In his latest interview with CNBC, Carl Icahn discusses the death of activism. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Icahn: It makes no sense to make it tougher and tougher for the activism to work and with me we take big positions, we make tender offers, we have permanent capital, but what you are is killing the smaller activists who you know if you don’t give him time to accumulate a stock position, up to ten percent, up to 15 percent, even up to five percent, if you don’t give… and why there’s no incentive to spend the great deal of money that you have to spend to do a proxy fight.
To try to get these guys to account, and believe me I’ve seen it over and over and over first hand how many of our companies that just terribly run, terribly run, and that’s why we make so much money over the years.
We clean up these companies and it’s just amazing the abuses that corporate America places on the shareholders in many companies. There are many very good companies and many very good CEOs but then there are very many bad ones and I think it’s sort of crazy to throw the baby out with the bath water.
I don’t get involved in politics but I may get involved in this one.
You can watch the entire interview here:
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