After reaping billions as a father of the Web boom, Jim Clark is turning his back on the ‘Net, calling it too “political” to make a buck anymore.
“It’s a massively political marketplace – one that I would not enter again,” Clark said.
The co-founder of Netscape, the search engine that opened up the world of surfing, said he may have been naive about the sudden riches of the Internet stocks.
“I think we were probably a bit naive in a few ways about how to go at that market,” he said in an interview with San Jose Mercury News.
Clark, a 56-year-old Silicon Valley icon, said he no longer wants to be involved in publicly traded companies and calls the stock market “manic,” with tech stocks far overvalued.
He’s also liquidated all his stocks, including Microsoft, AOL and Cisco, except for his 12 million shares in WebMD.
Shares of WebMD fell 10 percent yesterday to $10.13, off $1. News Corporation, the owner of The Post, also owns about 6 percent of WebMD.
WebMD yesterday posted a wider-than-expected third-quarter loss, excluding restructuring charges, of $65.8 million, or 27 cents a share, vs. a loss of $55.5 million, or 28, a year earlier. Wall Street analysts had expected a loss of 22 cents.
Revenue rose to $151.2 million from $28.7 million.