Carl Icahn

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King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist by Mark Stevens

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, classic study, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gordon Gekko, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Michael Milken, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, shareholder value, yellow journalism

In retrospect, Phillips was a watershed deal, for both the evolution of Carl Icahn and the M&A craze that defined the decade. “Before Phillips, Carl Icahn was just Carl Icahn—a successful takeover guy with brass balls and a pretty good record for getting things done,” said the former Drexel managing director. “But after Phillips, Carl became the Carl Icahn. The deal firmly established his image as the best intimidator, the best takeover practitioner around. “Think about it this way. For Pickens, a creature of the oil patch, to launch an assault on Phillips was audacious. But for Carl Icahn, this Wall Street operative who’d never even seen an oil well and who had no ties to the business establishment, to attack Phillips, that was unholy, incredible, awesome.

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The man, who for all outward appearances and statements didn’t care a whit what others thought of him, was genuinely interested in having a biography of his life produced by an independent writer and read by the world. I believe this rush of vanity surprised no one more than Carl Icahn himself. A final note: there are many qualities about this germaphobic, detached, relatively loveless man but he is by far the smartest person I have ever had the pleasure of knowing in my life. This book chronicles it all. THE BILLION DOLLAR EPIPHANY “I was once the rich uncle. Now he’s the rich nephew.” —Elliot Schnall In the summer of 1979, Carl Icahn, then a relatively obscure Wall Street figure with a hole-in-the-wall brokerage firm and a knack for making money in the options business, traveled to Miami to visit his mother Bella and his uncle, Elliot Schnall.

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Icahn had detected a weak link in the capitalist system, and he would exploit it with enormous success over the course of a tumultuous decade in American business. FIRST STRIKES: CONTROLLING THE DESTINY OF COMPANIES “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 By 1977, Carl Icahn was ready to move out of the shadows and onto Wall Street’s center stage. Two decades of thinking and observing had come together in a cohesive vision. He would make his mark, and his fortune, by controlling “the destinies of companies”—a feat he would accomplish not with brute force or financial might (neither of which he possessed at the time), but instead by putting a new spin on a time-tested Wall Street battle tactic, the proxy contest.

When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle by Scott Wapner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, deal flow, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Tim Cook: Apple, unbiased observer

James Sterngold, “The Pawns Differ: Icahn Still Winning,” New York Times, February 6, 1985. 10. Tobias Carlisle, “How Carl Icahn Became a Corporate Raider,” Investment News, December 7, 2014. 11. Tobias Carlisle, “The Insight That Enabled Carl Icahn to Become a Corporate Raider,” Crain’s Wealth, December 8, 2014. 12. Carlisle, “How Carl Icahn Became a Corporate Raider.” 13. Paul Richter, “Carl Icahn Relishes His Raider Role,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1985. 14. Slater, The Titans of Takeover. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Carlisle, “How Carl Icahn Became a Corporate Raider.” 20. Robert Cole, “Icahn Makes Dual Offer for Dan River,” New York Times, October 26, 1982. 21.

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Kevin McCoy and Nathan Bomey, “Herbalife Agrees to $200M FTC Settlement,” USA Today, July 15, 2016. 27. Carl Icahn, “Carl Icahn Issues Statement in Response to Herbalife’s Settlement with the FTC,” carlicahn.com, July 15, 2016. 28. Lindsay Rittenhouse, “Herbalife Settlement Is Profound Victory,” The Street, July 15, 2016. Chapter 15: Finale or Fakeout? 1. Michelle Celarier, “Inside Wall Street’s Greatest Feud,” Fortune, September 19, 2016. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. David Benoit, “Carl Icahn Mulled Selling Herbalife Stake to Group That Included Bill Ackman,” Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2016. 5. CNBC, Squawk Box, August 26, 2016. 6. Carl Icahn, “Carl Icahn Issues Statement Regarding Herbalife,” carlicahn.com, August 26, 2016. 7.

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Slater, The Titans of Takeover. 22. Richter, “Carl Icahn Relishes His Raider Role.” 23. Robert Cole, “ACF, Icahn Target, Prepares Next Step,” New York Times, September 20, 1983. 24. Ibid. 25. Linette Lopez, “Carl Icahn Told an Amazing 8-Minute Story That Explains His Entire Philosphy About Activist Investing,” Business Insider, November 4, 2015. 26. Times Wire Services, “Chesebrough Will Buy Stauffer for $1.2 Billion,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 1985. 27. Robert J. Cole, “Icahn Bids $8.1 Billion for Phillips,” New York Times, February 6, 1985. 28. Ibid. 29. William Gruber, “Raider Carl Icahn—A Pirate or Patriot?”

Deep Value by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, financial engineering, fixed income, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, John Bogle, joint-stock company, low interest rates, margin call, passive investing, principal–agent problem, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple

Available at http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/ another-view-can-biotech-survive-icahn/?ref=business. Bertoni, March 9, 2011. Carl Icahn, Schedule 14A Filing, February 23, 2010: http://www.sec.gov/ Archives/edgar/data/732485/000091062710000037/dfan14a022210.txt. Icahn Capital LP SEC Form 13F March 31, 2010 Available at http://www.sec. gov/Archives/edgar/data/1412093/000114036110021805/form13fhr.txt. Ibid. Howard Anderson. “Carl Icahn’s Battle to Take Down Genzyme.” The Boston Globe, June 2, 2010. Available at http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/06/02/carl_icahns_battle_to_take_ down_genzyme. Icahn Capital LP SEC Schedule 14A Filing Available at http://www.sec.gov/ Archives/edgar/data/732485/000091062710000101/genzdfan14a060110.txt.

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“iPrefs: Unlocking Value.” Greenlight Capital, 2013. Available at https://www.greenlightcapital.com/905284.pdf. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Carl Icahn, “Letter to Tim Cook.” Icahn Enterprises, October 8, 2013. Available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/178753981/Carl-Icahn-s-Letter-To-Apple-s-Tim-Cook. 20. Einhorn, 2013. 21. David Benoit. “Icahn Ends Apple Push With Hefty Paper Profit.” The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2014. Applied Deep Value 215 22. Steven Russolillo. “Carl Icahn: ‘Agree Completely’ With Apple’s Bigger Buyback.” The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2014. 23. Benoit, 2014. 24. Benjamin Graham and David Dodd.

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Each chapter tells a different story about a characteristic of deep value investing, seeking to illustrate a genuinely counterintuitive insight. Through these stories, it explores several ideas demonstrating that deeply undervalued stocks provide an enormous tail wind to investors, generating outsized returns whether they are subject to activist attention or not. We begin with former arbitrageur and option trader Carl Icahn. An avowed Graham-and-Dodd investor, Icahn understood early the advantage of owning equities as apparently appetizing as poison. He took Benjamin Graham’s investment philosophy and used it to pursue deeply undervalued positions offering asymmetric returns where he could control his own destiny.

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders by Connie Bruck

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial independence, fixed income, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, profit maximization, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, yield management, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

The junk-bond-financed takeover had not sprung, fully functioning, from the minds of Milken and his Drexel colleagues; it had needed crafting and fine-tuning. T. Boone Pickens Jr.’s peanut-sized Mesa Petroleum had made a run at mammoth Gulf Oil in early 1984. Pickens had ultimately driven Gulf into the arms of its white knight, Standard Oil of California. Then Steinberg’s Reliance had mounted its raid against Disney. Carl Icahn had launched his bid for Phillips Petroleum, after Pickens’ Mesa had taken its turn and been bought out. These raids—all financed by Drexel junk bonds, except for Pickens’ run at Phillips—had thrown off hundreds of millions of dollars to the raiders and to Drexel. But not one had acquired its target.

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It must have not only excited but tickled the fancy of Milken, an amateur magician who occasionally does tricks for his friends, to be able to wave this particular wand. The honored guests of this conference, therefore, were the takeover artists and their biggest backers—men like T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Irwin Jacobs, Sir James Goldsmith, Oscar Wyatt, Saul Steinberg, Ivan Boesky, Carl Lindner, the Belzbergs—and lesser lights about to shine, such as Nelson Peltz, Ronald Perelman, William Farley. The names tend to meld into a kind of raiders’ litany, but they are not all the same. For Milken, they would have separate roles during the coming months, performing discrete functions in a vast, interlocking machine of which he alone would know all the parts.

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It was a glorified road show for the buyers and for the scores of companies that made presentations, many of whom would soon be doing junk-bond offerings. It was a reunion for Milken’s high-rollers, whose camaraderie, if not collusion, he encouraged. One Drexel lawyer later recalled having seen Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn, Carl Lindner and Irwin Jacobs huddled in a corner. “Anything could have been happening there,” he remarked with a laugh. It was a good time. Bungalow 8 would not soon be forgotten, and client loyalty gets forged in sundry ways. And it launched Milken’s now full-blown tour de force. Within the first two weeks of April 1985, hard on the heels of the Predators’ Ball, five more Drexel clients—in addition to Triangle Industries—would make bids for companies, all backed by Milken’s junk bonds.

The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Jeff Bezos, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tim Cook: Apple

Available at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1040273/000089914000000393/0000899140-00-000393-0003.txt 59 David Einhorn. “iPrefs: Unlocking Value.” Greenlight Capital, 2013. Available at https://www.greenlightcapital.com/905284.pdf. 60 David Einhorn. “iPrefs: Unlocking Value.” Greenlight Capital, 2013. Available at https://www.greenlightcapital.com/905284.pdf. 61 Carl Icahn, Letter to Tim Cook. Available at https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/24/carl-icahns-letter-to-tim-cook.html 62 Carl C Icahn, Tweet, 11:21 AM, August 14, 2013. Available at https://twitter.com/Carl_C_Icahn/statuses/367350206993399808 63 David Einhorn. “iPrefs: Unlocking Value.” Greenlight Capital, 2013. Available at https://www.greenlightcapital.com/905284.pdf. 64 Carl C Icahn, Tweet, 11:12 AM, 11:13 AM, August 19, 2014.

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Buffett wrote in 1984, “It is extraordinary to me that the idea of buying dollar bills for 40 cents takes immediately to people or it doesn’t take at all”:1 A fellow…who had no formal education in business, understands immediately the value approach to investing and he’s applying it five minutes later. In the book, I set out the data and my reasoning. We’ll look at the details of actual stock picks by billionaire deep-value investors: •Warren Buffett •Carl Icahn •Daniel Loeb •David Einhorn We’ll see the strategies of Buffett and his teacher, Benjamin Graham, and other contrarians, including: •billionaire trader Paul Tudor-Jones •venture capitalist billionaire Peter Thiele •global macroinvestor billionaire Michael Steinhardt •billionaire tail-risk hedger Mark Spitznagel I wrote this book so you can read it in a couple of hours.

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But they only do it when the stock is deeply undervalued. Billionaire value-investor Warren Buffett famously says he tries to be “fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” Said in other words, Buffett zigs when the crowd zags. Like Buffett, billionaire corporate-raider Carl Icahn is also a value investor. He has been called the “the contrarian to end all contrarians.”2 Ken Moelis, former chief of investment banking at UBS, said of Icahn, “He’ll buy at the worst possible moment, when there’s no reason to see a sunny side and no one agrees with him.”3 Icahn explains why:4 The consensus thinking is generally wrong.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Their successes earned them billions of dollars and laid the groundwork for the next round of exploitation. In order to unravel the nexus of wealth and power at the top, these systemic changes must be reversed. CHAPTER 8 From Stakeholder to Shareholder Capitalism JAMIE DIMON wanted to be President Trump’s Treasury secretary, according to several sources. But billionaire investor Carl Icahn preferred Steven Mnuchin for the job. Mnuchin got it. How did Icahn get his pick? Icahn endorsed Trump for president in September 2015, barely three months after Trump announced his candidacy and long before he was considered a serious contender. “He’s the only candidate that speaks out about the country’s problems,” Icahn explained at the time.

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In 1980, under pressure from financial entrepreneurs like Weill, Congress lifted that ban, and Weill quickly got to work merging banks. A related Depression-era rule erected a strict wall between commercial banking (collecting deposits and making loans) and investment banking (making bets), called the Glass-Steagall Act. By the mid-1980s, as the stock market took off courtesy of Carl Icahn and the other raiders, people like Weill and Dimon noted that huge money could be made by taking down that wall. In early 1985, three of the Street’s biggest banks—JPMorgan, Citicorp, and Bankers Trust—asked the Federal Reserve Board to remove a few bricks. As a member of JPMorgan’s board at the time, Alan Greenspan endorsed the company’s application.

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The three systemic changes I have outlined—from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, from unionized workers to corporate monopolies, and from regulation of Wall Street to letting the Street run wild—profoundly altered the American system. It created a jaw-droppingly wealthy and powerful oligarchy. It shafted just about everyone else. CHAPTER 11 The Triumph of the Oligarchy DIG UNDER THE SURFACE of the system and you see individuals making deals that generated billions for themselves—such as Carl Icahn’s corporate raids, Jack Welch’s attacks on GE’s workers and unions, Warren Buffet’s investments in corporations with moats, and Sandy Weill’s and Jamie Dimon’s unfettered financial supermarkets and betting parlors. Dig deeper and you see how these deals depended on seemingly small changes in laws and regulations, such as preventing companies from defending themselves from raiders, neutering antitrust enforcement, imposing small fines on corporations for firing union organizers, refusing to regulate derivatives, and dismantling Glass-Steagall.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

You’ll gain insight into how they became the titleholders in the field of finance, and how you too have to stay alert and be ready for anything that happens. You’ll learn investment strategies that will prepare you for all seasons, for times of inflation and deflation, of war and peace, and, as Jack Bogle puts it, “times of sorrow and joy.” CHAPTER 6.1 CARL ICAHN: MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE * * * The Most Feared Man on Wall Street Question: When is a single tweet worth $17 billion? Answer: When Carl Icahn says Apple is undervalued and announces he’s buying the stock. Within an hour of Icahn’s tweet in the summer of 2013, Apple stock had jumped 19 points. The market got the message: whenever the billionaire businessman takes an interest in a company, it’s time to buy.

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Icahn’s business skills have made him one of the richest men in the world—at last check of the Forbes list, he was 27th, with a net worth of more than $23 billion—and he’s made billions more for ordinary shareholders who invest in his diversified holding company, Icahn Enterprises LP (NASDAQ: IEP), or own stock in the companies he targets. The secret to his success? Even his critics will tell you Carl Icahn doesn’t just look for opportunities in business—he makes them. But most outsiders still think of him as a Wall Street caricature, a ruthless vulture capitalist who pillages companies for personal gain. When you Google the term corporate raider, Icahn’s name autofills in the search bar. But Carl Icahn is challenging that creaky old stereotype. Icahn thinks of himself as a “shareholder activist.” What does that mean? “We go in and shine a light on public companies that are not giving shareholders the value they deserve,” he told me.

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Buffett responded that he had abstained from the vote but was opposed to the plan, and that he had been quietly talking to management about reducing its excessive pay proposal—but he didn’t want to “go to war” with Coke over the issue. In contrast, Carl Icahn is always ready for war. He’s been in the trenches many times before, making runs on companies as diverse as US Steel, Clorox, eBay, Dell, and Yahoo. But this time was different: instead of Icahn, a younger fund manager named David Winters was buying stock and leading the charge against Coke’s management. To the dismay of overpaid CEOs everywhere, a new generation of “activist investors” is taking up the fight Icahn started decades ago. Naturally, Carl Icahn has ticked off a lot of corporate dynamos, enemies with big clout in the media.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

“Regarding Mr. Icahn’s”: “eBay Inc.’s Statement on Carl Icahn’s Investment and Related Proposals,” January 22, 2014, https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/ebay-incs-statement-carl-icahns-investment-and-related-proposals/. “The complete disregard”: Maureen Farrell, “Carl Icahn Charges eBay’s Board with ‘Complete Disregard for Accountability,’ ” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2014, https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/02/24/carl-icahn-charges-ebays-board-with-complete-disregard-for-accountability/. “dead wrong”: “Stick to the Facts, Carl: eBay Inc. Responds to Carl Icahn,” February 26, 2014, https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/stick-facts-carl-ebay-inc-responds-carl-icahn/.

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Responds to Carl Icahn,” February 26, 2014, https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/stick-facts-carl-ebay-inc-responds-carl-icahn/. “PayPal is a jewel”… “in the world”: Steven Bertoni, “Carl Icahn Attacks eBay, Marc Andreessen and Scott Cook in Shareholder Letter,” Forbes, accessed July 29, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/02/24/carl-icahn-attacks-ebay-marc-andreessen-and-scott-cook-in-shareholder-letter/. “A thorough strategic”: “eBay Inc. to Separate eBay and PayPal Into Independent Publicly Traded Companies in 2015,” September 30, 2014, https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140930005527/en/eBay-Inc.-to-Separate-eBay-and-PayPal-Into-Independent-Publicly-Traded-Companies-in-2015.

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In a 2002 talk at Stanford, a questioner asked Thiel what advice he had for PayPal. “The larger market is off eBay,” he said, “and they should develop a lot of product features and functionalities that enable point-to-point payments in a non-eBay context.” The PayPal independence movement picked up steam, thanks to activist investor Carl Icahn. In 2013, Icahn took a significant stake in eBay and began to push it to spin off PayPal. In its January 2014 quarterly report, eBay responded: “Regarding Mr. Icahn’s separation proposal, eBay’s Board of Directors… does not believe that breaking up the company is the best way to maximize shareholder value.”

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

Craft Blockbuster Online, vice president of strategic planning Rick Ellis Blockbuster Online, operations consultant Shane Evangelist Blockbuster Online, senior vice president and general manager Gary Fernandes Board member Bill Fields Chairman/chief executive before Antioco Sarah Gustafson Blockbuster Online, senior director, customer analytics Jules Haimovitz Board member Lillian Hessel Blockbuster Online, vice president, customer marketing Jim Keyes Chairman/chief executive Karen Raskopf Corporate Communications, senior vice president, Nick Shepherd Chief operating officer Michael Siftar Blockbuster Online, director, applications development Nigel Travis President Strauss Zelnick Board member Larry Zine Chief financial officer COSTARS (ALPHABETICAL) Robert Bell AT&T Laboratory, Statistics Division, researcher Jeff Bezos Amazon.com founder/chief executive Martin Chabbert Netflix Prize winner, ­French-­Canadian programmer Tom Dooley Viacom, senior vice president Roger Enrico PepsiCo, chairman John Fleming Walmart, chief executive Brett Icahn Carl Icahn’s son Carl Icahn Blockbuster investor/board member Michael Jahrer Netflix Prize winner, Big Chaos team, machine learning researcher Mike Kaltschnee HackingNetflix, founder/blogger Gregg Kaplan Redbox, chief executive Mel Karmazin Viacom, chief operating officer Yehuda Koren Netflix Prize winner, AT&T Laboratory, scientist Warren Lieberfarb Warner Home Video, president Joe Malugen Movie Gallery, chairman/chief executive Dave Novak Yum!

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Wattles, however, would not turn over the information to Antioco unless his rival agreed not to tender an offer directly to Hollywood Video’s shareholders. Wattles said publicly that he welcomed the offer, but he privately expressed doubts to the Blockbuster executives that U.S. antitrust regulators would approve the deal. The proposal had drawn the attention of billionaire investor Carl Icahn, a former corporate raider and self-styled shareholder activist, who then planned to profit on both ends of the Blockbuster–Hollywood Video merger. Icahn sank $150 million into Blockbuster shares and about $60 million into Hollywood Video. In a securities filing Icahn said he might seek to participate in, and influence the outcome of, any proxy solicitation and the bidding process involving the owner of the Hollywood Video stores.

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“They are still pretty small, so in the background, but have good significant potential over the next three years, mostly to negatively impact stores, which of course has a positive effect for us,” Hastings said. That summer, everyone at Netflix was exhausted and becoming demoralized. Hastings carried himself like a depleted man, and it was clear that Kilgore was very, very worried. CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE GREAT ESCAPE (2007–2009) LATER, CARL ICAHN WOULD REFLECT that John Antioco had, in fact, done a good job in setting up Total Access, and that if Antioco had not left the company in a huff over his bonus, things might have turned out differently. But in the summer of 2007, Icahn could hardly wait to get rid of Antioco. In his view, Antioco never cared as much about Blockbuster as he did about making money and escaping to his ranch to drink tequila.

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Then, in 1984, Milken began using: Burrough and Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate, p. 141. 21. Black famously conceived: Jerry Useem, “20 That Made History,” Fortune, June 27, 2005, as well as interview with Black. 22. Carl Icahn, for example: Information about Marshall Field’s comes from Charles Geisst, Wall Street: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 339; information about Carl Icahn and Texaco is from Roy C. Smith, The Wealth Creators: The Rise of Today’s Rich and Super-Rich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 107. 23. Not all of his deals: Geisst, Wall Street, p. 340. By 2006, Icahn’s fortune had ballooned to $9.7 billion. 24.

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Much of the 1980s bull market is attributed to the Milken machine that bought and sold junk bonds for corporate takeovers. Without the hundreds of billions of dollars in these low-grade bonds that he and Drexel raised, the takeover boom might have been far smaller, and his raider clients such as Ronald Perelman, T. Boone Pickens, and Carl Icahn might never have landed on the Forbes 400. “There was fear everywhere,” remembers Leon Black, cohead of corporate finance at Drexel in the 1980s and now head of a major New York private equity firm (and number 160 on the Forbes 400 in 2006). “Every CEO was worried. They’d read the Wall Street Journal in the morning and learn that their company was under attack by some guy we’d financed for $10 billion that morning.

…

They’d read the Wall Street Journal in the morning and learn that their company was under attack by some guy we’d financed for $10 billion that morning. Nobody felt safe.” Black famously conceived21 the “highly confident” letter that Drexel gave raiders, essentially a pirate flag that told takeover targets the fearsome bank was backing them. Carl Icahn, for example22, a secretive former Wall Street stock arbitrageur and fiendish poker player, came out of nowhere to earn over $100 million from hostile purchases of stock in companies like Marshall Field’s and over $500 million from Texaco, whose corporate boards paid him to go away—the greenmailing strategy.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Six out of the top ten fastest-growing job categories pay $15 an hour and workforce participation is as low as it’s been since the late 1970s.4 It used to be that as the fortunes of American companies improved, the fortunes of the average American rose, too. But now something has broken that relationship. That something is Wall Street. Just consider that only weeks after Apple announced it would pay off investors with the $17 billion, more sharks began circling. Corporate raider Carl Icahn, one of the original barbarians at the gate who attacked companies from TWA to RJR Nabisco in the 1980s and 1990s, promptly began buying up Apple stock, all the while tweeting demands that Cook spend billions and billions more on buybacks. With each tweet, Apple’s share price jumped. By May 2015, Icahn’s stake in Apple had soared 330 percent, to more than $6.5 billion, and Apple had pledged to spend a total of $200 billion on dividends and buybacks through March 2017.

…

Chapter 3 will delve deeply into the history of US business education and examine how and why it came to focus on balance sheet manipulation to the exclusion of real managerial skills. Chapter 4 will deconstruct our conventional wisdom around shareholder value by looking at how activist investors like Carl Icahn now call the shots at the country’s largest and most successful firms—such as Apple—at the expense of innovation and job creation. Chapter 5 will show how much of corporate America has come to emulate banking—how we’re all glorified bankers now—by tracking the history of General Electric, which is one of the great American innovators, but which became the country’s fifth-largest bank before trying to reclaim its roots in industry.

…

Indeed, “shareholder value” has become the rallying cry of many a financially oriented manager making decisions that boost a company’s share price at the expense of longer-term growth. And it has also become the justification for “activist” investors who, in a clever semantic trick, have today been rebranded from their previous incarnation as “corporate raiders”—people like Carl Icahn, Bill Ackman, and Daniel Loeb, who have pushed American companies to pay back their record $2 trillion cash hoard in the form of dividends and share buybacks, rather than pay higher wages or make investments in factories, infrastructure, or worker training.17 And they’ve been quite successful at forcing companies to do just that.

100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them by Christopher W Mayer

Alan Greenspan, asset light, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, market bubble, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, peak oil, Pershing Square Capital Management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, tontine

And you can see that. There are so many articles out there right now about how companies are hoarding cash at such a high level. The owner-operators are nothing if not opportunistic. We talked about a few examples, such as Carl Icahn, the famous dealmaker. There are a variety of Icahn-led companies in the index. American Railcar, CVR Energy and Chesapeake are three. “When you study somebody like Carl Icahn,” Matt said, “it becomes very clear that he’s using these companies like chess pieces.” Let’s just look at American Railcar and CVR Energy, for instance. In the oil-rich Bakken, there was a shortage of pipeline capacity to get it to the refineries, such as CVR.

…

— Martin Sosnoff, Silent Investor, Silent Loser OWNER-OPERATORS: SKIN IN THE GAME 87 “When my mother asked me what I was doing these days, I explained it to her this way,” Matt Houk told me. “I said, ‘OK, Mom, what if Warren Buffett approached you and said he’d manage your money [for a small fee]—would you let him?’ “‘Of course.’ “‘What about Carl Icahn?’ “‘Yes.’ “‘What about Bill Ackman, David Einhorn or the Tisch family at Loews? Would you let them do it for that fee?’ “‘Yes, absolutely.’ “And that’s what this fund is. People manage your money for a very reasonable fee and you get access to private equity-type talent. “Odd that there wasn’t a product like this before,” Matt explained.

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OWNER-OPERATORS: SKIN IN THE GAME 91 “For the average person,” Matt summed up, “getting access to investors of that quality is not easy. You can get it only if you go through a hedge fund or a private equity partnership. And you need to be at a high standard of living to qualify. But this is an indirect way to access that talent. And you can have Nelson Peltz invest your money. You can have Carl Icahn and Warren Buffett.” Wealth begets wealth “Most wealth remains hidden in private financial arrangements undetected by curious onlookers,” write Professors Joel Shulman and Erik Noyes. “The public will probably never know the secrets behind this money.” But not all such wealth lies hidden. As we saw with Matt Houk, some of the world’s wealthiest own and operate public companies.

Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire by Sujeet Indap, Max Frumes

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, data science, deal flow, Donald Trump, family office, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, lockdown, low interest rates, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, NetJets, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, super pumped, Travis Kalanick

“TPG Capital, Apollo sell remaining stake in Caesars,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 12, 2019. Caesars Entertainment Corporation, Robert Morse resignation, 8-K, Nov 26, 2018. Vardi, Nathan. “How Carl Icahn Made $1.4 Billion Playing The Booms And Busts Of Las Vegas.” Forbes, August 30, 2017. Indap, Sujeet. “US casinos unlock the value in their real estate.” Financial Times, July 18, 2019. Lombardo, Cara. “Carl Icahn All But Exits Casinos With Tropicana Entertainment Sale.” Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2018. CNBC Power Lunch. “Caesars Entertainment CEO on plummeting stock price.” Mark Frissora on CNBC, August 1, 2018.

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The party made news highlights and Loveman, wounded by Bonderman’s decision, would be asked for years about why exactly the TPG founder did not choose the casino he owned. A PARTY AT THE MUSEUM of Modern Art proved more problematic for Leon Black and Apollo. On the evening of May 15, 2007, the crowd included New York heavyweights such as Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, Caroline Kennedy, Carl Icahn, Barry Diller and his wife Diane Von Furstenberg, and Vera Wang. The MoMA was hosting its annual black-tie “Party in the Garden” fundraiser, and the evening’s honorees were Leon and Debra Black and Martin Scorsese. The entertainment would be provided by Jay-Z, who, like Black, was a native New Yorker.

…

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.

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

All kidding aside, it’s hard to believe that in the age of mobile communication and content delivery that the company’s management believed something as old-fashioned as home phones would reverse its slide. Candy sales almost seemed more promising by comparison. Even though I shorted the stocks of three other public video rental chains that wound up going bankrupt, I never shorted Blockbuster. You could say I got “cahned.” A few years before my visit with Angelika, renowned investor Carl Icahn had become the biggest shareholder in Blockbuster and had won a proxy war to control its board of directors. I respected Icahn’s acumen, or at least his clout, enough to stay away from shorting Blockbuster while he was so deeply involved. Even if the new retail scheme was as doomed as I thought, I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of such a powerful figure.

…

But without late fees and per-movie charges, it was never going to be profitable for the company—not with the burden of thousands of store leases and tens of thousands of employee salaries to pay. But instead of closing as many stores as they could to cut costs and putting everything they could into its online presence, Blockbuster’s leadership went backward and decided to turn its stores into glorified candy racks. I am definitely not trying to bash Carl Icahn. I have a lot of respect for him. But as he has admitted, he blew it big time at Blockbuster. The only way it was going to survive was by adapting to the fact that people weren’t going to get in their cars and drive several miles to a store just so they could overpay to rent movies anymore. Instead, he wagered that people would continue to drive several miles to overpay for movie rentals if they could also buy candy and magazines and video games—or maybe a cheap flat-screen TV—at the same time.

…

There’s no other way to put it: the man was imposing. Leaning back in his leather chair with the skyline of Houston spread out behind him, he looked like the perfect embodiment of the 1980s corporate raider—which, in many ways, he was. A few years after our meeting, he waged a storied takeover battle for Eastern Airlines with none other than Carl Icahn. Several scale models of DC-10s were displayed around his office. One of these was painted in Continental’s colors, another had the now-defunct Texas International Air brand on the side of it, and a third had been decorated with the name and logo of Jet Capital, the holding company Lorenzo and a fellow Harvard MBA had started in the late 1960s.

Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, creative destruction, deal flow, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, fixed income, fudge factor, George Gilder, index arbitrage, Internet Archive, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, walking around money, zero-coupon bond

Tomilson Hill III, co-head of M&A Steve Waters, co-head of M&A Peter Solomon, investment banker At Bank Leu, Nassau, the Bahamas Bernhard Meier, banker Bruno Pletscher, banker Cast of Characters U At Merrill Lynch & Co., New York Stephen Hammerman, general counsel Richard Drew, vice president, compliance Major investors Carl Icahn, corporate raider and future chairman of TWA John Mulheren, head of Jamie Securities Henry Kravis, principal, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Inc. At Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, New York (counsel for Goldman, Sachs) Martin Lipton, partner Ilan Reich, partner Lawrence Pedowitz, partner At Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, New York (counsel for Michael Milken and Dennis Levine) Arthur Liman, partner Martin Flumenbaum, partner At Williams & Connolly, Washington, D.C.

…

Boesky claimed he had no interest in the unsavory practice of "greenmail," in which a large, hostile stake is accumulated in a company hoping to scare management into buying out the raider at a premium price. Conway signed on; he was intrigued at the thought of working for someone who might turn into the next Boone Pickens or Carl Icahn. His colleagues at Drexel were pleased: Conway could be counted on to steer business to his former employer. Indeed, to put his ambitious plans into eflFect, Boesky needed much more capital—and Drexel seemed the perfect source for it. The capital base in his arbitrage operation, always smaller than he had hoped for, had been decimated by the Cities Service crisis; he wasn't even financing his routine arbitrage activity on the scale he had wanted.

…

Considine frantically tried to put together his own financing for a leveraged buyout, but it was really no contest. Milken simply shopped National Can to his other loyal clients, oflFering them the chance to seize the company in Posner's stead, sure that they would top any bid Considine could muster. Carl Icahn eyed National Can seriously, even taking a large position, but eventually demurred. Ultimately another Milken protege, Nelson Peltz, bought the company. Drexel, raising a total of $595 million for Peltz, made even more in financing and investment banking fees than it would have had Posner carried through with the original plan.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

When John Carpenter filmed his 1981 postapocalyptic thriller Escape from New York—a commentary on Manhattan’s shattered state—he chose to do it in St. Louis because he did not need to build a set. St. Louis’s natural end-times look filled in just fine. New York and St. Louis were brothers in blight—until they weren’t. The rapacious greed of the Reagan 1980s marked the rise of New York corporate raiders like Carl Icahn, who bought out St. Louis companies like Trans World Airlines (TWA), draining St. Louis of its money and resources and pride. TWA was “a broken-winged bird helpless before the pounce of the ultimate corporate predator,” wrote St. Louis magazine, describing the shock of Missourians that an out-of-state tycoon had bought something as essential as an airline purely to destroy it and pocket the profits.8 By the late 1980s, New York and St.

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In the late 1970s, as Ford told New York to drop dead, Cohn and Trump picked at the city’s corpse like vultures. Manhattan was ready to be torn down and bludgeoned and remade with blood money in concrete: Trump Tower, the Plaza, the many, many casinos. Corporate raiders who would later aid the Trump administration—Carl Icahn, Wilbur Ross, Rupert Murdoch—commenced a national shakedown disguised as economic revival. Scams stretched from Atlantic City to Gary, Indiana, to St. Louis and beyond, to international waters where moguls parked their stolen assets.29 Critical regulations were tossed—the fairness doctrine that had protected media; the labor laws that had protected unions.

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“What we were seeing with Russia was the fruition of a long-term strategy to try and compromise Treasury by cultivating civil servants. That’s why we sounded the alarm and reported it.”39 This internal threat to national security has only grown since 2015. The Treasury is now run by Steven Mnuchin, a lackey of Trump and fellow protégé of Trump’s old adviser Carl Icahn. Mnuchin has gone out of his way to ease sanctions on Russian oligarchs—in particular, Manafort’s former employer Oleg Deripaska—despite protest from Congress.40 Again, basic vetting by state officials—particularly during Trump’s “I have nothing to do with Russia” campaign phase—would have highlighted shady connections between the Trumps and Russia that were already in the public domain.

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, man camp, margin call, Maui Hawaii, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, reshoring, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Timothy McVeigh, urban decay

Now they, too, were nearly broke and the banks were making noises about calling in the loans. The U.S. economy was on a roll, so bankers gave McClendon and Ward some time to meet their payments. McClendon and Marc Rowland, the chief financial officer, flew to New York to ask some big-name investors, like Carl Icahn, to buy Chesapeake. After an hour’s discussion at Icahn’s office, he came to a decision. “Your bonds aren’t cheap enough,” Icahn said. His point: Chesapeake wasn’t yet enough of a bargain, even at seventy-five cents a share, because its debt wasn’t trading at the dirt-cheap prices that usually got Icahn excited.

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Ward renamed his company SandRidge Energy to signal that he was going after sandstone and other types of rock that had been drilled for decades. Let McClendon and Chesapeake spend all that money on shale, I’m going to find enough energy in old-fashioned rock, Ward was saying. Several months later, Ward approached Carl Icahn, the billionaire New York investor, who had cobbled a collection of energy companies into an entity called National Energy Group. Ward asked if Icahn was interested in merging his operation with Ward’s new company. Icahn was hesitant. He liked Ward on a personal level and thought he was bright, but Icahn was wary of all the money Ward and McClendon had spent at Chesapeake.

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“Mark Ruffalo got an Academy Award nomination and was in the Avengers movie after” becoming involved in the antifracking movement. Either way, the publicity helped pressure New York State officials to maintain the moratorium on fracking in the state and it helped focus national attention on the drilling, dealing a public relations blow to those in the business. • • • In late 2010, billionaire investor Carl Icahn disclosed that he had purchased nearly 6 percent of Chesapeake’s shares. Icahn is a so-called activist investor, or someone who buys big chunks of a company and then levies pressure on its management to enact changes aimed at getting shares higher. Weeks later, Icahn reached out to McClendon to let him know the company had piled on too much debt.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

NBC News: Trump’s cabinet appointments combined net worth of $14.5 billion Ben Popken, “Trump’s Cabinet Picks Have a Combined Wealth of $14.5B. How Did They All Make Their Money?” NBCNews.com, December 7, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/​business/​economy/​trump-s-cabinet-picks-have-combined-wealth-11b-how-did-n692681. Carl Icahn: worth more than $15 billion “Carl Icahn Profile,” Forbes.com, last modified April 12, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/​profile/​carl-icahn/. Steve Mnuchin and foreclosures Sean Coffey, California Reinvestment Coalition, personal correspondence with author or her research assistants, April 24, 2017: “tens of thousands of people were foreclosed on (or kicked out of their homes), with more than 15,000 of those foreclosures happening due to a reverse mortgage, a type of loan that can only be originated to seniors.”

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Not a Transition, but a Corporate Coup What Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires represents is a simple fact: the people who already possess an absolutely obscene share of the planet’s wealth, and whose share grows greater year after year—the latest figure from Oxfam shows eight men are worth as much as half the world—are determined to grab still more. According to NBC News in December 2016, Trump’s picks for cabinet appointments had a staggering combined net worth of $14.5 billion (not including “special adviser” Carl Icahn, who’s worth more than $15 billion on his own). Moreover, the key figures who populate Trump’s cabinet are more than just a representative sample of the ultrarich. To an alarming extent, he has collected a team of individuals who made their personal fortunes by knowingly causing harm to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, and to the planet itself, often in the midst of crisis.

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am by Robert Gandt

airline deregulation, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, flag carrier, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, RAND corporation, revenue passenger mile, Tenerife airport disaster, yield management, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Another group based in Iowa and headed by a Pan Am pilot named Neil Sapp launched a quixotic effort of its own to take over the shuttle. One of the most persistent shoppers—and most irritating—was TWA owner Carl Icahn. Icahn was like a horsefly around Tom Plaskett’s head. Icahn had bought out TWA and was managing it in much the same enervating fashion as Frank Lorenzo had run Continental and Eastern. Like Lorenzo, Carl Icahn was a predatory creature, an animal of the roaring, deregulated eighties. What he lacked in hard cash he made up for in hubris. Although TWA was in scarcely better health than Pan Am, and even though Icahn was about to sell TWA’s own London gates to American Airlines, Icahn was talking about building a merged TWA-Pan Am airline into a new American megacarrier.

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The notion caused head-shakes among those who remembered Juan Trippe’s own frustrated merger talks with TWA when it was controlled by Howard Hughes. Virtually every CEO since Trippe had fantasized about such a merger. It was a tantalizing prospect—a single American flag carrier that would span virtually the entire planet. The trouble was, it was too late. It would be a marriage of the enfeebled. And no one in the industry was taking Carl Icahn seriously as a builder of such an enterprise. Icahn’s style was to buy on the cheap, in a highly leveraged takeover, and then sell off assets to fund his huge indebtedness. These days Tom Plaskett was ignoring Icahn’s phone calls. And that was making Icahn furious. “Plaskett will go down in history,” Icahn told the Wall Street Journal, “as the General Custer of the airlines.”

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On the morning of August 12, 1991, in the court of New York bankruptcy judge Cornelius Blackshear, Tom Plaskett unloaded most of Pan Am’s remaining assets to Delta Airlines for $416 million in cash and the assumption of $389 million worth of liabilities. To some, it still seemed like too good a deal for Delta. Several unsuccessful bidders, notably Carl Icahn, screamed that their own bids were being ignored. But Icahn’s bids were backed mostly by paper and pledges, with little hard cash. Delta was not only waving real money, it was immediately advancing $80 million of debtor-in-possession funding to keep Pan Am in operation. Even better, Delta was agreeing to invest in what was now being called the “restructured” Pan Am, the remaining sliver of the airline that would be based in Miami and fly to Latin America.

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff by Christine S. Richard

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Blythe Masters, book value, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, electricity market, family office, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, glass ceiling, Greenspan put, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, money market fund, moral hazard, old-boy network, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, statistical model, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, white flight, zero-sum game

Berkowitz agreed to accept a Gibson acoustic guitar, which originally cost about $1,000, in exchange for his stake in the management company. “He got a bargain,” Ackman remembers. And he didn’t have to deal with Carl Icahn. On April 16, 2004, Hallwood Realty Partners announced that it would be merging with another company and that the shareholders would be bought out for $137.91 a share, a substantial premium to the $80 per share Carl Icahn had paid Ackman. It looked to Ackman like the “schmuck insurance” was going to pay off. Ackman called Icahn to congratulate him on the deal and to find out when Icahn would wire him $5 million, the amount Ackman believed his investors were entitled to under the schmuck insurance contract.

…

IN EARLY 2003, in addition to preparing for upcoming testimony at the attorney general’s office and at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ackman was working to liquidate Gotham’s holdings. He negotiated the sale of Gotham’s stake in Hallwood Realty Partners to renowned shareholder activist and corporate raider Carl Icahn for $80 a share. As part of the agreement, Ackman and Icahn worked out a “schmuck insurance” arrangement under which Ackman would get half of the profits if Icahn sold his Hallwood stake within 18 months. When Icahn asked Ackman if he had any other interesting investment ideas, Ackman launched into his argument for shorting MBIA and gave Icahn a copy of the Gotham report Is MBIA Triple-A?

…

(Morgan Stanley) Government Accountability Office (GAO) Farmer Mac and Gotham Partners / Ackman and Grady County (Oklahoma) bonds, MBIA and Graham, Benjamin Graham Fisher & Company Great Depression Greenberg, Maurice “Hank,” Greenlight Capital Greenspan, Alan Gross, Bill comments on rescue proposals for bond insurers Grossman, Hy Grossman, Michael Grubman, Jack guaranteed-investment contracts (GICs) defined FSA and MBIA and Moody’s and Haines, Robert Hallwood Realty Partners LP Hamline University JB Hannauer & Company Harbus News Harrisburg International Airport (Pennsylvania) bonds Harvard Club Harvard University Ackman and Business School Law School “Havenrock II,” Hearst, Patty Heitmeyer, Richard Hempel, George Herskovitz, Marilyn Hilal, Paul background of Hilal, Phil Hobson, Cal Hottensen, Robert housing market, mortgage crisis and Credit Suisse projections Deutsche Bank projections Hovde Capital Advisors “How to Save the Bond Insurers” (Pershing Square / Ackman) Hubbard, Edward Hunt, Heather MBIA downgraded by Hurricane Katrina, MBIA and IBM Icahn, Carl Icahn Partners IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG ING Groep NV Initiative for a Competitive Inner City Institutional Investor “Insurance Charade, The” (Bloomberg News) Intelligent Investor (Graham) Is MBIA Triple-A? A Detailed Analysis of SPVs, CDOs, and Accounting and Reserving Policies at MBIA Inc.

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Gordon Gekko, junk bonds, margin call, Michael Milken, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble

As stock prices plummeted in the crash of October 1987, Kravis and Roberts made their move, swooping in and secretly buying vast chunks of several major U.S. corporations. In 1988 they brought the LBO idea to one of those companies—its identity still secret—and were rejected. At the end of March, Kravis unveiled a 4.9 percent stake in Texaco, then under pressure from its largest shareholder, investor Carl Icahn. For two months Kravis and Roberts attempted to talk the oil company’s officials into a buyout or major restructuring. “We tried everything in the world to get them to do something with us,” Raether recalled, “and they wouldn’t.” The firm eventually sold its stock at a profit. The problem, it soon became clear, was that Kohlberg Kravis was all bite and no bark.

…

“Peter knew what he read in the magazines, but he had about as much experience in investment banking as my father,” who had advised Bershad to stay away from Wall Street. Bershad’s replacement, hired in June 1986, was a controversial figure named Daniel Good, who as merger chief at E. F. Hutton had built a thriving business backing corporate raiders. Good, so boundlessly optimistic he was sometimes called “Dan Quixote,” didn’t back four-star investors like Carl Icahn or Boone Pickens. His clients were little-known “wanna-be” raiders, third-tier greenmailers such as Asher Edelman, a Fifth Avenue arbitrager, and Herbert Haft, the pompadoured scourge of the retail industry. Instead of LBOs, Cohen chose to funnel Shearson’s money into bridge loans for Good’s raiders.

…

This would give Salomon bargaining leverage, Strong argued. It had the added advantage that, even if Salomon failed to ultimately gain control of the company, the firm would almost certainly realize a massive gain on its stock holdings. What Strong described was exactly the strategy that corporate raiders such as Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn had been using for years. For a major investment bank to try the same approach was unheard of, an order of magnitude beyond what Tom Hill and Shearson had sprung on Koppers that spring. But unusual deals, Strong argued, required unusual tactics. With Gutfreund’s approval, Strong wanted to begin acquiring RJR Nabisco stock on Monday morning and keep buying until they had spent $1 billion.

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Admiral Zheng, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, compensation consultant, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, passive investing, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payment for order flow, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, WikiLeaks

The authors are founders (Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik) and a director (David Pitt-Watson) of the ICGN. 38. Institutional Investor Responsibilities (2013), https://www.icgn.org/policy/guidance. 39. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo. 40. David Benoit, “Carl Icahn Wants to Create Twitter Movement,” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/09/09/carl-icahn-wants-to-create-twitter-movement/. 41. http://navalny.livejournal.com/. 42. “Access Blocked to Major Opposition Sites and Navalny’s Blog,” Moscow Times, March 14, 2014, www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/access-blocked-to-major-opposition-sites-and-navalnys-blog/496148.html. 43.

…

A passenger took a run-of-the-mill complaint about a musical instrument damaged in a baggage transfer and turned it into a YouTube video called “United Breaks Guitars.”39 The company was caught flat-footed when the video went viral, exacting a nasty reputation hit. Investors have joined in too, though less often. Yahoo! saw perhaps the best-known example in 2007 when Eric Jackson, a retail investor with a handful of shares, stirred a large-scale shareowner revolt through his Breakout Performance social media campaign. The activist investor Carl Icahn started using Twitter in June 2013 as part of a battle over the Dell buyout and quickly gained 76,000 followers.40 Then there is retail shareholder David Webb, in Hong Kong, who writes a blog from his home flat. People feed him tips about insider corporate wrongdoing that could never appear in Hong Kong’s mainstream media, because they are controlled by either the state or major families.

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

Loeb wrote a letter to his investors saying that the majority of his stake was purchased “during the panicked selling that followed the short seller's dramatic claims.”18 In the five days since Loeb's filing, Herbalife's stock rose 20%. Then a week later, the Wall Street Journal reported that billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn took a stake in Herbalife, and a month later, disclosures showed he owned 12.98% of the company. Carl Icahn and Dan Loeb against Bill Ackman – a face‐off raging all because Ackman got on his soapbox. It's impossible to know for sure whether Loeb and Icahn actually thought Herbalife was a good business and its stock was undervalued. In fact, that part was sort of irrelevant.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Slate pilloried it: Seth Stevenson, “Designed by Doofuses in California,” Slate, August 26, 2013, https://slate.com/business/2013/08/designed-by-apple-in-california-ad-campaign-why-its-so-terrible.html. One of the original corporate raiders: Cara Lombardo, “Carl Icahn Is Nearing Another Landmark Deal. This Time It’s with His Son,” Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/carl-icahn-is-nearing-another-landmark-deal-this-time-its-with-his-son-11571457602; interview with Carl Icahn. Ahrendts had tripled: Jeff Chu, “Can Apple’s Angela Ahrendts Spark a Retail Revolution?,” Fast Company, January 6, 2014, https://www.fastcompany.com/3023591/angela-ahrendts-a-new-season-at-apple.

…

The commercial would be a great spot for other companies; for Apple, it was a B. THE SENATE’S SPOTLIGHT on Apple’s growing cash hoard attracted Wall Street’s sharks. Apple’s share price was languishing as Samsung stole smartphone market share. Investors wanted the company to pay dividends. In August 2013, Carl Icahn trumpeted on Twitter that he had bought a large stake in Apple and spoken by phone with Cook. Icahn made his message clear: Apple needed to return capital to increase the price of its depressed shares. One of the original corporate raiders, Icahn had made a name for himself in the 1980s by amassing stakes in mismanaged companies such as TWA and pushing them to cut costs and sell assets.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

And Murdoch, finally arriving at the party he was in more than one way sorely late to, was as subdued and thrown as everyone else, and struggling to adjust his view of a man who, for more than a generation, had been at best a clown prince among the rich and famous. * * * Murdoch was hardly the only billionaire who had been dismissive of Trump. In the years before the election, Carl Icahn, whose friendship Trump often cited, and who Trump had suggested he’d appoint to high office, openly ridiculed his fellow billionaire (whom he said was not remotely a billionaire). Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was almost his appeal: he was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.

…

But Trump had grown up and built his business in New York, the world’s largest Jewish city. He had made his reputation in the media, that most Jewish of industries, with some keen understanding of media tribal dynamics. His mentor, Roy Cohn, was a demimonde, semiunderworld, tough-guy Jew. He courted other figures he considered “tough-guy Jews” (one of his accolades): Carl Icahn, the billionaire hedge funder; Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire investor who had bought and sold Marvel Comics; Ronald Perelman, the billionaire Revlon chairman; Steven Roth, the New York billionaire real estate tycoon; and Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate. Trump had adopted a sort of 1950s Jewish uncle (tough-guy variety) delivery, with assorted Yiddishisms—Hillary Clinton, he declared, had been “shlonged” in the 2008 primary—helping to give an inarticulate man an unexpected expressiveness.

…

This ritual was, everyone understood, more a pretext to a discussion of the power he held than it was, strictly, about personnel decisions. Still, in Trump’s poison-the-well fashion, the should-I-fire-so-and-so question, and any consideration of it by any of the billionaires, was translated into agreement, as in: Carl Icahn thinks I should fire Comey (or Bannon, or Priebus, or McMaster, or Tillerson). His daughter and son-in-law, their urgency compounded by Charlie Kushner’s concern, encouraged him, arguing that the once possibly charmable Comey was now a dangerous and uncontrollable player whose profit would inevitably be their loss.

The Taking of Getty Oil: Pennzoil, Texaco, and the Takeover Battle That Made History by Steve Coll

business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, financial innovation, interchangeable parts, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, jitney, North Sea oil, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks

Lipton, for example, now expressed doubts about the effects of merger mania on the long-term health of the country’s economy, this despite the personal fortune he had made during its halcyon days. He even drafted legislation and testified before Congress, urging that restrictions be imposed on corporate raiders such as Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, and Irwin “The Liquidator” Jacobs. Lipton’s critics, and there were plenty of them, decried the hypocrisy of his sudden moralizing about takeovers. At a more personal level, merger maestros such as Lipton, Boisi, and even the ambitious Siegel, had by the fall of 1983 settled into a steady, quiet professional routine.

…

They had come to Icahn’s office to cut a deal: Jamail, Pennzoil chairman J. Hugh Liedtke, and a handful of the other lawyers involved in the case. After wallowing in Texaco’s Dickensian bankruptcy proceedings since the previous April, Pennzoil v. Texaco had again come to life, and once more the puckish Jamail was at the center of things. Carl Icahn, an enormously successful corporate raider who had gained control of TWA Inc. in a hostile takeover, had decided there was potential for profit in Texaco’s travails. After the stock market collapse in October 1987, he had purchased about 15 percent of Texaco’s stock at fire sale prices from Australian investor Robert Holmes a Court.

…

I’m just bored.” “Where are you going?” “I’m going to get a cold beer.” “It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning,” Icahn observed. “Now, look, you can’t be my guardian,” Jamail answered, his voice animated with a playful malice. “I’m going to get a cold beer. And you’re invited.” “All right,” Carl Icahn said. “Let’s go.” They found a tavern, threw back a few beers, and began to talk. Jamail sketched out a scenario for Icahn: he suggested that the lawsuit could probably be settled for less than $3.5 billion. He urged Icahn to visit Texaco and press for a deal. “You’re the big, bad bogeyman now, not me,” Jamail told Icahn, whose reputation for launching hostile takeovers had indeed seemed to spook Texaco in recent weeks.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

Milken and Drexel would fund these hostile takeovers by pledging the assets of the target corporation as collateral, in the same way that a home buyer obtains a mortgage by pledging the collateral of the home against the loan. This practice gave rise to an army of corporate raiders, men such as Ron Perelman, Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, and Nelson Peltz, who became rich selling junk bonds through Drexel Burnham to finance predatory raids on such Fortune 100 companies as TWA, Disney, Revlon, and Phillips Petroleum. So fearsome did Milken’s reputation become that sometimes the mere rumor that a company might come under siege was enough to send it scrambling toward a defensive merger.

…

— Trump thought being president was about asserting dominance. Just after he’d locked up the GOP nomination, 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.” Trump was equating politics with business and the presidency with the job of being a big-shot CEO, a “killer.”

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes, Mohamed El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, high-speed rail, impact investing, interest rate derivative, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, NetJets, oil shock, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, two and twenty, zero-sum game

As I was ushered up to the forty-second floor and led into a conference room with sweeping views of all of midtown Manhattan in the far distance, I knew I’d landed somewhere where people were having a real impact on the world in a big way and felt fortunate to be there. I was fascinated hearing about how the team identified credit risk and mitigated losses for thousands of clients and outside parties. Hearing about how the bank would work closely with companies advising on potential mergers and takeover targets seemed exciting—this must be what Carl Icahn does, I thought. Citigroup had “the big balance sheet” that dwarfed many of the more prestigious investment banking teams on the Street, and so we were always allowed into the consortium for deals—even as the deal arranger. I left the building with an offer for a semester internship in hand, convinced I had found my calling with the good guys—good guys with nice shoes.

…

Once the managers realized I was truly interested in things like portfolio construction and alpha generation—a return in excess of a benchmark adjusted for risk and country analysis—I started to get more access and even some complimentary comments on Squawk Box from Julian Robertson, Michael Steinhardt, and Carl Icahn. Beyond that, I continued to speak to investors and get a pulse for what they were seeing, hearing, and concerned about within hedge funds. As I continued to study the leaders of this new age of hedge funds, I realized that the investors who had consistently outperformed the broader market for a significant period of time, these alpha masters, were bound together under the hedge fund umbrella, yet were wildly unique.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Working at Drexel Burnham Lambert, a second-tier brokerage and investment bank, Milken—who would go to prison in 1991 for securities law violations—figured out that if companies had sufficient earnings or potential earnings, he could help what would become a group of buccaneer raiders, including Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, and Boone Pickens, borrow the money to buy them. The interest rates on what came to be called “junk bonds,” which Milken specialized in, would be high because the risk would seem high. However, if the raider took over and made the right expense cuts and sold off the right pieces, and then cashed out, the result would be a home run.

…

When the company yields by purchasing huge amounts of its stock, the hedge funder usually sells his stake at the now increased price and goes away. Even Apple yielded, beginning in 2013, when it borrowed billions of dollars (rather than tap profits it was shielding overseas from U.S. taxes) to finance a massive buyback that was being pushed by, among others, raider Carl Icahn. Whether Icahn’s assault on Apple produced a positive or negative result for the company is beside the general point, which is that these kinds of drive-by shareholders have no accountability for the long-term damage that those who run the corporations they briefly own might do to please them.

…

As The Washington Post put it, the company was “swept away by the wave of corporate takeovers and buyouts that have come to dominate American business in the 1980’s.” The raiders’ victory didn’t last. As of 2016, the larger textile maker that had purchased the bulk of the Stevens operations in 1988 had gone through a 2003 bankruptcy stemming from foreign competition. It was then bought by corporate raider Carl Icahn. Most of its manufacturing is now done overseas, and what remains has been highly automated. The industry as a whole shared the same fate. In 1973, there were 1,024,000 textile workers in the United States. In 2016, there were 112,000, and the average hourly wage for those left in American textile factories was 30 percent lower than it would have been if the low, non-union wages prevailing in 1975 (the year closest to 1973 for which there is wage data) had only kept up with inflation.

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

One of the least welcome effects of the strike was its depressing influence on United’s stock. This was the precise midpoint of the 1980s, when the takeover epidemic was intensifying. A low stock price on even the biggest corporations was like a blue light twirling in the ceiling of a dime store, an advertisement to the likes of Carl Icahn or Boone Pickens or Sir James Goldsmith or Ivan Boesky or Donald Trump or for that matter, Frank Lorenzo. United was an inviting target in another respect. Unlike Pan Am, which had been raiding its pension plans to keep afloat, United had been overfunding its pension accounts—or so Dick Ferris was told by his advisors on Wall Street.

…

Lorenzo, they could see, had an additional and probably greater motive: to lay his hands on TWA’s computer reservation system, the same system that Bob Crandall had helped to create in the early 1970s, before joining American Airlines. In the end, Lorenzo’s reputation would cost him TWA. The company’s unions were so mortified at the idea of having him on the property that they maneuvered the takeover artist Carl Icahn into a position to take control, failing to appreciate that he was no picnic either. There was something vague and off-center about Icahn; whereas Lorenzo was accused of forever backing out of his deals, Icahn would never quite come to closure on one. Lorenzo and Icahn tussled over TWA for weeks, the battle growing increasingly personal.

…

Plaskett remained unaware that Wolf had already made up his mind to the contrary. Crandall was apoplectic that Wolf had stolen the march into Heathrow, but he made a quick recovery. There was a second American company with precious landing rights at Heathrow. It was TWA, and TWA was in nearly as sorry a condition as Pan Am. In the rarefied atmosphere of the race to London, Carl Icahn of TWA could force Crandall to pay top dollar. For six routes to Heathrow Crandall forked over $445 million; Wolf had paid less for more from Pan Am. Icahn, for additional millions, agreed to throw in 40 slots at O’Hare. With this purchase Crandall scored a double, because many of those slots had been on lease from TWA to United.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

The raiders’ m.o. was simple: they looked for struggling companies whose sagging share price made them a bargain, quietly bought up a controlling stake (usually with high-interest loans, known as “junk bonds”), and then began what was euphemistically referred to as “restructuring.” In some cases, the raiders—epitomized by flashy characters such as bond trader Carl Icahn and real estate mogul Victor Posner—would go on a downsizing tear. They shut down underperforming divisions and laid off hundreds and even thousands of employees before selling the restructured firm at a substantial profit. In other cases, the target would simply be liquidated: broken up into separate entities and sold off piecemeal.

…

In a truly efficient market, such short-termism would be recognized and punished. But in the self-centered economy, the market is in on the scam. Thus, shareholders cheer when Microsoft or Apple or Intel spends tens of billions of dollars on share buybacks. Consider the following: in August 2013, Carl Icahn, the corporate-raider-turned-activist-investor, announced (on Twitter, naturally) that he had acquired a $1 billion stake in Apple, and was demanding that the company spend $150 billion to buy back its own shares. Such a move, Icahn insisted, would lift Apple’s share price from $487 to $625 (and, others noted, net the raider a $280 million capital gain48).

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

A high point of the visit was the opportunity I got to try on a Lyft employee’s Halloween costume. He had dressed up as a Lyft car, using a skillfully constructed cardboard contraption. Three years later, Lyft had raised over a billion dollars in venture capital (including $100 million from the legendary investor Carl Icahn) and was in 60 cities around the United States. Although often in the news because of the bruising battles it has waged with Uber for market share, Lyft projects a decidedly kinder and gentler feel than their larger competitor, even as they have graduated from the giant pink mustaches to a more subtle branding strategy.

…

These executives are present in growing numbers at events like OuiShare Fest (something my friend Charly Strum had pointed out to me earlier in the day with a sardonic remark about there being “more high heels than Birkenstocks this year”). Active investors range from New York’s Union Square Ventures and Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz to the hedge funds Black Rock and Tiger Global Management, the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, the business magnate Carl Icahn, General Motors, and the Indian media company Bennett and Coleman. Of particular interest is the Collaborative Fund, founded by Craig Shapiro in 2011, which invests almost exclusively in the sharing economy. The infusion of venture capital and the emergence of platforms with large corporate investors lead many to believe that any ideals associated with a pre-2010 sharing economy cannot be sustained.

One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch

air freight, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Boeing 747, book value, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, fixed income, index fund, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, large denomination, money market fund, prediction markets, random walk, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Teledyne, vertical integration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

For instance, the SEC says a mutual fund such as mine cannot own more than ten percent of the shares in any given company, nor can we invest more than five percent of the fund’s assets in any given stock. The various restrictions are well-intentioned, and they protect against a fund’s putting all its eggs in one basket (more on this later) and also against a fund’s taking over a company à la Carl Icahn (more on that later, too). The secondary result is that the bigger funds are forced to limit themselves to the top 90 to 100 companies, out of the 10,000 or so that are publicly traded. Let’s say you manage a $1-billion pension fund, and to guard against diverse performance, you’re required to choose from a list of 40 approved stocks, via the Inspected by 4 method.

…

Between the domestic buyout groups (Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts; Kelso; Coniston Partners; Odyssey Partners; and Wesray), the European firms and buyout groups (Hanson Trust, Imperial Chemical, Electrolux, Unilever, Nestlé, etc.), and the individual corporate raiders with sizable bankrolls (David Murdock, Donald Trump, Sam Hyman, Paul Bilzerian, the Bass brothers, the Reichmanns, the Hafts, Rupert Murdoch, Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Asher Edelman, et al.) any company, large or small, is up for grabs. The popularity of the leveraged buyout, or LBO, through which entire companies or divisions are “taken private”—purchased by outsiders or by current management with money that’s borrowed from banks or raised via junk bonds. The phenomenal popularity of these junk bonds, as first invented by Drexel Burnham Lambert and now copied everywhere.

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions by Lee Freeman-Shor

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, family office, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Pershing Square Capital Management, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Back in 1979, a seminal research paper – again by Kahneman and Tversky – showed that the pain experienced from losing, say $50, was far worse than the joy we experience when we win $50.26 We find it easy and pleasurable to sell a winning stock, but difficult and painful to sell out of a losing position. There’s also the question of whether a stock might rally after we sell it. The very idea freezes many into inaction. “In life and business, there are two cardinal sins. The first is to act precipitously without thought and the second is to not act at all.” – Carl Icahn “There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.” – John F. Kennedy The Assassins were some of the most disciplined investors I have met, and a significant factor in their ability to make money was that they cut their losses consistently.

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World by Bethany McLean

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, buy and hold, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, family office, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

Investment analysts told Reuters they’d had no idea about the loans. Over the next month, Chesapeake’s stock fell 30 percent. In the spring of 2012, Chesapeake’s board stripped McClendon of his chairmanship, and over the course of the next year, new investors who thought they could clean up Chesapeake, including Carl Icahn, took seats on the Chesapeake board. Icahn, according to someone familiar with events, initially thought he could control McClendon’s most reckless impulses, especially with McClendon no longer serving as both CEO and chairman, but began to realize it was futile. Lou Simpson, who had run Geico’s investment portfolio for Warren Buffett for decades, and who had joined the board in 2011, was also furious at the state of affairs, according to someone close to events.

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

“We’re now starting to see the fragility associated with these things.” * * * ♦ MANY OF THE SKEPTICS ARGUE that the biggest fault line lies not in the big, mainstream index funds that invest in stocks, but in ETFs that track less traded, more idiosyncratic markets—such as bonds. Carl Icahn, the famed corporate raider, once went as far as to call BlackRock “a very dangerous company” due to its being the world’s biggest provider of fixed-income ETFs, while sitting next to Larry Fink on an industry conference stage.9 With the mischievousness and nonchalance that comes with age and what Wall Street calls “fuck-you money,” he predicted how the bond market would eventually “hit a black rock.”

…

,” Journal of Finance, September 22, 2018. 8. Kenechukwu Anadu, Mathias Kruttli, Patrick McCabe, Emilio Osambela, and Chae Hee Shin, “The Shift from Active to Passive Investing: Potential Risks to Financial Stability?,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2018. 9. Matthew Goldstein and Alexandra Stevenson, “Carl Icahn Calls BlackRock a ‘Very Dangerous Company,’ ” New York Times, July 15, 2015. 10. Joe Rennison, “How the Fed Helped Bond ETFs Meet Their Biggest Challenge,” Financial Times, March 26, 2020. 11. Robin Wigglesworth, “All That Drama About Fixed-Income ETFs Was Overplayed,” Financial Times, April 22, 2020. 12.

Why Wall Street Matters by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, Apple II, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, break the buck, buttonwood tree, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, financial repression, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Potemkin village, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tontine, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

Morgan once controlled, set out to create a new supply of these so-called junk bonds by persuading companies that never before had access to the capital markets—where companies go to get capital from public investors as opposed to trying to get it from banks—to issue bonds underwritten by Drexel Burnham. Not only did Drexel underwrite these bonds for corporations that could not get financing from more traditional sources—banks, insurance companies, and the public-equity markets—but it also pioneered the selling of junk bonds to help corporate raiders, like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens, get the capital they needed to take over companies such as TWA and Gulf Oil, which they would otherwise have been unable to do, and to help private-equity firms, such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the Texas Pacific Group, get the money they needed to buy companies with their investors’ money.

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The most prominent of the early practitioners was T. Boone Pickens, a former geologist and Oklahoma oil wildcatter, who would buy some shares of a company, then bid for it, hoping to sell out to a higher bidder and pocket the profit on his initial purchase of shares. Thus, he put companies “in play,” and earned “greenmail” in the process. Carl Icahn used Boone Pickens’s tactics to launch still bigger attacks. For Wall Street, the profitability of takeovers increased as the number and size of deals grew. The Wall Street investment bankers and the new takeover “artists” like Pickens and Icahn, who provoked hostile bidding contests, accrued more capital to make higher bids as they engineered more deals.

…

Some of these discarded subsidiaries and operations no doubt might not have succeeded over time, but others would have. With Milken’s critical help, corporate debt levels exploded in America. Milken also financed other iconoclastic takeover artists who, like Pickens, rose to prominence on the basis of his financial power. Carl Icahn became a more successful greenmailer even than Pickens. In 1982, Icahn made a bid for the department store chain Marshall Field, driving the company into the hands of the British retailer Batus. The Icahn group, which had bought a substantial portion of the shares beforehand, made $100 million in greenmail.

…

The unleashing of unregulated self-interest since the 1980s, he believed, was a sufficient condition for prosperity. 15 George Soros and John Meriwether FABULOUS WEALTH AND CONTROVERSIAL POWER Until the mid-1980s, the takeover movement was the way to make the most money on Wall Street. Men like Henry Kravis, George Roberts, Boone Pickens, and Carl Icahn built enormous fortunes, and by the 2000s all were billionaires. Icahn was frequently listed among the twenty-five richest Americans, eventually with some $8–9 billion in personal wealth, and Kravis and Roberts were reported to have about half that. Starting in the mid-1980s, managing hedge funds made more great fortunes for more people than the takeover movement did, and replaced them at the glamorous pinnacle of the financial community.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The best and the brightest among them looked west to Beverly Hills, where Michael Milken could raise billions of dollars when the need arose, junk bonds becoming the pirate ship on which the corporate raiders sailed. • • • IF THERE WAS A COMPETITION to find a real-life equivalent to Larry the Liquidator, who relished the persona of financial agitator in the 1980s, the award would have gone to Carl Icahn. Raised in a middle-class home in Queens, Icahn went to Princeton and then enrolled at NYU School of Medicine for two years. He dropped out and joined the army, where his main contribution seems to have been playing poker. After these detours, he found himself on Wall Street through his uncle. He thrived in short order in the abstract world of options trading, where his primary activity consisted of arbitrage, finding mathematical discrepancies in pricing that allowed risk-free profits.

…

It seemed that business principles were fairly universal and applicable across the board. This hypothesis would be tested. In the spring of 1985, the nation’s fifth-largest airline, TWA, found itself the target of such evolutionary changes in behavior. Through a securities filing known as a 13D, Carl Icahn had declared that he had accumulated a 20 percent stake in TWA. TWA’s management panicked. To ward off a raider like Icahn, TWA agreed to be acquired by Texas Air. The acquisition by Texas Air would have left Icahn with a profit in the tens of millions on his holdings. But to the surprise and dismay of corporate America, Icahn actually wanted to own the company.

…

boom of the sixties: John Brooks, The Go-Go Years (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1973), 138–39. home in Queens: Bruck, Predators’ Ball, 150–51. “I don’t know”: Ibid., 157. known as greenmail: Ibid. conglomerate didn’t look: Brooks, Go-Go Years, 154–55. 20 percent stake in TWA and notoriously bad relations: Carol J. Loomis, “The Comeuppance of Carl Icahn,” Fortune, August 18, 2013. behind Icahn’s bid: Ibid. they formed KKR: George Anders, Merchants of Debt: KKR and the Mortgaging of American Business (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 45–47. RJR Nabisco for: Ibid., 214. ninety-eight-count indictment: Ibid., 486–87. Chapter 33: Shoes Rolls-Royce Corniche: Mike Tyson, Undisputed Truth (New York: Plume, 2013), 176.

Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The best and the brightest among them looked west to Beverly Hills, where Michael Milken could raise billions of dollars when the need arose, junk bonds becoming the pirate ship on which the corporate raiders sailed. • • • IF THERE WAS A COMPETITION to find a real-life equivalent to Larry the Liquidator, who relished the persona of financial agitator in the 1980s, the award would have gone to Carl Icahn. Raised in a middle-class home in Queens, Icahn went to Princeton and then enrolled at NYU School of Medicine for two years. He dropped out and joined the army, where his main contribution seems to have been playing poker. After these detours, he found himself on Wall Street through his uncle. He thrived in short order in the abstract world of options trading, where his primary activity consisted of arbitrage, finding mathematical discrepancies in pricing that allowed risk-free profits.

…

It seemed that business principles were fairly universal and applicable across the board. This hypothesis would be tested. In the spring of 1985, the nation’s fifth-largest airline, TWA, found itself the target of such evolutionary changes in behavior. Through a securities filing known as a 13D, Carl Icahn had declared that he had accumulated a 20 percent stake in TWA. TWA’s management panicked. To ward off a raider like Icahn, TWA agreed to be acquired by Texas Air. The acquisition by Texas Air would have left Icahn with a profit in the tens of millions on his holdings. But to the surprise and dismay of corporate America, Icahn actually wanted to own the company.

…

boom of the sixties: John Brooks, The Go-Go Years (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1973), 138–39. home in Queens: Bruck, Predators’ Ball, 150–51. “I don’t know”: Ibid., 157. known as greenmail: Ibid. conglomerate didn’t look: Brooks, Go-Go Years, 154–55. 20 percent stake in TWA and notoriously bad relations: Carol J. Loomis, “The Comeuppance of Carl Icahn,” Fortune, August 18, 2013. behind Icahn’s bid: Ibid. they formed KKR: George Anders, Merchants of Debt: KKR and the Mortgaging of American Business (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 45–47. RJR Nabisco for: Ibid., 214. ninety-eight-count indictment: Ibid., 486–87. Chapter 33: Shoes Rolls-Royce Corniche: Mike Tyson, Undisputed Truth (New York: Plume, 2013), 176.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game

More surprisingly, as channels began to rely on fees from cable companies, those same cable companies came to control the Internet. Viacom, in 2005, divided itself in two, one part a mostly cable programming company, retaining the Viacom name, and then the other part, a new independent CBS, a mostly network broadcaster. Time Warner, after an assault by activist investor Carl Icahn in 2006, spun off its cable system, TWC (completed in 2009). Comcast, in 2009, bought NBC Universal, a content company. Each of these moves suggests doubt about a fundamental direction of the business and is, in some fashion, a circling-the-wagons move. Viacom, in part believing the Internet view that advertising will more and more migrate to digital form, pushes off CBS, its still entirely ad-supported broadcaster, in the hopes that, no longer competing with its cable channel brothers at Viacom (MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, etc.)

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Future Shock, Gordon Gekko, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, risk tolerance, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, éminence grise

Doing right by shareholders wasn’t high on every CEO’s agenda, so it wasn’t hard for the raiders to cast themselves as militant reformers intent on liberating businesses from the clutches of venal, high-living CEOs who cared more about their perks than about shareholders. To the corporate world, the raiders were a ragtag band of greedy predators whose aim was to pillage companies and oust management for personal gain. No one embodied the raider role better than Carl Icahn, a lanky, caustically witty New York speculator whose tactics were typical. After buying up shares, he would demand that the company take immediate steps to boost its share price and give him a seat on its board of directors. When his overture was rebuffed, he’d threaten a proxy fight or a takeover and rain invective on the management’s motives and competence in acidly worded letters to the board that he made public.

…

Blackstone’s first buyout developed that way. It was puny compared with KKR’s big deals—a mere $640 million—but it would have an immense impact on the young firm’s image and fortunes. It began when Altman telephoned Donald Hoffman, a top official at USX Corporation, the parent of U.S. Steel. USX was battling for its corporate life with Carl Icahn, the much feared corporate raider. In 1986 Icahn had amassed a nearly 10 percent stake in USX and launched an $8 billion hostile takeover bid. U.S. Steel was three months into a strike that was crippling steel production and had pummeled the stock. Over the next year, Icahn hectored USX to off-load assets and take other steps to boost its share price.

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

The company now planned to “recapitalize” itself by giving a third of its shares to its employees and offering other stockholders (who included the pension funds run by Machold, Goldin, and Unruh) a package of new stock and bonds whose value was in dispute on Wall Street. That recapitalization scheme prompted another corporate raider, Carl Icahn, to launch his own takeover bid for Phillips, mustering the services of the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert along with several Drexel clients to help him finance an $8.1 billion bid. He also had the support of the takeover speculator Ivan F. Boesky, who was unhappy with the package of securities Phillips had offered.

…

It was the debut of a new force in the takeover battles to come—public pension fund chiefs wielding shares worth tens of billions of dollars were claiming a seat at the takeover table. The best way to see the new reality taking shape in the market is to jump forward two weeks, to a congressional hearing on a broad range of takeover issues, initially focusing on the Phillips battle. As Carl Icahn, Boone Pickens, and several Phillips executives sat simmering beside him, Jay Goldin carefully explained the new institutional council’s origins and its agenda. Almost two dozen public pension fund directors, with authority over more than $100 billion, were now part of the new council, he reported.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

Beginning in the 1980s, an unprecedented wave of corporate restructurings streamlined American firms. It is almost impossible to find any case of corporate downsizing before the mid-1980s, and some large companies even adopted express “no layoff” policies. But now the reorganizations expressly sought to eliminate what the corporate raider Carl Icahn once called “incompetent” and “inbred” middle managers, “layers of bureaucrats reporting to bureaucrats.” The cull was dramatic: AT&T, for example, restructured one of its units with the express aim of reducing the ratio of managers to nonmanagers from 1:5 to 1:30. Across restructurings in the 1980s and 1990s, middle managers were downsized at nearly twice the rate of nonmanagerial workers.

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., “Forbes 400: The Definitive Ranking of the Wealthiest Americans,” Forbes, October 3, 2018, www.forbes.com/forbes-400/#7de6813e7e2f. Hereafter cited as Kroll and Dolan, “Forbes 400.” The founders who hold these shares include: Jeff Bezos (1), Bill Gates (2), Warren Buffett (3), Mark Zuckerberg (4), Larry Ellison (5), Larry Page (6), and Sergey Brin (9). Others among the top one hundred—for example, George Soros (60) and Carl Icahn (31)—owe their fortunes to carried interest. reported by one-percenters: Victor Fleischer, “How a Carried Interest Tax Could Raise $180 Billion,” New York Times, June 5, 2015, http://nytimes.com/2015/06/06/business/dealbook/how-a-carried-interest-tax-could-raise-180-billion.html. Fleischer reaches this result by inference from the legal structures typically employed by investment funds.

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express “no layoff” policies: According to “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America,” in 1993 ten had “no layoff” policies; by 1997 only two did, and only one of the two was a public company. See Cappelli, The New Deal at Work, 115. “layers of bureaucrats reporting to bureaucrats”: See Carl Icahn, “Leveraged Buyouts: America Pays the Price; The Case for Takeovers,” New York Times Magazine, January 29, 1989 (quoted in Adam Goldstein, “Revenge of the Managers: Labor Cost-Cutting and the Paradoxical Resurgence of Managerialism in the Shareholder Value Era, 1984 to 2001,” American Sociological Review 77, no. 2 (2012): 273, hereafter cited as Goldstein, “Revenge of the Managers”).

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Any acquired business was theoretically up for sale almost immediately: Hanson was rather like an antique dealer, buying slightly dingy assets, polishing them up, and putting them back in the shop window. Most of the other raiders also had a sense of swagger. T. Boone Pickens was a folksy oilman who found that he could make a fortune by failing to take over oil firms: thanks to the rising share price, he made $500 million in one foray at Gulf alone. Carl Icahn, a former stock-market trader who liked to pontificate about the way that “the corporate welfare state” was smothering the American economy, bought TWA. The most beguiling of all was Sir James Goldsmith (1933–1997). Having made several hundred million dollars asset-stripping Diamond International, a timber firm, he bought 11.5 percent of Goodyear in 1986.

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

Watershed Asset Management managed over $2 billion in assets in the heyday and became an extraordinarily successful fund. Here is where it gets interesting, though. She decided to shut down in 2015 and proceeded to return all external capital. Not because she had lost money—au contraire—or had reached an age at which you would hesitate to give anyone your kid’s monthly allowance anyway (Carl Icahn is eighty-four years old—think about that). No, she believed that the field was too crowded, the alpha generators gone, and future returns not high enough for the fees. She turned out to be prescient and a pioneer there too. We had a working relationship for over two decades until we served together as independent directors on a corporate board.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

It turns out that the story is richer and more complex than I’ve made out so far. The CEO who died, Melvin Gordon, had married into the Rubin family, that had historically controlled Tootsie Roll. He had been CEO for more than fifty years (he died at age ninety-five) and had repeatedly refused the overtures of Carl Icahn, a notorious corporate raider, who had wanted to sell the company to a larger candy company, like Mars or Hershey’s. The Gordon/Rubin family owned a fair chunk of Tootsie Roll, but the key is that they controlled the company with a separate class of shares that had extra voting rights, effectively meaning they would always call the shots.

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

Shareholder buybacks, then, ought to allow shareholders to receive more money and pay less tax on that money because it is taxed only once at the lower capital gains rate, and shareholders who don’t want to sell shares back aren’t required to. This is the sort of gambit reformed corporate raider Carl Icahn loved to push on the companies in which he invested. IBM, unlike some of the Icahn target companies like Apple and eBay, isn’t at all resistant to buying back its own shares. In the last decade, in fact, IBM has spent $101 billion buying back shares, thereby reducing the number outstanding by about a third.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Ascot racecourse, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, false flag, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Jon Ronson, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Skype

I wondered if the screenwriters had taken the line from Al Dunlap, but later I discovered that he hadn’t been the only bigwig to say it. “You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog,” Harry Truman had apparently said during his presidency, according to the 1975 biographical play Give ’em Hell, Harry! “You learn in this business, if you want a friend, get a dog,” said the corporate raider and pharmaceutical chief Carl Icahn at some point during the mid-1980s. “If you want to be liked, get a dog,” said the host of CBS’s Inside Edition, Deborah Norville, in the early 1990s. “The people you work with are not your friends.” We gathered in the kitchen—Al, Judy, and Sean the bodyguard. I cleared my throat. “You know how I said in my e-mail that your amygdala might not shoot the requisite signals of fear to your central nervous system and that’s perhaps why you’ve been so successful and so interested in the predatory spirit?”

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

Before Mount Sinai, he was the chief science officer at Pacific Biosciences, a gene sequencing company in Silicon Valley. Schadt did not move east for an ordinary job. He was given the mandate to create an institute with a $100 million budget for the first five years, the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. Most of the funding comes from the man whose name is on the institute, Carl Icahn, the Wall Street financier and philanthropist. Icahn has taken a particular interest in genetics, having also paid for a genomics laboratory that bears his name at Princeton, his alma mater. Hammerbacher came away impressed from that meeting with Schadt. He knew enough about health care to know that it can be a bureaucratic, slow-moving industry.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

LBOs now relied on paying down debt from selling assets, cost cutting, reducing business investment, and other corporate auto-cannibalism: “We’re always cutting, cutting, cutting.... There’s the risk that you may cut out something that you really need.”9 In the 1980s, corporate raiders—T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, Robert M. Bass, Kirk Kerkorian, Sir James Goldsmith, Saul Steinberg—dominated LBOs. Boone Pickens made a series of raids on major oil companies, realizing that they were literally liquidating themselves by depleting their reserves without investing in exploration and development to replenish them.

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When Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers issued the first junk bonds in 1977, Milken and Drexel seized the opportunity, starting with a $30 million issue for Texas International. Over time, they found new issuers of junk bonds—Milken’s mobsters. Drexel forged relationships with the new robber barons—buyout firms, entrepreneurial outsiders like Turner Broadcasting, MCI, and McCaw Cellular, and aggressive corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Boone Pickens. Drexel’s Christian Anderson summarized the situation: “There are only two kinds of companies—the comers and the goers. We finance the comers.”28 Observers later noted: “Pumped into buyouts, Milken’s junk bonds became a high-octane fuel that transformed the LBO industry from a Volkswagen Beetle into a monstrous drag race belching smoke and fire.”29 Harvard-trained Fred Joseph, Drexel president and CEO, wanted to build the firm to rival Goldman Sachs, then, as now, the benchmark for excellence.

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

Thanks largely to financing from traditional banks and investment banks, U.S. corporations had purchased all manner of companies unrelated to their core mission. Others had become top heavy in terms of unaccountable executives enjoying excessive executive perks and had consequently grown somewhat flabby by the 1970s. Milken’s innovation involved backing upstarts largely shunned by the blue-chip banks (think Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, Reginald Lewis—the first black CEO of Fortune 500 company Beatrice Foods) eager to restructure corporations that were operating at a fraction of their potential. This included “breaking up” large-for-large’s-sake corporations by selling pieces to investors with a stated objective of running the business lines purchased more effectively.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Total employment rose to almost 150,000, and its stock price increased fourfold between 2000 and 2015. But the forces of industry change are relentless. Revenues dipped from $21 billion in 2012 to $18 billion in 2015, and Xerox’s stock fell by almost 50 percent from January 2015 to January 2016. Later that year, influenced undoubtedly by pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, Xerox announced plans to split into two companies: a business process-outsourcing company called Conduent, with 96,000 employees and $7 billion in revenue; and a copier and printer business, with 39,000 employees and $7 billion in revenue. The two offshoot businesses are individually more vibrant than either would have been a decade ago but no doubt will again confront the challenge of disruptive change in their respective markets.

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators

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.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Start-ups and unicorns, many of whom have never earned a dime in profit, craft stories of warp-speed growth rooted in network effects and low marginal costs of distribution. They promise to remake markets and reengineer society through mobile tech and killer apps and venture capitalists are enthralled. They could be getting a piece of the next Facebook, the next Slack (a popular workflow platform), the next Uber. Individual investors such as Carl Icahn, venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, and funds such as Softbank’s Vision Fund and the Collaborative Fund have dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into tech start-ups over the past decade. The Silicon Valley spirit is even bigger than the promise of its platforms to create value and success for individuals and firms, however.

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

Even after the merger wave of the sixties, top advisers such as Morgan Stanley had only about four merger and acquisition specialist investment bankers.25 The senior partner of Goldman Sachs ‘would say that he was the original merger department, in the sense that the bottom left-hand drawer held the buyers and the bottom right-hand drawer the sellers’.26 There were only three hundred bulge bracket investment bankers in America in total in 1965 and only 1,500 in 1978.27 It was the leverage-based corporate raiders of the eighties such as Carl Icahn and Ronald Perelman and the mega-mergers of the nineties such as Travelers-Citicorp and Vodafone-Mannesmann that signified the arrival of mergers and acquisitions as a mainstream activity for the investment banks. In 1980 there were only 106 M&A deals announced in America and 97 in the rest of the world; in 1998, the peak year, there were nearly 12,000 in America and over 30,000 elsewhere.

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional

We both quit Goldman Sachs a week and a half ago and are coming off our first week working full-time. The decision to leave GS, I think, will prove to be one of the best of my life. Who knows where it will go, but it’s clear to me now that I should be in media, not finance. I don’t want to be a Carl Icahn or Bill Gross or Steve Schwarzman. I want to be an L. A. Reid, a Richard Branson, a Michael Jackson—where the shit I create will impact people forever. Real life is hard. I’m pretty sure I just made it harder. But I’m doing what I wanna do, not what “prestige” says I ought to be doing. GS is firmly a thing of my past, a memory that I never have to relive.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

The wealth generated by realizing that vision has turned Rubenstein into one of the more prominent philanthropists during the past decade. He’s a signee of the Giving Pledge, the movement founded in 2010 to get wealthy people to commit to giving away at least half their money. Created by billionaires led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, the Pledge has drawn the support of families and individuals including investors Carl Icahn, Julian Robertson, and Ronald Perelman. Peter G. Peterson, the co-founder of Blackstone, is the only other founder of a big private-equity firm to sign the pledge. Rubenstein wrote a 1,400-word letter explaining his decision. In describing his path to philanthropy, Rubenstein wrote about realizing at age 54 that the average white male lived to be 81, meaning he was, statistically speaking, two-thirds through his life.

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to Las Vegas by Mary Herczog, Jordan S. Simon

Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Carl Icahn, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Saturday Night Live, young professional

Casino Legends Hall of Fame contains the world’s largest collection of gambling-related objects, from Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio’s marriage license and a pair of Cassius Clay’s boxing gloves to mobster photos, videos of casino demolitions, matchbooks, dice, chips (over 13,000), and swizzle sticks. Hall of Fame inductees, each with an individual display, are enshrined in different sections: “Headliners” (the Rat Pack, Liberace, Wayne Newton, Shecky Greene, Engelbert Humperdinck), “Gamblers” (Amarillo Slim, Jay Sarno), and “Visionaries” (Benny Binion, Howard Hughes, Carl Icahn, Steve Wynn). UNLV’s Marjorie Barrack Museum explores the culture of the area’s natives and early settlers with breathtaking collections of Southern Paiute baskets, Navajo textiles, Hopi kachinas, Guatemalan huipils (blouses), and ceremonial masks from the Americas. Out at the Hoover Dam, visitor center exhibits detail the dam’s arduous 5-year construction (amazingly, completed ahead of schedule), along with Ripleylike factoids (didja know that Lake Mead could cover the state of Pennsylvania in a foot of water, or that all the concrete in the dam could pave an entire cross-continental highway?).

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Eighteen months after buying Skype, Andreessen and his partners sold the company to Microsoft for $8.5 billion—three times what they paid. To some, Andreessen’s role as both an eBay director and an investor acquiring an asset from eBay seemed like a problem. “Andreessen, he’s screwed more people than Casanova, for Christ’s sake, and yet he goes and takes this attitude that he’s on the high moral ground,” activist investor Carl Icahn said on CNBC. Icahn complained that eBay had sold Skype for less than what it was worth and that eBay’s investors had been shortchanged. Andreessen said Icahn was “making up a fake conspiracy theory out of thin air.” The tech press sided with Andreessen. The story went nowhere. Andreessen is relentlessly optimistic and pounds away on the same message, which is that no matter how high the valuations of start-ups might go, this all makes sense.

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

They went looking for an investor to pair with, someone with deeper pockets than the doctors and dentists who had so far been funding their splurge. Treehouse had bought a few houses in Atlanta and California but needed many more properties in each market to make managing them cost-effective. Treehouse enlisted a young investment banker named Rich Ford to find a match on Wall Street. Ford approached Carl Icahn, the corporate raider and activist investor, and pitched the Carlyle Group, a $200 billion Washington, D.C., firm that had gained prominence privatizing government businesses and carving out unloved divisions from big corporations. Blackstone took a meeting. Jonathan Gray, the New York firm’s real estate chief, was mulling a move into single-family real estate, and his team was vetting rental operators for potential partnerships.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

By the end of his tenure, the numbers of deals soared to upward of 14,000 a year, with a combined value of well over $1 trillion. Of the companies that were in the Fortune 500 in 1980, a full 143 of them—28 percent—had been acquired by the end of the decade. At the same time, corporate raiders were on the march. Men like Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, and Nelson Peltz were raising money, mounting aggressive takeover campaigns against unsuspecting companies, and—once they had control—squeezing them for profits by cutting staff and slashing costs. When companies wouldn’t listen to their profit-hungry investors, the raiders would mount campaigns to replace directors, installing themselves or their cronies on the board, and then forcing the company’s hand.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

He was enamoured by the giant Tenke Fungurume mine and decided to spend as much as possible to develop the deposit. A private runway was built and a highway to export copper and cobalt.7 But in 2015, commodity prices had plunged due to a weakening of demand in China and Adkerson was facing pressure from the billionaire New York-based activist investor Carl Icahn, who had become the largest shareholder of Freeport a year earlier. Icahn wanted the miner, which traced its roots to 1912, to reduce its debt levels, which had jumped to $20 billion after a series of ill-timed oil and gas acquisitions. Freeport’s shares were in free fall. During the LME week in late 2015 I watched as Adkerson took the stage, grabbed a microphone and sang ‘If you’re going through hell, Keep on going,’ a song by Rodney Adkins, at the Intercontinental Hotel in Park Lane.

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

Motorola “didn’t have the DNA or the people” to understand the software, former CEO Ed Zander told Chicago Magazine.10 By the time Balsillie came calling in the spring of 2008, Motorola was under seige. Motorola’s core mobile device sales were rapidly shrinking, tumbling nearly 40 percent in 2008 from the year before to $12.1 billion. Operating losses in the group, nearly doubled to $2.2 billion in the year, a humbling decline that prompted cantankerous shareholder activist Carl Icahn to wage a noisy battle to dismantle the company. Motorola’s misfortunes, Icahn complained in a public letter to shareholders, were the legacy of “blunders” by management. Under pressure, CEO Zander left the company, and its new chief, Greg Brown, was directed by Motorola’s board to explore a sale of its mobility business.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, disinformation, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, Irwin Jacobs, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, nuclear winter, Ponzi scheme, risk free rate, The Predators' Ball, yield curve

To raid corporations, however, Milken needed a few hit men. The new and exciting job of invading corporate boardrooms appealed mainly to men of modest experience in business and a great deal of interest in becoming rich. Milken funded the dreams of every corporate raider of note: Ronald Perelman, Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Mar-vin Davis, Irwin Jacobs, Sir James Goldsmith, Nelson Peltz, Samuel Heyman, Saul Steinberg, and Asher Edelman. "If you don't inherit it, you have to borrow it," says one. Most sold junk bonds through Drexel to raise money to storm such hitherto unassailable fortresses as Revlon, Phillips Petroleum, Unocal, TWA, Disney, AFC, Crown Zellerbach, National Can, and Union Carbide.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

On top of that, the small number of companies that master the AI flywheel will dominate globally, and their founders and shareholders will continue to rake in more than a fair share of global wealth. In the 1960s and 1970s, corporations tended toward a more balanced approach by taking into consideration the needs not only of their shareholders but also their employees and communities. The 1980s saw the advent of corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, and T. Boone Pickens, who put pressure on boards and management to run their corporations solely for shareholders. Since then, running a business to maximize returns for shareholders has become the modus operandi. Commonly, CEOs today will do whatever it takes—cutting R&D, firing employees, slicing benefits—to make the latest quarterly earnings, because if they don’t deliver, activist investors will find someone who will.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

He was among the best-known hedge fund managers in America—a Master among Masters of the Universe—making his career on high-profile investments in name brands such as Starbucks and Wendy’s. When Ackman took a position in a stock, it was headline news. He was even better known for his bearish bets, such as a $1 billion short against Herbalife Nutrition, a health supplement company Ackman said was a pyramid scheme, a wager that pitted him against Carl Icahn—and that Ackman famously lost. As Ackman spoke, the market—already sharply lower for the day—tanked. It fell so quickly, trading was halted. When the market reopened, the Dow industrials were down more than two thousand points. The Guardian called Ackman’s performance “near-hysterical” and “doom-laden.”

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

That excess capacity played a large part in what Jensen called the “capital market restructuring revolution of the 1980s.”2 Companies sitting on large piles of cash—and there were many, as before the 1980s, executives were loath to return money to shareholders—suddenly became the target of hostile acquirers. The age of investor capitalism had begun, and its heroes were not CEOs but corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens. A wave of deregulation then created the active market for corporate control that critics of managerialism were calling for, with the new logic of shareholder primacy absolving managers of responsibility to any “stakeholder”—employees, communities, society itself—except shareholders.

…

Sahlman, in October 2014, missing the point entirely. Ackman invites the calumny. Indeed, he seems to relish it. One can hardly look upon someone who compares a publicly traded company (Herbalife) to Enron, the mafia, and the Nazis—all in one sitting—as some sort of passive player in the whole stage drama that is investing. (Carl Icahn, equally loose-lipped but far more entertaining than Ackman, called the younger man “a liar” and a “crybaby” on television.32) “Mr. Ackman is no charlatan,” writes Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. “He genuinely believes what he says. But he also seems to be able to compartmentalize his views and rationalize his investment philosophy in contradictory ways.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

Turning to President Trump’s social connections, an April 2017 article in the New York Times noted a “group of advisers—from family, real estate, media, finance and politics, and all outside the White House gates—many of whom he consults at least once a week” (Haberman and Thrush 2017). They include nine millionaires or billionaires (Thomas Barrack, Carl Icahn, Robert Kraft, Richard LeFrak, Rupert Murdoch, David Perlmutter, Steven Roth, Phil Ruffin, and Steve Schwarzman); the conservative television cable news host Sean Hannity; the conservative political strategists Corey Lewandowski and Roger Stone; Republican politicians Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, and Paul Ryan; a financial lawyer, Sheri Dillon; President Trump’s sons; and his wife.

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

And those same lax regulations allowed the S&Ls to pay high enough rates of interest in deposits that they could have money to spare. So when Milken called with a new opportunity, the hint was taken seriously. By 1985 he could be so certain of closing a deal of eye-popping size that Drexel only needed to issue a letter saying that it was “highly confident” that it could do the financing. As demonstrated in Carl Icahn’s run on Phillips Petroleum, Milken was able to raise $1.5 billion in forty-eight hours.14 With such extraordinary powers, Milken and his men could take a targeted management by surprise. The raider could make his offer so quickly that the target had only hours for defense. It is worth remarking, more than parenthetically, that Milken also had additional ways, beyond junk-bond financing, to reward those who helped him with his deals.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Will the new robot- and AI-dominated future necessarily imply a large number of people on low pay and therefore a substantial increase in inequality? 6 Winners and losers “In the coming century or so, humanity will divide into two classes of people – the gods and the useless.” Yuval Harari1 “Some people get rich studying artificial intelligence. Me, I make money studying natural stupidity.” Carl Icahn, billionaire2 So far, we have discussed the impact of robots and AI largely as though the effects fall equally on all people and parts of the world alike. That is clearly not true, and it is time to set the record straight. I will now discuss the effects on the distribution of income across different individuals, groups, regions, and countries, starting with individuals.

file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise

"There was increased pressure on management to look after the interests of shareholders, because a raider could come along if the stock was too low," says Goldschmid, who would later become the SEC's general counsel. "On the other hand, there was a lot of funny money going around, and a lot of questionable people and motives involved." The raiders— people such as Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, and Saul Steinberg— caused much bitterness, and not just among unhappy managers turned out of their corner offices. Dozens of acquired companies were broken up and sold in pieces, thousands of people were laid off, suppliers and customers were disrupted, and local communities were torn apart.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

Bannon outlined a series of ideas, including making Conway a more frequent presence on television to defend Trump. “That sounds like a terrific idea,” Mercer said. Later the same day, the Mercers boarded a helicopter to the East Hampton beachfront estate of Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets, where GOP backers, including Wall Street investors Carl Icahn and Steve Mnuchin, were gathering to meet Trump. Clutching the Times story, Rebekah made a beeline for the candidate. “It’s bad,” Trump acknowledged. “No, it’s not bad—it’s over,” she told Trump. “Unless you make a change.” She told Trump she had a way for him to turn the election around.

The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All by Mary Childs

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, break the buck, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, index card, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, skunkworks, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, yield curve

A totally unproductive use of money, especially given that many of those activists ran hedge funds that were open only to sophisticated investors, so they were bullying companies to funnel profits to the already rich. Something about that didn’t sit right. One day in late October, as the notoriously pugnacious activist Carl Icahn was loudly pushing Apple to buy back stock, which would inflate the price of shares he held, Gross snapped. “Icahn should leave #Apple alone & spend more time like Bill Gates,” Gross tweeted on October 24. “If #Icahn’s so smart, use it to help people not yourself.” Icahn took the bait. “To Bill Gross @PIMCO,” he tweeted on October 28, “If you really want to do good, why not join givingpledge.org like Gates, I and many others have?”

Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham, David Dodd

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, full employment, Greenspan put, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, prudent man rule, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, secular stagnation, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, zero-coupon bond

Ultimately, Texaco is most significant as an example of the use of the Bankruptcy Code as an escape hatch, to evade legal or contractual liabilities.4 Distressed investing generally involves buying debt instruments of a troubled company, because in most bankruptcies the equity is wiped out. That is not always the case, however, and sometimes an astute investor can find riches in the equity of a distressed company, as demonstrated by Carl Icahn in the case of Texaco. Here’s what led the oil giant to bankruptcy. In 1984, Texaco acquired Getty Oil Company, but it was sued by Pennzoil, which contended that Texaco had interfered with its prior contract to buy part of Getty. The following year, a jury determined Texaco was wrong and awarded Pennzoil $10.3 billion.

…

(p. 230) By illuminating bankruptcy, they made it not so scary. This change in perceptions is not to the discredit of the authors. Indeed, they probably were indispensable to the shift, in light of their role in educating the investing public. Call it the Graham and Dodd Heisenberg effect. In light of Graham and Dodd, the game shifted, all the way to Carl Icahn. The effect may be similarly present in the authors’ relatively concise discussion of distressed investing. Their brevity is readily understandable not only because the field has grown since Graham and Dodd published but because the themes sounded throughout their work are inherently applicable to this mode, such that dedicating a chapter to distressed investing as such would have been nearly superfluous.

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World by Russell Gold

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, activist lawyer, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, California energy crisis, Carl Icahn, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), man camp, margin call, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, risk tolerance, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

The new Chesapeake, he went on, would be “simpler . . . we have what we own, and we are happy with what we own.” At the end of his short remarks, he mentioned the public drubbing his handpicked board members had just received, saying, “We will be studying the results of the vote today and see what else needs to be done.” After he spoke, Vincent Intrieri took the microphone. He worked for Carl Icahn, a well-known activist investor with a reputation for acquiring shares in a company and forcing change. Icahn had been buying Chesapeake shares for several weeks. Intrieri was in his midfifties. He wore an expensive suit and eyeglasses, the uniform of a powerful capitalist. “We believe Aubrey that you are a great oil and gas man,” he said, “but even great leaders need oversight.”

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, Donald Trump, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, fear of failure, financial deregulation, hiring and firing, income inequality, junk bonds, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, medical residency, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, p-value, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Predators' Ball

Newman Changes the Law,” K&L Gates LLP, May 3, 2015. 1. MONEY, MONEY, MONEY Established in 1880, Gruntal had survived: Richard Behar, “The Shabby Side of the Street,” Fortune, March 3, 2003. Aizer had implemented a strategy called “option arbitrage”: The options department at Gruntal had been started in 1964 by Carl Icahn. Icahn and Aizer, and Cohen for that matter, had much in common. Even though Icahn was several years older than Aizer, they were all kids who’d spent their youths admiring the skyline of Manhattan from the outer boroughs and plotting to triumph over their middle-class upbringings. At the time, if someone wanted to trade a stock option, they had to call up a broker at Gruntal or a handful of other firms, explain what kind of bet they wanted to make and over what time horizon, and basically accept whatever price they were given.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Corporate values shifted sharply in the 1980s, the “greed is good” era in which vast pay inequities and frequent downsizing became normalized. Conspicuous consumption by corporate chieftains and Wall Street big shots—frowned on in the early postwar decades—returned on a grand and gaudy scale. The new business stars of the moment were brash figures unembarrassed by their mean streaks, such as Donald Trump and Carl Icahn. Milton Friedman’s argument—that profit was the overriding goal of corporate leaders—was taken to its logical extreme in a wave of leveraged buyouts in which entire companies were dismantled and communities devastated for the sake of short-term shareholder gains. The notion that business had a wider set of responsibilities was increasingly seen as quaint, if not grounds for a hostile takeover by raiders purporting to act on behalf of shareholders.

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

He’d recently roped Asness into a private high-stakes poker game played with several other traders and hedge fund hotshots in ritzy Manhattan hotel rooms. The game had a $10,000 buy-in, couch cushion change to topflight traders such as Asness and Muller. The quants ran the private poker game, but more traditional investment titans joined in. Carl Icahn, the billionaire financier who’d gotten his start on Wall Street with $4,000 in poker winnings, was a regular. So was Marc Lasry, manager of Avenue Capital Group, the $12 billion hedge fund that would hire former first daughter Chelsea Clinton later that year. Lasry was known for being a cool investor whose icy demeanor belied his let-it-roll mentality.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Within a few years, he had become the leading public advocate and justifier of a number of new techniques in the financial world that suddenly became pervasive: a large increase in mergers and acquisitions, including hostile ones; the development of the junk-bond market, whose high-risk, high-return instruments often financed these activities; enormous raises in the compensation of corporate chief executives, often in the form of stock options; the onset of leveraged buyouts and private equity as ways for financiers to take direct, usually temporary control of formerly publicly held companies. For a new coterie of raiders and financiers of a type Adolf Berle could hardly have imagined—Carl Icahn and Michael Milken, T. Boone Pickens and Irwin Jacobs—Jensen was the provider of the accompanying public philosophy, the scholar who could explain why their techniques were good for America. Between 1981 and 1983 alone, there were more than two thousand corporate takeovers a year valued at more than $1 million, far more than the country had ever seen, enabled in part by Ronald Reagan’s new administration in Washington signaling that it was going to interpret the antitrust laws more loosely.

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

For example, here are just a few successful acquirers: Brookfield Asset Management; Penn National Gaming; Cisco; Danaher; and Berkshire Hathaway. The CEOs of these businesses are willing to walk away from a deal if they believe they are about to pay too much. For example, at Penn National Gaming, CEO Peter Carlino did not get into a bidding war with investor Carl Icahn to buy the unfinished Fountainbleau Resort in Las Vegas because he felt he would be paying too much if he offered a higher price. As Carlino said (during a quarterly conference call), “We hit our limit of where we wanted to go and then walked away. Buying properties at full price at high multiples is like treading water.

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry by Steven Rattner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, business cycle, Carl Icahn, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Ford Model T, friendly fire, hiring and firing, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, too big to fail

Free of crippling costs and debts, this new business would go forth as a streamlined, revitalized competitor on the world automotive scene. We meant it to be not only viable but also highly profitable. The meeting ended at 6 P.M., having stretched nine hours. Even though it was Friday night, Harry didn't stop; he had booked a session with Carl Icahn, the legendary corporate raider and multibillionaire, who had lately expressed interest in acquiring a stake in Delphi. Icahn's offices were a couple of elevator rides away, on the forty-seventh floor. Matt dutifully accompanied Harry on the short journey, but was soon called back to Connecticut over a family matter.

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Litterman, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business process, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, eat what you kill, Emanuel Derman, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, housing crisis, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, performance metric, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, value at risk

For example, I worked on a team that advised AT&T on combining its broadband business with Comcast in a transaction that valued AT&T broadband at $72 billion. I also helped sell a private company to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. As the head of Goldman’s unsolicited take-over and hostile raid defense practice, I worked on a team advising a client involved in a proxy fight with activist investor Carl Icahn. When I joined Goldman, partnership election at the firm was considered one of the most prestigious achievements on Wall Street, in part because the process was highly selective and a Goldman partnership was among the most lucrative. The M&A department had a remarkably good track record of its bankers being elected—probably one of the highest percentages of success in the firm at the time.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

There was pundit Scottie Nell Hughes, TV and radio host Laura Ingraham, the muscle-bound SNL alum Joe Piscopo, former VP candidate Sarah Palin, and even the MyPillow guy, Michael Lindell. The video-blogging duo Diamond and Silk chatted with the infamous “apprentice” Omarosa Manigault, and a bevy of billionaires (David Koch, Carl Icahn, Wilbur Ross, Harold Hamm, and Andy Beal) stood around in a huddle. Iowa congressman Steve King and Jerry Falwell Jr. kibitzed. And Trump advisers Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Rudy Giuliani, and Roger Stone, and Senator Jeff Sessions somberly drank their cocktails. The earliest projections came in at around 7:00 p.m.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The companies secretly dispatched teams to rendezvous in Scottsdale, Arizona. After several days, they concluded that the fit would be excellent. But this would be no merger of equals. Texaco had gone through difficult times. It had lost a $3 billion lawsuit to an independent oil company, Pennzoil, and then, to fend off a hostile takeover from the financier Carl Icahn, it had taken on billions more in debt. As a result, it had to sell its Canadian subsidiary and slash its exploration budget, which would have painful consequences. “It’s a pretty simple rule,” said William Wicker, then CFO of Texaco. “If you cut your exploration budget in Year Zero, you’re not growing in Year Seven and Eight.”

…

The second was the danger of being absorbed in a hostile takeover. Phillips faced the same risks. And these were not theoretical risks. After all, the reason Conoco had fallen into DuPont’s arms in 1981 was to ward off hostile bids. And later in the 1980s, Phillips had been the target of hostile tenders by both T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn. And, thus, Dunham and Phillips’s CEO, James Mulva, had begun discussing a possible combination in 2000. But the talks had foundered in October 2000. Instead, the two companies went head to head as finalists in bidding for the Alaskan assets that BP and ARCO had to shed in order to consummate their merger.

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers by Lawrence G. Mcdonald, Patrick Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, diversification, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, naked short selling, negative equity, new economy, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, value at risk

Unlike me, who had nothing and was officially associated with one of the least attractive bucket shop gangs on the East Coast. Whether or not that Series 7 was a top priority or just a distant mountain to be climbed made no difference. One by one my new Wharton buddies came and asked to see the study book, especially my pal and roommate Rick Schnall, a nephew of Carl Icahn, the most famous corporate raider on Wall Street, the Muhammad Ali of his trade. It was a big help being among guys like that, because when everyone is involved in the same subject, with similar insights and perceptions, the sheer velocity of the available information is ratcheted up a few notches.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Galbraith’s analysis proved poorly timed. Subsequent decades saw the rise of globalization and the removal of import restrictions, which left much of American manufacturing—from autos to textiles to toys to furniture to steel to chemicals—struggling to fend off foreign competition. Meanwhile, the rise of corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens, and leveraged buyout conglomerates such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Texas Pacific, created an active market in the ownership of blue-chip companies. The cosseted top executives of Fortune 500 companies found their positions and perquisites of office under threat. The demise of the megacorporation shouldn’t be overstated, though.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

When Reagan’s SEC chairman began worrying loudly in 1984 about the dangers of takeovers, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, made the administration’s position clear by stating that takeovers were “beneficial” as “they provide a means—sometimes the only feasible means—of policing management in widely held corporations.”35 A few months later, the annual Economic Report of the President included a whole chapter titled “The Market for Corporate Control”—written by a product of Chicago’s Economics Department—that was simply an updated version of Manne’s seminal 1965 article.36 The 1980s takeover boom did end eventually, shut down by state legislatures immune to Chicagoan reasoning, a U.S. attorney in Manhattan (Rudy Giuliani) intent on bringing down some big Wall Street names, and the crash of the junk bond market. But the power of Manne’s arguments helped delay this fate for nearly a decade, during which buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., lone rangers Nelson Peltz and Carl Icahn, and others like them transformed the economic landscape. They accomplished this transformation with what to many seemed like great brutality and waste. By the late 1980s, many worried commentators were arguing that while Japan and Germany built up their industrial might, U.S. corporations were being forced by the takeover wave to shutter factories and load up on debt.

Jennifer Morgue by Stross, Charles

Boeing 747, call centre, Carl Icahn, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, disintermediation, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, Etonian, haute couture, interchangeable parts, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, operational security, PalmPilot, planetary scale, RFID, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, stem cell, telepresence, traveling salesman, Turing machine

But you can imagine the threat we posed to the inefficient state monopolies like the British Aircraft Corporation, the coal mining industry, and Imperial Chemical Industries." Blofeld paused to sip his tea thoughtfully. "We were ahead of our time in many ways. We pioneered business methods that later became mainstream — Sir James Goldsmith, Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn, they all watched us and learned — but by then, the commies were out of power in the West thanks to our friends in the establishment, so they had an easier time of it. No need to hire lots of expensive security and build concrete bunkers on desert islands! And yes, that made us look bad, don't think I'm unaware of it — but you know, you want bunkers and isolated jungle rocket-launch bases?

Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

By monitoring to protect its loan, the bank generally protects shareholders’ interests also.8 Shareholders Shareholders also keep an eagle eye on the company’s management and board of directors. If they believe that the corporation is underperforming and that the board is not holding managers to task, they can attempt to elect representatives to the board to make their voices heard. For example, in 2011 billionaire shareholder activist Carl Icahn believed that the management of Oshkosh was not acting in the shareholders’ interest when it did not pursue a merger with fellow vehicle manufacturer Navistar. He therefore purchased nearly 10% of the stock of each company, and nominated six associates for election to the Oshkosh board. Smaller stockholders cannot justify the time or money for a proxy battle.

…

When Disney shareholders voted 43% of the shares against the reelection of Michael Eisner, the company’s autocratic chairman, he heard the message and resigned the next day. The threat of a proxy fight may also encourage management to change company policy. For example, in 2008 shareholder activist Carl Icahn indicated his intention to put himself forward for nomination to the board of Motorola. However, Icahn controlled less than 7% of the votes and failed to prevent the reelection of the existing board. Nevertheless the pressure from Icahn had an effect: Motorola agreed to nominate two new board members and, at Icahn’s urging, spun off its handset division as Motorola Mobility.21 Takeovers The alternative to a proxy fight is for the would-be acquirer to make a tender offer directly to the shareholders.

…

Spin-offs A spin-off (or split-up) is a new, independent company created by detaching part of a parent company’s assets and operations. Shares in the new company are distributed to the parent company’s stockholders.12 We came across one recent example in the last chapter, where we saw how Motorola was pressured by Carl Icahn into spinning off Motorola Mobility. Motorola’s shareholders received shares in the new company and could trade their Motorola Mobility shares as well as those of the slimmed-down Motorola Solutions. Motorola was not alone in wanting to split up. Other spinner-offers in 2011–2012 include Abbott Laboratories, Marathon Oil, McGraw-Hill, Kraft, Fortune Brands, ITT, Hewlett-Packard, and Sara Lee.13 Spin-offs widen investor choice by allowing them to invest in just one part of the business.

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

Not only did Drexel underwrite these bonds for corporations that could not get financing from more traditional sources--banks, insurance companies, and the public-equity markets--but also Milken pioneered the use of these securities to finance the huge financial ambitions of corporate raiders, like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens, and of LBO firms, such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Before long, the unknown firm of Drexel Lambert was both advising and financing these raiders and LBO firms in their acquisition sprees. Drexel was reaping huge fees as a result. Lazard's lackluster response to Milken was to have Felix protest loudly (and correctly) about his villainy and await his demise.

…

Lucy Jane, Wendy's young daughter, who was born in 1999 with the help of fertility treatments and raised by Wendy alone, now lives with Bruce and his family at 927 Fifth Avenue. THE BEGRUDGING ACCOLADES for Bruce keep coming despite the valid criticism he received in some circles for agreeing to represent, in late November 2005, the billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn and a group of dissident Time Warner shareholders--who together owned some 3.3 percent of the company--in their very public battle to try to boost Time Warner's long-beleaguered stock price by either pushing out the CEO, Dick Parsons, or breaking up the company, or both. Lazard was hired to analyze various strategic alternatives, find a slate of candidates to run as replacement board members at Time Warner, and make recommendations to Icahn and his group.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Prominent American economists such as Robert Gordon of Northwestern and Tyler Cowen of George Mason argue that the U.S. economy is plagued by falling productivity gains, poor infrastructure, a technological innovation plateau, declining education standards, and rising inequality; its transportation system remains too slow and inefficient to meet its export targets. And yet, deeper capital investment is the largest source of productivity growth in the U.S. economy. After decades of neglect, crucial infrastructures are now being upgraded and expanded. The investors Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn are reviving the commercial freight rail industry, and Google is rolling out fiber with speeds of a thousand megabits per second in dozens of cities nationwide. With Congress unwilling to spend on infrastructure as it did in the 1950s, only opening up the floodgates to more foreign investment can provide the capital infusion needed to put Americans to work on this project of generational renewal.

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Even after the gold market crisis, Gould continued to operate with impunity, manipulating stocks such as the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to great profit. Memorialized as “The Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” Gould reportedly took $5 million out of his speculations in Pacific Steamship in the early 1870s, a return that in modern terms ranks with that of corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and Kirk Kerkorian.33 Gould was hardly alone among the great investment operators of the age, including Jay Cooke and his Northern Pacific Railroad. Gould’s next operation, taking over the Union Pacific Railroad, allowed him to manipulate upward the prices on railroad freight rates in the West and begin a long period of accumulating equity positions in several major rail lines.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

That the inefficiencies were in fact just as we had seen them in theory, but the markets took a while to adjust. That adjustment is still taking place." GOVERNANCE Jensen especially celebrated LBOs engineered by boutiques like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and Clayton & Dubalier; "entrepreneurs" like Carl Icahn, Ronald Perelman, Irwin Jacobs, and Warren Buffett; merchant banking arms of Morgan Stanley and Lazard Freres; and families like the Pritzkers and Bronfmans. These fine people — the forgotten stars of the largely forgotten 1980s — should be trusted to run corporate America like a stock portfolio, from their thinly staffed (20 to 60 people) home offices, transforming the industrial cities of yesteryear into ghost towns.

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

On top of that example, some of the best names on Wall Street (nontrend followers) have had tough sledding in 2008: Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway): –43 percent Ken Heebner (CMG Focus Fund): –56 percent Harry Lange (Fidelity Magellan): –59 percent Bill Miller (Legg Mason Value Trust): –50 percent Ken Griffin (Citadel): –44 percent Carl Icahn (Icahn Enterprises): –81 percent T. Boone Pickens: Down $2 billion since July 2008 Kirk Kerkorian: Down $693 million on Ford shares alone Drawdowns happen. The key is to determine how quickly and successfully you can recover and get back to making new money again, but a comparison between trend trading drawdowns and buy and hold drawdowns doesn’t seem to be much of a comparison.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

They then went on a lending spree that ended in disaster when interest rates rose and borrowers failed to repay; all told, institutions with a net worth of $519bn collapsed.29 Lower rates seemed to do the trick for a while; the US economy grew in 1988 and 1989 and the stock market rebounded from its temporary slump. Corporate takeovers, often using borrowed money, were widespread in the 1980s and 1990s. A series of predators, like T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn and Ivan Boesky, made headlines by taking significant stakes in businesses in a practice known as “greenmail”; either the existing management would buy them out at a profit, or another predator would use their stake as the basis of a deal. The process was dramatised in the film Wall Street, in which Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko, proclaims that “Greed is good.”

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar