Skype founder quits

by admin October 1, 2007 at 6:39 pm

As eBay makes tacit admission it overpaid

Skype co-founder and chief executive Niklas Zennstrom has quit his job running the eBay-owned IP telephony outfit day-to-day.

In an SEC filing, also today, eBay said it would take a $1.43bn hit in charges relating to Skype in Q3.

Some of Skype’s early investors who stood to gain as much as $1.7bn from eBay if the company hit profit targets for 2008 and 2009 have decided to cash out now, trousering a mere $530m. eBay said the payment “is reasonable given the progress and anticipated rapid growth of Skype’s active user base”. How it plans to make money from a rapidly-growing group of freeloaders remains foggy.

Read more: theregister.co.uk