Who Is Carl Icahn - The Corporate Raider Turned Activist Shareholder 2021 HD - The Real Gordon Gekko

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Carl Icahn was born on the 16th of February 1936 in Brooklyn, New York in a Jewish family to two schoolteachers. Carl Icahn went to Princeton and graduated in Philosophy and he then started medical school at New York University, but dropped out to join the Army. That’s a bit similar to what Charlie Munger did. Carl Icahn started his career at mutual fund manager Dreyfus & Co and then moved on to be a stock-broker in the New York stock exchange with his own arbitrage and options trading firm called Icahn & Co, when he was just 32 years old. Carl Icahn became famous as a “corporate raider” back in the 1980s when he launched a takeover of TWA and stripped the company of some of its best assets to pay off the debt he had used to buy the company, which ultimately led to TWA going bankrupt. You may remember this has inspired the characters of a few famous movies and notably the figure of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street who was plotting a takeover of an airline at some point in that movie… Carl Icahn also forced some of the firms he targeted to pay him to exit the stock, in what is technically called “greenmail”. So, Carl Icahn belongs to a breed of brash and aggressive investors that used to be called corporate raiders, but have now slightly toned down their ways and have rebranded themselves or been rebranded as activist shareholders. The way they operate is that they take an ownership stake in a company, which is sometimes pretty small, say 1% but can go up much higher to 10% or even 30% and then try to convince management teams to make changes to their business. Carl Icahn has been very successful with his personal fortune amounting to more than $14 billion. In the course of his career, Icahn has targeted many leading U.S. companies, including the following: Clorox, Occidental Petroleum, Apple, Netflix, Sandridge Energy, Herbalife, Hertz, eBay, Hologic, CVR Energy, just to name a few. Carl Icahn has often challenged the Boards and management teams of these companies and asked them to do a series of things that they were not willing to do and that in his mind would increase the value of those companies for the people who owned the shares. Some of these activist campaigns, as they are technically called, ended up being successful for Carl Icahn, whereas others were significant failures and led to a lot of damage being made to the companies while Carl Icahn sold out of his position. One of his big recent failures was Hertz, the car rental company which ended up going bankrupt when Carl Icahn owned close to 40% of it and ended up losing $1.6 billion when it went belly up. To be fair he also had huge recent successes, including Netflix and his push to have PayPal spun out of eBay, which was a massively positive deal for shareholders.
In the course of these activist campaigns, Carl Icahn has often had some punchy sentences and tough words for some CEOs. A good example of that for you guys and gals. Discussing Vicki Hollub, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum, and the financing deal she agreed to with Warren Buffet, yes, that guy! Carl Icahn pretty much said that Warren Buffet “took Vicki Hollub to the cleaners.” That’s a good one. We added a few more at the end of this video, so you can check those out if you are curious. They are pretty good. An interesting anecdote is that Carl Icahn is often seen wearing those shirts with a different colored collar, which scream I work on Wall Street and I want to make sure all of you know. Another one is that there is another billionaire he really doesn’t like. That would be hedge fund superstar Bill Ackman. The two have feuded publicly numerous times in public venues and over investments like Herbalife, and it appears that the hard feelings originate from a deal the two did back in 2004 that ended up in a lawsuit between the two, with Carl Icahn being forced by a court to pay $9 million to Bill Ackman, which he really did not want to pay. Over the years Carl Icahn has had very tough words for Bill Ackman like the following: “Bill Ackman is like a crybaby in the schoolyard. I went to a tough school in Queens, you know, and they used to beat up the little Jewish boys. He was like one of the little Jewish boys crying”.