Francis D’Souza, CEO of biotech giant Illumina, didn’t know what he was in for when he resisted Carl Icahn’s request in March for three seats on the company’s board.
Mr. Icahn, a billionaire investor, has hired a private investigator to dig up the dirt on Mr. de Souza. He wrote letters to Illumina shareholders criticizing Mr. deSouza’s leadership and published details of his divorce. By June, Mr. deSouza and Illumina’s president had both resigned. An ally of Mr. Icahn has joined the board.
Such bare-knuckle tactics have made Mr. Icahn a nightmare for many CEOs and changed the fate of some of America’s most iconic companies, including Apple, RJR Nabisco, Blockbuster and Netflix.
But in May, Mr Icahn, 87, found out what it’s like to be on the receiving end when Nathan Anderson, a 39-year-old short seller, posted, Setup questioning report at Icahn Enterprises, his publicly traded company. Mr. Anderson noted that the company was paying shareholders dividends it could not afford. Earlier this month, Icahn Enterprises succumbed to pressure, cutting its dividend by half.
“It’s very embarrassing for Carl because this guy beat him and beat him at his own game,” said Mark Stephens, author of the 1993 book King Icahn: Biography of the Rebel Capitalist.
Mr. Icahn scoffed at comparisons between himself and Mr. Anderson, whose short-selling company Hindenburg Research made news recently about its attacks on companies such as electric car maker Nikola and Adani Group, one of India’s most powerful conglomerates.
“He goes out and scares the little guy into selling stocks at the worst of times and taking big losses,” Icahn said during one of his many phone interviews over the past month, referring to ordinary investors. He said Mr. Anderson had not contacted him before the report was published, denying him an opportunity to present his side of the matter.
Short sellers borrow shares held by large investors and sell them on the open market, betting that their price will fall. If they bet correctly, they could buy back the borrowed shares at a lower price, return them and pocket the difference. Hindenburg publishes research that supports its short bets.
Mr. Icahn said he buys shares, holds them for years, and makes changes from within. He said, “I am not telling you that I am a charitable organization.” But “what we’re doing is very impressive.” In a recent earnings release, he said that investors who bought his company’s stock in January 2000 and reinvested their dividends would have fared far better than any stock index. (As of July 31, he said, his investors will receive an annual return of 12.8 percent compared to 6.9 percent for the S&P 500.)
Mr. Icahn was one of the first game changers – now known as activist investors – to buy stakes in companies and push management to make changes. His main vehicle was a hedge fund until 2007, when he folded it into a public entity that he also owned. The new entity, Icahn Enterprises, has diversified beyond activism and owns stocks, real estate, and other investments.
Mr. Icahn, who friends and acquaintances say often drinks a martini or two between disparate late-night CEOs, discovered his appetite for the company’s noisy cages in the late 1970s.
Mr. Icahn was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, in 1936, the only child of a synagogue cantor and schoolteacher, and attended Princeton University, working in the mess hall to help pay for his tuition. At his mother’s urging, he attended New York University School of Medicine before dropping out. After a brief stint in the US Army, he went to work on Wall Street. In 1968, he set up his own investment firm with a loan from his uncle.
One of his first successes came when he pushed Tappan, a family-owned company that made ovens, to sell it to a larger competitor. The campaign made him nearly $3 million.
He became a household name in the 1980s for his attempts to take over some of the most prominent companies of that decade. In 1985, he bought Trans World Airlines. His turbulent reign as president began with battles with the flight attendants’ union, which grounded the airline for weeks when they went on strike. It ended, for the most part, when TWA declared bankruptcy in 1992. Along the way, Mr. Icahn accumulated debt to the company, which allowed him to scrape cash and make a profit for himself.
One of his big wins was for RJR Nabisco, the food and tobacco giant he pushed to split in two starting in 1996. When the company eventually liquidated its food business, Mr. Icahn made $884 million by the time he sold off his stock of late. 2000.
In 2011, he launched a multi-year attack on pharmaceutical company Forest Labs, accusing it of destroying shareholder value. He ousted the CEO and pressed for a sale. Shares of Forest Labs tripled over that period, earning Mr. Icahn a net profit of about $2 billion. is also successfully to push Apple would buy back his shares in 2013, earning him $1.8 billion by the time he sold his stake.
Mr. Icahn estimated that his activist campaigns for dozens of companies, including Apple, eBay, PayPal, Forest Labs, Herbalife and Netflix, helped generate $300 billion in additional value for those companies’ shareholders. The bulk of it came from Apple.
Forbes estimated Icahn’s fortune at $18 billion earlier this year, though that number has nearly halved since the Hindenburg report.
However, Mr. Icahn’s bets have not always worked out in his favor or in favor of the target. When he joined Blockbuster Video’s board of directors in 2005, John Antioco, then the company’s CEO, was surprised how little Mr. Icahn knew about the business.
““Once Carl gets on the bus, I’m not sure he knows what to do with it,” said Mr. Antioco. However, he said Mr. Icahn supports his plans to move Blockbuster’s business online. In 2007, after a battle over damages, Mr. Antioco resigned. He said he was surprised when Mr. Icahn brought in a new CEO who has refocused on retail. Blockbuster declared bankruptcy a few years later.
Calling Blockbuster “the worst investment ever,” Icahn said he blames himself for letting the new CEO focus on retail. “We almost made it cool.”
He has also lost money on some of the activists’ recent campaigns. Xerox stock, where it is the largest shareholder, has fallen since it took a stake in 2015. International Flavors & Fragrances is trading at about half the price when it bought shares in early 2022. Illumina, which is now looking for a new CEO, is down 20 percent. Since Mr. Icahn launched his campaign.
At the same time, friends said that money is not what drives Mr. Icahn.
“It sounds cliché, but money isn’t important to Carl,” said Buzzy Krongard, a manager at Icahn Enterprises and an old friend who hooked up with him when he was an undergraduate at Princeton. “Winning is important,” said Mr. Krongard. “Carl is enjoying the battle itself.”
Often, the fight extends far beyond the activity. In 2003, real estate developer Harry McCullough bought the General Motors Building in Manhattan for a record price of $1.4 billion. Mr. Icahn, a friend of Mr. McClough’s, had a below-market lease for one of the upper floors of the 50-storey building which was nearing completion.
When one of the brokers in Mr. McCullough’s firm calls Mr. Icahn about a new lease at a higher rent, he yells at the broker to leave his office. He will not be involved in any talks with Mr. McCullough or his team, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. It was only when they had started to give tours to potential tenants and they lined up in one line that Mr. Icahn agreed to negotiate a new lease.
Icahn, a night owl who plays tennis almost every day, said he usually gets up before the stock market opens but has been known to work after midnight. Employees have been known to keep notebooks next to their night tables in case their boss calls after sleep, although Mr. Icahn said he rarely calls staff after midnight.
Friends and associates of Mr. Icahn said he bets on everything from poker games to chess matches. Once, when he was in Las Vegas, he even bet a million dollars that the San Francisco 49ers would win the Super Bowl. (They won, netting him a few hundred thousand dollars.) But they said it’s the high-stakes bets on companies – and the chance to influence their future – that he finds exciting.
Icahn and his 44-year-old son, Brett, are the controlling shareholders of Icahn Enterprises, owning 85 percent of the shares. Outside shareholders — mostly individual investors — own the rest. In 2020, Mr. Icahn said in regulatory filings that his son will succeed him by 2027 or sooner, but remains the face of the company for now.
In May, Hindenburg published research suggesting Icahn Enterprises was valued more than its peers because it paid lucrative dividends to shareholders despite reporting quarterly losses, which kept investors buying shares. “Icahn has been using money taken from new investors to pay dividends to old investors,” Anderson writes, comparing this to an unsustainable “Ponzi-like economic structure.”
Mr. Anderson also suggested that if Icahn Enterprises stopped paying dividends, the value of its shares would drop, meaning that Mr. Icahn would struggle to repay the billions of dollars he borrowed for his personal stake in the company. This can lead to a downward spiral. Mr Anderson also accused Mr Icahn of inflating the value of his own investments.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department launched investigations into Mr. Icahn’s business practices after the Hindenburg Report.
Icahn Enterprises stock fell more than 50 percent after the Hindenburg report, forcing Mr. Icahn to renegotiate the terms of his loans in July, which “substantially squandered” the effects of the report. Earlier this month, the company also cut its dividend by half.
He recently acknowledged that his company’s short bet against the S&P 500 had cost him nearly $9 billion over about six years and told investors he would refocus on the business.
Mr Anderson said Mr Icahn could still struggle to pay off his loans and refinance some debts given the high interest rates. “The next chapter of his financial skyrocketing business is going to be tough.”
Mr. Icahn said higher rates are not important to his company’s performance. He’s more determined than ever to use the billions in money he’s borrowed to achieve his next goals, using an activist instinct honed over nearly five decades in the business.
“When it sees an investment that has the potential to be profitable, you take as much money as you can and buy that stock as far as you can go,” said Icahn. “This is where you make the money.”