King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist

Rating:
Summary: This was a page turner.....
Review: I don't know what to think of this man. He has both saved companies and made them turn a profit, he has also destroyed companies that were once doing well, but then he bought their shares out and they were liquitated only few years after he bought them. Talk about a large gray area. he's a man that has both destroyed jobs and saved jobs.

Rating:
Summary: Carl Icahn___ a brilliant Shylock
Review: An interesting & detailed look into the hunting methods & machinations of the notorious corporate raider of the 1980's , Carl Icahn . A shylock-like shady character from Brooklyn ,Icahn comes across as a brilliant Machiavellian Wall Street shark whose humble lower middle class origins seemed to have whetted his appetite for his soon to be corporate preys.Interestingly , like some other legendary investors ( George Soros , Jim Rogers, Benjamin Graham etc) Icahn was drawn to philosophy from an early age and went on to study it at Princeton ______after all Schopenhaur himself was a hard-nosed savvy investor! Also like most legendary investors he grew up poor .This book dissects in detail the anatomy of Icahn's raids on Texaco , TWA and others, along with the doomed(for most investors) but brilliant(for Icahn & his clique) concept of taking control of susceptible companies through leveraged buyouts financed with junk bonds & subsequently selling off the family silver to line his own pocket! He also perfected the art of "greenmail" by blackmailing vulnerable managements and thus enriching himself at the expense of his fellow shareholders . Icahn comes across as a lean,mean, street-smart SOB who had the brains and the chutzpah to take on the most entrenched managements on Wall Street .

Rating:
Summary: Best book on finance/investing that I've ever read - by far!
Review: An interesting & detailed look into the hunting methods & machinations of the notorious corporate raider of the 1980's , Carl Icahn . A shylock-like shady character from Brooklyn ,Icahn comes across as a brilliant Machiavellian Wall Street shark whose humble lower middle class origins seemed to have whetted his appetite for his soon to be corporate preys.Interestingly , like some other legendary investors ( George Soros , Jim Rogers, Benjamin Graham etc) Icahn was drawn to philosophy from an early age and went on to study it at Princeton ______after all Schopenhaur himself was a hard-nosed savvy investor! Also like most legendary investors he grew up poor .This book dissects in detail the anatomy of Icahn's raids on Texaco , TWA and others, along with the doomed(for most investors) but brilliant(for Icahn & his clique) concept of taking control of susceptible companies through leveraged buyouts financed with junk bonds & subsequently selling off the family silver to line his own pocket! He also perfected the art of "greenmail" by blackmailing vulnerable managements and thus enriching himself at the expense of his fellow shareholders . Icahn comes across as a lean,mean, street-smart SOB who had the brains and the chutzpah to take on the most entrenched managements on Wall Street .

Rating:
Summary: Best book on finance/investing that I've ever read - by far!
Review: This book is fantastic. It is brilliantly written and lets you get right inside Icahn's head as he stalks each prey! You can almost feel the squirming of the CEO's he tortures. The descriptions of his strategic thinking are amazing. This book is a MUST READ for anyone interested in activist investing. My most influential book.