Starboard Value has $500 million stake in Autodesk: WSJ

Autodesk (ADSK) shares are climbing on reports that activist investor Starboard Value has a $500 million stake in the company. Market Domination Hosts Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton report more on the story and what it means for the future of Autodesk, including Starboard CEO Jeff Smith's push for board changes.

Yahoo Finance sat down with Autodesk Chief Marketing Officer Dara Treseder at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France. Keep up with Yahoo Finance's coverage from the Cannes Lions Festival.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination.

This post was written by Melanie Riehl and updated by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video transcript

That shares moving higher on reports that Activist, a starboard value, has a $500 million stake in the company.

That's according to The Wall Street Journal.

Starboard Value is reportedly seeking changes within auto desk, including a potential board shake up.

Now.

This is all stemming from what has played out at Auto Desk here over the last several months.

They did have an internal probe regarding some accounting questions into the company.

Now they what that investigation did result in it didn't lead to any changes here to auto desks a previously disclosed financial reports, although the company ultimately did remove or did move its CFO into a new position.

So now starboard, the question of of they at least their issue with what has played out here over the last several weeks or the real issue has been the timing of when Auto Desk did disclose that probe, saying that they disclosed it right after a window had closed for board nominations, and now they are pushing here to have that window reopened because they think that maybe they a new board members could potentially help address some of the issues here at audit us So again, we're seeing auditor shares move higher on this news here today.

Starboard value of $500 million daycare in auto desk and now pushing for some changes here in a letter to auto desk executives.

Yeah, and this comes as the stock under a little bit of pressure.

At least they're down about 3.5% year to date over the past year, though up nearly 7%.

It does appear that, according to Bloomberg, they reached out, and Auto Desk said they were confident in their direction after the starboard letter in an email.

But that is just according to Bloomberg reporting there.

Having said that like you mentioned Sean, I think the critical part here is this investigation that is going to be the key piece of starboard's argument, at least moving forward here about kind of concerns with the start, the software company's performance and how they have handled that accounting probe in particular.

That seems to be the sticking point, at least for starboard here