Word: icahn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Feelings were running high in Bartlesville, Okla., last week, where Phillips shareholders debated Icahn's proposal; they began voting on whether to accept or reject a financial plan proposed by Phillips' management. A group of 40 townspeople burned a pile of Icahn's proxy statements...
Angry stockholder meetings are a long way from Icahn's early life as the son of a synagogue cantor in New York City. After studying philosophy at Princeton, the future raider spent two years in medical school, but quit when he realized that he was not enjoying the work--and becoming a bit of a hypochondriac to boot. After a stint in the Army at Fort Sam Houston, he used a few thousand dollars won in barracks poker games to get started on Wall Street. He made $50,000 in the bull market of 1961, then lost it just...
...Icahn moved into a field where he could have more control: takeovers. He now specializes in finding poorly run companies and then launching a raid, which involves an effort to get con- trol of the firm. Icahn's record is impressive: since 1968 he has made more than $100 million in the takeover game. One premise of the Icahn strategy is that large American firms are staffed with poor managers. Says he: "Unfortunately, many of today's chief executives have spent the first 20 or 30 years of their business careers studying how to please their boards rather than concentrating...
...corporate prowler since the late 1970s, Icahn has undertaken a major corporate raid about every six months. He buys stock in companies that he thinks are undervalued and then begins to tell the management how to run the business. That is hardly welcome news to executives, who usually try to get court orders to stop him from acquiring more shares. Icahn's most controversial takeover before his current fight with Phillips came in 1982, when he went after Dan River, a Virginia textile company. Residents of Danville rose up in protest against the aggressor from the North, and more than...
...Greenmailer. One of Icahn's partners in the Phillips struggle is Saul Steinberg, 45, an expert in the fine art of greenmail. In that corporate maneuver, an investor buys up a large block of stock in a company and threatens to take it over in hopes that the firm's management will become frightened and buy the shares back at a higher price than the stockholders can get, just to get rid of the raider. Last summer, in such a ploy, Steinberg bought 11.1% of Walt Disney Productions. After a long battle with Disney management, he sold the stock...