Note to Yahoo! Chief Executive Jerry Yang.  Word is that you are trying to wring a few more bucks out of Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) for your struggling Web portal.  Maybe this will help: The state of California says you have $3,008.46 worth of unclaimed Microsoft dividend checks coming your way.  Not bad, even for a billionaire. Another $271.6 billion more and Yang can even start bidding for Microsoft.  Yang isn't the only billionaire in Silicon Valley who's got a little unclaimed cash. Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Chief Executive Steve Jobs has $465.26 waiting for him from an insurance company. Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin never picked up $1,023.91 earned as a graduate student from Stanford University, in addition to $9.53 worth of dividends from The New York Times Company (nyse: NYT - news - people ). Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) other co-founder, Larry Page, has lost track of $262.26. Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ) Chief Executive Larry Ellison, who currently tops Forbes' list of the best compensated executives, can hang onto a little more Oracle stock this year: he's got $51.43 coming from the U.S. arm of Swiss insurer Zurich.  Even venture capital moneymen John Doerr and Vinod Khosla have lost track of some of their wealth. Doerr has lost 9,745 shares of Picturetel, a videoconferencing start-up backed by Kleiner Perkins and acquired by Polycom (nasdaq: PLCM - news - people ), best known for its conferencing calling setups, in 2001. Khosla is owed $376.99 by the local phone company and a mail-order pharmacy.  Yang and his counterparts can thank the California State Controller's Office for trying to reunite them with their money. For the fiscal ending in 2007, the state collected $522 million in unclaimed property--ranging from the contests of safety deposit boxes, cash from accounts, un-cashed insurance refunds, overpaid utility bills, escrow accounts and even unused gift certificates.  The small sums add up. California is now sitting on $5.3 billion worth of unclaimed funds split among 8.7 million owner accounts. California state controller John Chiang is pushing to get those funds back to their owners, with his office sending out more than a million notices since last year.  The effort is part of a push by the state that includes new laws to help Chiang's office connect people with their property. "We are able to notify people even before the property comes to the state that their property has been untouched for what is generally three years," says Garin Casaleggio, a spokesman for the California State Controllers Office.  The office has allowed anyone to search for unclaimed property on its Web site for many years, but it made the search available at claimit.ca.gov on February 20 to help people find the service more easily.  Some of those missing checks went astray due to bureaucratic snafus: It looks like Microsoft may have sent Yang's money to the wrong address. The California state government's site lists Yang's address as 3400 Central Expressway, Suite 201, in Santa Cruz, Calif. There's no such address. But Yahoo!'s (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) old offices were at that address in Santa Clara, Calif.  So what is Yang doing with enough Microsoft stock to generate more than $3,000 worth of dividends? Wouldn't wringing more money out of the software giant for Yahoo! hurt the value of those holdings? Oh, and why does Yang put his money in Microsoft if he won't even rely on Microsoft's operating system to power Yahoo!'s servers? Does he still own any shares?  Yahoo! did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As Microsoft and Yahoo! haggle, an unclaimed property search shows the chief of Yahoo! has a little Microsoft money coming his way.