January of this year. John Swainson, now president of Dell’s software group, consulted with Silver Lake Partners.
As one former Dell exec said via email: “So there you have John Swainson, previously Silver Lake and currently at Dell and Dave Johnson previously at Dell, and currently at Blackstone. Add Marius Haas previously KKR and now at Dell, and you have a pretty interesting PE clique there.” Haas is VP of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions group.
According to the Journal’s sources, the entry of new bidders will extend Dell’s “go shop” period for another four days.
Adding more intrigue to the mix, Fortune reported last week that Blackstone Group might tap Mark Hurd, Oracle co-president, to lead Dell. That raised eyebrows. Hurd left Hewlett-Packard, where he was chairman and CEO, under a cloud of accusations about sexual harassment and misuse of company expense accounts.
HP rival Oracle then hired Hurd, presumably for his hardware expertise and possibly because Oracle CEO Larry Ellison wanted to taunt HP chairman Ray Lane, a former Oracle president. So far, the hardware turnaround Hurd has promised for Oracle has not materialized. That Dell, which competed tooth-and-nail with HP for PC and server market leadership, might be run by a former HP guy would be ironic.
It’s also not at all clear whether ownership by a private equity firm will right Dell’s course. It’s missed a lot of opportunity by being late or ineffectual in the mobile device and tablet market — areas where HP has also missed the mark.
Hurd is often mentioned as a successor to Ellison at Oracle. But the tech world is littered with former successors to Ellison who are now elsewhere. Just ask Charles Phillips or Tom Siebel or Gary Bloom or Marc Benioff. Or Ray Lane. It’s by no means a certainty that Hurd will be any more successful and he may be looking for an out. Especially since, as one Wall Street analyst put it, Oracle’s promised hardware turnaround hasfailed to materialize.
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