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Kerkorian took another big swing last week. His investment vehicle, Tracinda, named for daughters Tracy and Linda, announced it had bought 22 million shares of General Motors and planned to buy up to 28 million more, for nearly a 9% stake, which would make Kerkorian one of GM's largest and most potentially nettlesome stockholders. Why GM, and why now? Just a couple of months ago, when a friend broached the idea, the billionaire brushed it off. "He said, 'They have a lot of problems,'" recalls Mason. GM stock has been a dud, and despite popping 18% after Tracinda announced...
That Kerkorian doesn't even drive a GM car suggests he may not be in love with the goods. Loaded down with excess factory capacity, waning SUV sales and crushing health-care liabilities, the company is no quick turnaround play. So you have to wonder, What is he thinking? Kerkorian isn't talking--he has been virtually silent with the press since 1971. But there was no shortage of speculation on Wall Street and in Detroit. The scuttlebutt: that Kerkorian will try to force GM to spin off its lucrative financing unit, GMAC; that he will try to line...
Crazy as all this sounds--we're talking GM here, the world's largest automaker--Kerkorian practically wrote the how-to book on such tactics. In the late '70s he loaded up on shares of Columbia Pictures, then turned into such a litigious nightmare that Columbia bought his stake for a 50% premium, a settlement that Fay Vincent, then CEO of Columbia, called "greenmail" (a characterization disputed by a Kerkorian spokesman). In the '90s Kerkorian was at the center of a gear-grinding saga with Chrysler. After buying a big stake and standing by for a few years, he launched...
...also has the edge in the automotive sector, the heart of the satellite-radio market. XM generates 50% of customers with new-car sales (Sirius does better in the aftermarket), and XM's financial backers, GM and Honda, offer XM radios as standard equipment in 62 models, selling the tuners in 30% of their new vehicles. Sirius' partners, such as DaimlerChrysler and Ford, are running at a 10% to 15% installation pace, says analyst Lee Westerfield of Harris Nesbitt. All told, he estimates that XM's automotive partners hold a 10-point market-share lead over automakers aligned with Sirius...
Just a few years ago, black cars were rare. Today remarkable numbers of cars--expensive cars, serious cars--are black. Nearly one in five new Porsches sold in the U.S. is black, as is one in five GM Corvettes, a 100% increase over the past several years. Less than 7% of the new cars that Chrysler Corp. manufactures are black. All the more remarkable then that it is now the most popular color for the company's high-performance sports cars: among those sold this year, 32% of Laser XEs and Daytona Turbo Zs are black...