Skype soap opera ends as founders set to regain stake ahead of $2B sale

Memo to would-be Silicon Valley moguls: do not double-cross a pair of highly litigious billionaires.

After weeks of back and forth legal jousting, the tech heavyweights fighting over Skype are set to announce a deal in which the founders of the popular Web-calling service would regain a stake in the company they sold to eBay (EBAY) in 2005 for $2.6 billion, according to Bloomberg. Nice trick.

The pact ends an at-times vicious soap opera replete with accusations of back-stabbing, dishonesty and outright theft against Mike Volpi, the pair's one-time Golden Boy, who they believe double-crossed them. The legal circus held up eBay's proposed $2 billion sale of Skype to a consortium of private investors led by Silver Lake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, the investment firm of Marc Andreessen, the billionaire co-founder of Netscape.