A sign of how insular the world of big media is: Confirmation of Miller's job offer comes from Ross Levinsohn, who held much the same job before leaving News Corp. to start a venture-capital fund with Miller.

It's all a crazy waiting game until the aging mogul can install his wayward children in power. Most believe that's the reason why Chernin left, as it grew increasingly clear that Murdoch would never let the Hollywood hired hand become CEO of News Corp. But there are plenty of takers for the big jobs available in the meantime.

Miller replaces Fox Interactive Media chief Peter Levinsohn, who, as many inside News Corp. expected, is taking a job with the L.A.-based Fox TV and movie units. Miller, though, will have more power than Levinsohn, running pretty much everything with a URL attached and reporting directly to Murdoch. He'll need that authority to rein in wayward MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, who has long resisted reporting to the suits rotating through the executive suite of Fox Interactive Media.

If he takes the job, that is. Papers aren't signed yet, for reasons that are mostly legalese. Miller was ousted as AOL's CEO in 2006, replaced by the astoundingly awful Randy Falco. He's since been looking for a comeback, most recently through the VC firm Velocity Interactive Group — but he's been stymied by a noncompete agreement with AOL parent Time Warner, whose CEO, Jeff Bewkes, nastily decided to enforce after Yahoo invited Miller to join its board.

That noncompete ends in three days. Assuming Miller accepts the offer, and it seems like it would be enormously embarrassing for him not to, he'd be ending one long-running drama and joining another.

(Photo via LAT)

Now hardly seems like the time. The pension funds and college endowments which invest in VC funds have been pulling back, as of late. And investments in consumer Web startups — Miller and Levinsohn's specialty — are not looking as wise as they were a year ago. If the duo do raise money in this climate, it will be an impressive feat. If they don't? Then their second careers as venture capitalists may come to an abrupt end.

Why would respectable Web industry executives like former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig, former Fox Interactive boss Ross Levinsohn, or Levinsohn's partner at Velocity Interactive, ex-AOL CEO Jon Miller — the kind of names shareholders would trust — sign up with Icahn just in time to get replaced by Microsoft's Kevin Johnson? And why would they jinx their chances at a getting named to the plum job by Yang itself — a far more comfortable coronation? That's why those names never showed up in an Icahn press release. It's also why Icahn's board slate is filled by a bunch of no-names and Mark Cuban, whose feud with Yahoo is now nearing a decade in age.

So, what did Carl Icahn really do wrong? Buy his first share of Yahoo.

(Photoillustration by Jackson West; photo of Icahn by AP/Mark Lennihan)

• Former Fox Interactive boss Ross Levinsohn and AOL CEO Jon Miller, now partners at Velocity Interactive, seem to come as a pair. Levinsohn is best known for acquiring MySpace for Fox Interactive and quitting the company after it wouldn't buy Digg. But Levinsohn is also known for bullying entrepreneurs — once, so badly that renowned angel investor Ron Conway reportedly "flew off the handle" at him. In some quarters and in Jason Calacanis's heart, Miller gets credit turning around AOL. But like any exec, Miller has his detractors at AOL and they came out of the woodwork when he was fired last year. One described him as
  

  An executive over 4 years that put more incompetent people in high-places (e.g., McKinley) while firing (Govern) and letting reams of talented folks (e.g., Kotay, list-o-long) leave that were passionate and—at least—somewhat competent, and were actually trying to foster some core innovation and synergy.

• OpenTable’s CEO Jeff Jordan is on Yahoo shareholders and board members' wishlist, just like he was on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's list to become COO of that company before it settled on Sheryl Sandberg. An eBay veteran, Jordan was thought to be in line for Meg Whitman's job until he took over as OpenTable's CEO in 2007. His reputation as a "product Nazi" led Valleywag to endorse him for Yahoo's top job way back in November 2006.
• Tim Armstrong heads up Google's ad sales force and the unit is perhaps respectably profitable enough for Yahoo shareholders and board members to include him on their list. We wonder, however, if the board knows about Armstrong's involvement with sketchy search engine spam company Associated Content.
• Why wouldn't Yahoo's board and shareholders want Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson for the company's top job? Ever since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a bid to acquire the company on February 1, no one's given more thought to running Yahoo. Johnson's even written several memos on the topic — showing great ability to include exclamation marks after the company's name while still respecting the need for capital letters.

We've heard Levinsohn likes to trade on his MySpace-to-News Corp. deal by "bullying around little startups, demanding special deals because he's a famous 'CEO'." Problem is, Levinsohn may have run Fox Interactive, the News Corp. company that purchased MySpace, but he never exactly wrested control of MySpace, the only Fox Interactive property that matters, away from Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. Levinsohn's attitude is known to irk the Valley's influential, particularly angel investor Ron Conway.

Still, we applaud Microsoft's selection. Joining ComVentures, now renamed Velocity Interactive Group, at the expense of two partners last December, Levinsohn neatly proved his worth in a knife fight.

When Microsoft set Facebook's value at $15 billion last fall, Miller and Levinsohn's plans to acquire four startups and roll them into one blog publishing company suddenly got a lot more expensive. Too expensive. So much so that funding partner General Atlantic dropped out. That turn of events left Miller and Levinsohn ready to listen to ComVentures cofounder Roland Van der Meer. Van der Meer offered them spots on a five-man team leading a new venture capital firm focused on digital media. Miller and Levinsohn agreed to join. Problem was: There were already five ComVentures partners. Two would have to go. Van der Meer decided to ax Michael Rolnick and Jeb Miller.

On the morning of December 17, the ComVentures partners gathered for their usual Monday morning meeting. Rolnick and Miller took their seats, coffees in hand, according to PEHub. Then Van der Meer told them they were out.

"They were blindsided," one VC told PEHub. "There was no reason to treat people that way... Rolnick had been there nine years. This isn't a giant company doing layoffs, it's a small partnership. It was simply wrong."

That's just business, right? Well, according to PEHub, investors aren't happy about how the shakeup went down either. They feel it makes the firm seem unstable.

One investor said:

Levinsohn and Miller are impressive guys, but it's tough for me even if I want to invest with them. To do so, I have to believe that this entire team is going to still be together in five years, and I just can't trust that. Either Levinsohn and Miller will decide to leave because they aren't VCs at heart, or Roland will fire them for some reason or another. Either way, it's too risky.

(Photo by ahhhh)

That's because Miller and Levinsohn had announced in August a similarly named vehicle, Velocity Investment Group, for investing in startups, in conjunction with General Atlantic Partners, a buyout fund. That Velocity never lived up to its moniker, apparently.

No matter. The real question is, do you want to sell your startup to these guys? Ross Levinsohn may have access to $1 billion in funding now, but he's still the guy "bullying around little startups, demanding special deals because he's a famous CEO," as a source once told us, explaining why legendary angel investor Ron Conway can't stand the guy. As for ex-AOLer Jon Miller, well, he's not exactly a king of Pessinus.

He's lost every single motion he's charged against us. It's like when Mike Tyson kept trying to win this fight, and the guy kept getting up, and Tyson kept knocking him down.

It's kinda sad...two years before we bought the company, they kicked him out. For a guy who got $40 or 50 million from the sale, I mean...life's too short.

[Spoken onstage at Web 2.0 Summit]

As GigaOM blogger Robert Young wrote last week, News Corp isn't in the mood to spend its cash on big purchases — but there are still some hefty tech-media startups worth buying. Young says that Murdoch prefers buying companies with cash over paying with stock, which would dilute his ownership. And the best way to raise enough cash for a huge purchase (like — ugh — YouTube) is by taking Fox Interactive public and using its IPO capital.

Ross Levinsohn (pictured) has a firm hand on the steering wheel. The FIM chief is always ready to give the right quote, demonstrating a no-nonsense business perspective. His commentary (such as a recent retort to Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's sour grapes about losing the MySpace search deal) demonstrates his command of public relations narrative. He's not a wild visionary — just a smart man making smart deals (like the $500 million purchase of MySpace, now vindicated by a $900 million deal with Google). All this would-be CEO needs is the title.

Finally, Levinsohn tells BusinessWeek that Fox Interactive is hiring a global staff, investing in online video, and generally "ramping up." Granted, when BusinessWeek says buy, it's time to sell. But they may have hit this one on the mark — Fox Interactive is too strong a brand to tie down. It's time to spin off.

Fox to Make MySpace More Spacious [BusinessWeek]
Why Murdoch Won't buy YouTube [GigaOM]

Pop quiz — who was up at 2 last night trying to get on the TechCrunch Party guest list?

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington himself signed up at 1:48 AM and added VC David Hornik atop the list. From then on, anyone was allowed to add their name. Prashant Sarkar, a man from a Singapore entrepreneurial group, was the first guest to sign up at 2:36 AM. Probably in another time zone, so that's forgiveable. [Update: The group, NUSEA, is based in the Bay, so he is refreshing TechCrunch at 2:36 AM.] But #4, Justin Smith from a group called Social Intelligence, has no excuse. That hard charger listed himself at 2:39.

But the hardest chargers of all? The five people who signed themselves up (or got moved by Arrington) above Prashant, Justin, and several other guests. That includes Fox Interactive head Ross Levinsohn and ZDNet editor-in-chief Dan Farber.

At 8 AM, about 170 people had signed up. Would have been more if the list didn't keep locking up. See, the TechCrunch party list is built as a wiki, with an automatic 15-minute lock. That means that if I go and edit my name in, I need to tell the wiki to unlock so other people can edit. Otherwise, the wiki can't be touched for a quarter of an hour.

Give ya two guesses whether everyone remembers to unlock.

Meanwhile, attendees are getting bumped off and on the list, optimizing their edit times, or banging their heads against the wall in frustration. Get a grip, people. This isn't the Black and White Ball. (But while you're at the wiki, can you sign me up?)

TechCrunch Party 7 guest list [Wiki]