Icahn Quotes

Totally self-reliant, he is a master negotiator. He believes no one, expects the worst of people, distrusts his allies and adversaries alike and makes no pretense at intimacy.

But for people that make a lot of money, at least in business, or in any area, I think, the common denominator is an obsession, that they really are obsessed.

Explaining his stock market philosophy, Icahn said: “If the price is right, we are going to sell. I think that’s true of everything you have, except maybe your kids and possibly your wife.”   When a shocked judge responded by asking “Possibly?” Icahn confirmed that he had heard right. “Possibly,” Icahn repeated, adding the caveat, “Don’t tell my wife.

In life and business, there are two cardinal sins. The first is to act without thought and the second is not to act at all.

Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

PROBING ICAHN, MICKELSON FOR

In a fight, I go over a certain line and I become very tough. I even surprise myself. I reach a certain point in a fight where there is no turning back.”                                                                                                                                               —Carl Icahn

In the early 1980s, I looked at the container industry and saw that it was undervalued as hell,” Kingsley recalled. “The business was in a down cycle, but where else could you get these companies—some of the greatest names in American industry—selling for garbage? Just buying them was like stealing.

For a man who sees all of life as an auction, putting his honor up for bids seemed entirely appropriate.

Stan Druckenmiller, reflecting on his unbelievable success as an investor, said that the only way to make superior returns is to concentrate heavily. He thinks “diversification and all the stuff they’re teaching at business school today is probably the most misguided concept everywhere. And if you look at great investors that are as different as Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, Ken Langone, they tend to be very, very concentrated bets. They see something, they bet it, and they bet the ranch on it… . [T]he mistake I’d say 98 percent of the money managers and individuals make is they feel like they got to be playing in a bunch of stuff.”4

From Ashwood’s perspective, those who trusted Carl to rebuild TWA were naïve from the outset. “A leopard doesn’t change his spots. Icahn was, and is, a financial engineer. He can’t run a business. He can’t run a corner deli. If he ran the deli and the freezer broke, he wouldn’t fix it. He’d try to sell the spoiled milk rather than have the freezer fixed.

As employees vented their animosity, cruel jokes swept through the airline’s cockpits and ticket counters. Two of the favorites:   “Carl and one of his aides are walking down the street when a young blonde passes by. The aid says to Carl, ‘Hey, why don’t you screw her?’ Carl replies, ‘out of what?’”   “Saddam Hussein looks in the mirror and asks, ‘Mirror, mirror, who’s the meanest, most detestable son of the bitch in the world?’   “‘What! Who the hell is Carl Icahn?

On the day it was announced that Boesky was going down, I was negotiating with USX lawyers about the terms of a possible agreement that would give Carl the opportunity to have access to USX’s financial information,” Steve Jacobs recalls. “This presumably would facilitate Carl’s ability to make a bid because Drexel needed the information. But when the announcement came about Boesky, you knew the transaction was not going to fly.”   In the past, Icahn had succeeded in intimidating his adversaries by convincing them that he had the resources to make good on his threats. In most cases, that meant buying stock until he controlled or appeared capable of controlling the companies he attacked. But once Drexel was laid low and the pipeline of takeover capital had run dry, Icahn’s options were limited. In a critical transition, USX’s lawyers and investment bankers started treating Icahn as a major stockholder rather than as a raider capable of acquiring the business.

In many big corporations, the person who makes waves, who gives criticism, who does things to rock the boat—hell, he’s a persona non grata,” Icahn said. “The guys above him who are worrying about their jets and their other perks see to it that he’s kept down in the ranks. That he doesn’t make trouble.

You have to understand how the system is structured. The guy who gets to the top of the big corporations is, with notable exceptions, a political animal. He’s a survivor. He knows how to watch his back. That means hiring a number two guy that’s not as smart as him. That works for the CEO because he’s never threatened by his second in command.   “But think what that does to our corporate establishment. If the number two guy is always a little worse than the number one guy, sooner or later you’re going to have a country run by a bunch of morons. In American business we have a reverse Darwinism that provides for the survival of the unfittest.

Icahn’s first experience with a Wall Street boom-to-bust cycle was certainly a disappointment, but it also taught him two lessons he never forgot. First, no one makes money playing the market. A small investor dabbling in stocks is always vulnerable to bigger, more powerful forces that time after time will wipe him out.   Second, if he was going to emerge as a dominant force, he needed more than a broker’s training. He had to gain expertise in a market niche overlooked by the hordes of brokers content to sit by the phone and take orders. His study of empiricism had taught him that “there is a strategy behind everything,” and now he had to determine what that strategy was.

Undoubtedly, Icahn is blessed with a superior mind, but it is his determination to play an activist role in his business deals, to keep finding solutions to a maze of problems, that separates him from the run-of-the-mill Wall Street opportunists who are quick to write off problem deals and move on to the next. Starting with his earliest campaigns, Icahn would build his reputation, and his all-important credibility, by refusing to retreat no matter how bleak the picture or how much the deck was stacked against him.

This intergenerational fear is one that could be explained through epigenetics, the study of how we inherit certain mechanisms without there being a change in our DNA sequences. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, conducted a study to gauge how trauma is passed down from Holocaust survivors and found that, years later, their children inherited this PTSD because of how overactive their amygdala was.

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!” —RUDYARD KIPLING, “Brother Square-Toes” —Rewards and Fairies, a verse Icahn says has influenced his business career from the earliest days.

If you’d invested in Icahn Enterprises from January 1, 2000, to July 31, 2014, you would have made a total return of 1,622%, compared with 73% on the S&P 500 index!

What I’ve seen is a common denominator for successful people—I don’t mean just lucky; you know, you can get lucky for a year or two, get rich. But for people that make a lot of money, at least in business, or in any area, I think, the common denominator is an obsession, that they really are obsessed.

Apollo was having a difficult time finding candidates for the top spot, and Frissora would have had a hard time finding any job at any other public company. In September 2014, he had left as CEO at Hertz Global citing “personal reasons.” In fact, Hertz was in the middle of a massive accounting scandal where the rental car and equipment company was facing accusations of inflating profits. Carl Icahn had taken a near 10 percent stake and was making noise. Another hedge fund said Frissora had “lost all credibility.” To his surprise, Frissora got a call from an executive search firm just two weeks after leaving Hertz. They asked if he had interest in the Caesars job. He met with Rowan, Sambur, and Bonderman. Apollo claimed it would be a brief six-month bankruptcy, and the job would be fun. Frissora had been the CEO of two public companies, Hertz and auto parts maker Tenneco, and was new to gaming. But Hertz had gone private in a $15 billion LBO in 2006, so he had experience working with private equity. Until the accounting scandal, Hertz had prospered under Frissora. Rowan and Sambur were hoping an experienced operator could impose business discipline they believed Loveman had not.

When I was a kid, my mother said I was born with some kind of “warrior gene” or something.

If you want a friend, buy a dog

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken, And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools:

RUDYARD KIPLING, “Brother Square-Toes

Clearly, Texas Air had little

confluence of powerful forces sweeping through the economic arena was creating an unusual window of opportunity

The capital repurchases lifted Apple’s stock price and quieted Icahn, who eventually sold his shares for a profit of $1.83 billion. Cook cannily followed Icahn’s advice and drove the company’s share price up by doing something his predecessor would never have considered.

Events are often blown out of proportion, both the good and the bad.

The stories are rampant that Carl is going to take over TWA, which has been miraculously transformed from being the third-least-respected company in the United States into a national treasure.

My father was a very opinionated man,” Carl recalled. “He had set opinions on everything, and his strongest opinion was that there was something wrong about great wealth. To describe his feelings about this as an opinion is really an understatement. Wealthy people outraged him. The social juxtaposition of a tiny group of people living in great splendor and many more living in abject poverty was anathema to him.

In spraying the negotiations with a thousand possibilities, Icahn creates a complex environment in which he can camouflage his strategy. What does Carl really want? Which direction is he headed in? By tossing out dozens of variables, he leaves everyone guessing. The more his adversaries try to figure him out, the more he opens new channels: some dead ends, others viable options. It is in this context, where less accomplished negotiators look for symmetry and consistency, that Icahn thrives.

Much as they deny it, CEOs and their boards of directors come to view the companies they run as their own. Should an outsider threaten their prerogatives, they will do everything in their power to repel him. This insiders vs. outsiders mindset violates both the spirit of the corporate democracy and the fiduciary responsibility boards of directors owe to a company’s shareholders. Although the idea of having a gadfly on the board—one who would seek acquisitions or lobby for buyouts—is considered to be heresy among the corporate establishment, viewed from the standpoint of the shareholders’ interests, it makes all the sense in the world.

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist.

Trump said something to me that crystallized his view of politics and explains, to my mind, much of his subsequent difficulties. “I deal with people that are very extraordinarily talented people,” he told me. “I deal with Steve Wynn. I deal with Carl Icahn. I deal with killers that blow these [politicians] away. It’s not even the same category. This”—he meant politics—“is a category that’s like nineteen levels lower. You understand what I’m saying? Brilliant killers.