Insider Monkey

Long-Term Returns of Carl Icahn’s 40 Activist Targets

Swati Goyal
30 min read

In This Article:

In this article, we discuss long-term returns of Carl Icahn's 40 activist targets. You can skip our detailed analysis of Icahn's activist targets and their historical performance and go directly to read Long-Term Returns of Carl Icahn's 10 Activist Targets. 

He is one of Wall Street's biggest stars and most successful investors. Carl Icahn is a force to reckon with as an American billionaire, financier, corporate raider, and private equity investor. He rose to prominence in the 1980s on investing in various public companies and demanding extreme corporate leadership and management changes to unlock shareholder value.

He has grown to become one of the biggest and most revered activist investors. His moves and calls in the market are often followed by investors who always rely on his activism to unlock significant value in undervalued or sleeping giants. "Icahn Lift" is the acronym that often refers to the shareholder value that comes about from Billionaire investor activism.

With a network of about $8.4 billion, Icahn dropped out of the New York University School of Medicine and started his long and fruitful career on Wall Street in 1961. He would go on to form Icahn & Co, a securities firm that would engage in various strategies to squeeze in value through risk arbitrage options trading or through other strategies.

It was in 1978 that the lone wolf of Wall Street started seizing control of positions in individual companies, including Viacom, Texaco, Philips Petroleum, and Western Union, among others, as part of his activism plays. In 1979 aggressive activism would earn Icahn $3 million on winning a seat on the board of kitchen stove maker Tappan and engineered its sale.

Driven by the philosophy of buying something that no one wants has etched his name as a contrarian investor. Icahn mostly focuses on identifying stocks with low price-to-earnings ratios and book values exceeding current valuation.

After purchasing a significant position in the company, he either calls for the election of the entire board or divestiture of assets to unlock shareholder value. Splitting up businesses' and returning cash to shareholders to is one of the strategies he often deploys in the race to unlock shareholder value.

In 2015 he succeeded in convincing Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), as part of his activism, to increase stock buybacks. The push came after the activist investor had a meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook, after which he followed with a $150 billion buyback proposal while insisting the market was undervaluing Apple stock.

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