Tweet heard 'round the stock market makes Carl Icahn Apple's unlikely white knight
In the past months, Apple chief Tim Cook has had to deal with an increasingly indifferent press and an outright hostile stock market that pummels the company’s every move, despite its stellar success.
Enter this story’s unlikely white knight: billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who, with just one tweet (picture above), has single-handedly managed to raise the company’s stock by nearly five percent in less than twenty-four hours. This may not sound like much, but, given Apple’s size, that means that investors in the company are now roughly $15 billion dollars richer. It seems when Icahn expresses confidence in both Apple and its chief executive, the market finally listens.
History of a corporate activist
What makes Icahn’s remarks so significant is that the 77-year-old billionaire is not exactly known for his cozy relationships with corporate executives. Born in Queens, New York, in 1933, he began his career as a stockbroker on Wall Street, and moved on to buying significant portions of public companies in 1968, becoming very rich in the process.
Since then, he has been involved in some of the most contentious hostile takeovers of the last four decades. In 1985, he took control of the once-mighty airline TWA, and sold off many of its assets to pay off the debt incurred during his leveraged buyout; by the time he sold it off in 1993, he had made a cool $469 million in the transaction—not to mention giving a travel company he owned a ticket-booking deal so sweet that the only way the airline managed to get out of it was to enter bankruptcy proceedings in 1995.
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