REPORT: Best Buy Founder Is About To Submit A Bid To Buy Out The Company

Best Buy founder Richard Schulze wants to save the ailing electronics giant.

He's expected to submit a bid to buy out the company by the weekend, reports Thomas Lee at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The offer could be between $5 and $6 billion and would take the company private.

Sunday is the "hard" deadline.

Schulze founded Best Buy when he opened a store in 1966. Since then, it's grown to have $50 billion in annual sales and 100,000 employees.

But Best Buy has fallen on hard times recently, and the stock price has tumbled 45 percent since late June.

The problems at the retailer have been attributed to increased competition from Apple and Amazon.

Schulze's relationship with the company has improved since current CEO Hubert Joly took over earlier this year, Lee reports.

Schulze was ousted as chairman after executives accused him of hiding information implicating former CEO Brian Dunn's affair with a female employee.

But Joly's made a big effort to bring Schulze back into the fold.

Now it's up to the board to decide whether to accept Schulze's offer. He has said that he expects them to reject his plan the first time around, and will try again in January if that happens.

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