Word: icahn
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...Prowler. Carl Icahn, 48, looks for all the world like a typical, affluent suburbanite. He lives with his wife Liba in Westchester County, near New York City, and likes nothing better than to hang around the house on weekends, playing tennis or going for a swim in his pool. While he does not look like someone who would frighten even a PTA board, he is a scourge to the giants of corporate America. Last week newspapers across the U.S. carried full-page ads with the scare headline IS ICAHN FOR REAL? The ads were part of a counterattack by Phillips...
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...