Carl Icahn

It's an evil company.

This has to work." And, uh, we underestimated the risk of market dynamics, i.e., Carl Icahn showing up, buying the stock, putting capital to work, uh, against us, and it just reminded us that it's a really shitty business.

The company that you were, they're shorting the pyramid scheme, we won't mention the name, but that generated these huge attacks against you.

There was websites against you.

If you don't trust the management because they have a history of picking bad projects or delivering bad returns for you as a shareholder, then I think you're on completely legitimate ground saying, give me the cash back.

If you own a thousand shares and you get up and say, give me the cash back, what's the reaction of the management? Let's go away, right? But if you can get an ally in this fight, and this is where the activist investing base helps you, right? You're not big enough to make this noise, but if a Carl Icahn makes this noise, you can back, in a sense, you're free riding.

Those are the companies which get targeted to give cash back to their shareholders because people don't trust them.

So the next time you hear a company complaining about the fact that it's being targeted to return cash, before you feel sorry for the company's management, take a look at their track record.

And actually, when the company went public via SPAC merger back in 2021, the voting structure, the Bell's high vote shares, that was actually put in place as a protection for the company because there was... inbound interest in acquiring the company back when it was private.

And so there was this foresight of, you know, hey, we need to put in protections for the company so that the company will have enough time and latitude to execute on its mission, even if things get rough, so that, you know, a shareholder activist like a Jana Partners or Or Carl Icahn can't come in and try to force a company to sell if it's down on its luck, which, by the way, that happened in 2022, 2023, 2024.

If that structure wasn't in place, you probably would have saw a shareholder activist come in and say, hey, you guys should sell the company.

But also to keep interlopers at bay.

When I was about 13 years old, my dad came home from a trip and said, hey, the airline may not be around much longer.

And I was like, what's going on with that? This corporate raider, Carl Icahn, was buying shares.

And in a nutshell, he found more value in breaking the company up instead of managing as a whole.

So it was like my dad around the dinner table is like, and mind you, he's an airline pilot, not an investor.

Back in 2009, there was a big scandal centered around Raj Rajaratnam and his fund Galleon Group, which implicated traders at other big Wall Street firms, too.

According to the writers, Gekko wasn't based on any single person but was instead inspired by a number of people like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky, and Michael Ovitz.

The famous Gekko quote, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good," echoed a speech Ivan Boesky had given at Berkeley a few years earlier where he had said, "I think greed is healthy.

You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." The film dips into the world of corporate raiding where companies are bought and assets are stripped and sold, which often leads to job losses.

We have people that shouldn't.

I have guys like Carl Icahn.

You know Carl Icahn.

You've heard his name.

He's a great Wall Street dealer and trader and negotiator.