corporate raider

Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism
by Jeff Gramm
Published 23 Feb 2016

Thirty years earlier, nobody really knew what to make of fledgling corporate raiders picking fights with company CEOs. By the 1980s, such men were known as “masters of the universe.” In many ways, the corporate raiders of the ’80s were not so different from the ’50s Proxyteers. Both groups featured aggressive and motivated young businessmen operating on the fringes of Wall Street. But while the Proxyteers struck fear into the hearts of CEOs with their ability to harness the discontent of public shareholders, the corporate raiders had something much more powerful at their disposal: ready cash. It came from Michael Milken and the vast market he created for new-issue junk bonds.

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“I always knew there was an Establishment—I just used to think I was a part of it.”55 Steinberg’s willingness to target giants was years ahead of its time, but luckily for him he was not yet thirty years old. It wasn’t long until Steinberg and his fellow corporate raiders would have their day. With help from the efficient market hypothesis and the free market movement of the 1970s, raiders were viewed less as a scourge and threat to industry and more as a disciplinary force. In the ’80s, the hostile raiders rode strong economic growth and Michael Milken’s blank checkbook to fame and riches. 4 Carl Icahn versus Phillips Petroleum: The Rise and Fall of the Corporate Raiders “However, what I strenuously oppose is the Board not allowing the shareholders to receive a fair price for all their shares.”

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When the stock market crashed in 1987, pundits called it the end of an age of debt-fueled excess. They were wrong. The corporate raiders were not dancing on a house of cards. Economic growth in the ’80s was real, the stock market recovered its losses quickly, and the next decade would see further expansion and bigger deals. More than any of the other raiders’, Carl Icahn’s career in the 1980s exemplified the decade. He had an unlikely ascent followed by a crash that almost left him ruined. Yet today he is the best known of the corporate raiders. And, to use the metric that probably matters most to him, he is also the richest. Early in his career, Icahn was dismissed as a simple “greenmailer,” someone who would agitate at a company only to win a preferential buyout of his shares.

How Money Became Dangerous
by Christopher Varelas
Published 15 Oct 2019

So an outside agent is often required to force that change. For Walt Disney Productions, that agent was the corporate raider. The resulting disruption from such change is seldom pleasant. To the incumbent managers—and to the other employees whose futures are now uncertain—the disruptors are the bad guys. But the changes that they bring about can be necessary for the survival of the company. Before the corporate raiders of the ’80s, the mission statements of most companies were focused on creating the best product or providing the best service. Then corporate raiders forced management teams to prioritize share price above all else. Maximizing shareholder value became the new mantra.

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I didn’t know it at the time, but it would also be an important catalyst for moving me toward a career in the financial services industry. That morning, some portentous and confusing news appeared in the papers. A corporate raider named Saul Steinberg was targeting Walt Disney Productions in a hostile takeover. None of us knew what it meant, as we had never heard the terms “corporate raider” and “hostile takeover” before—the same was true for most Americans—yet I was fascinated by the news and gleaned what I could from the papers and TV reports. I learned that, while Disney hadn’t been for sale, there was a process by which a well-funded investor could buy up enough stock in a publicly traded company that he would gain some measure of influence over the firm’s board of directors.

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Management decision making was reduced to a cost-benefit analysis of risk and return. Today, if you open up the financial section of any major publication, you’ll discover that an incredible change has taken place in the public perception of corporate raiders. Gone are the days when the media painted them as scoundrels. They aren’t even called corporate raiders anymore, but rather activist investors. And in general, they’re viewed as good guys because they keep management teams honest and motivated. I recently attended a San Francisco Giants baseball game, and who threw out the first pitch? Our former-hero-turned-prison-inmate, Michael Milken.

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist
by Mark Stevens
Published 31 May 1993

TEXACO: ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER $500 MILLION COLD STEEL: USX AND THE END OF AN ERA ALL THE KING’S HORSES AND ALL THE KING’S MEN FORWARD: THE BATTLE TO WRITE THIS BOOK It was the spring of 1992 when Carl Celian Icahn first appeared on my radar screen. I knew of his Wall Street exploits from various news reports but it all became strangely personal when I watched the tall gangly figure I’d seen on television walk across the village green of my hometown of Bedford, New York. My mind raced. “Is that the feared corporate raider dressed in faded tennis shorts and a wrinkled top walking into the village wine shop? Is it just a look alike? If it’s Icahn, what’s he doing here in sleepy Bedford?” I wanted to approach the man but held back, thinking it was likely just another resident of the town who had no interest in or relationship to Icahn.

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What’s more, the idea of Icahn the born skeptic putting a penny’s worth of faith in management’s assertions is laughable. At this point his prey had yet to figure out that it was under siege. As Blasius noted in a memo to Chairman W. R. Tappan, Icahn “seemed pleased that we took the time to talk to them about the company.” Icahn had yet to become a feared corporate raider, and the Blasius memo speaks volumes about corporate management’s naiveté concerning his intentions. Carl Icahn “pleased” that executives of a company in which he held a major investment would take the time to talk to him? Nonsense. As a shareholder, Icahn believed that Tappan and Blasius worked for him, that they continued in their capacity at the pleasure of the shareholders and that they were obligated to be responsive to him.

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Now to have someone come along and buy that company, well what was Johnston going to do at this stage of his life, look for a job? Johnston reacted the way other CEOs react when they find themselves in that situation.” On every front, Icahn vs. Dan River was a clash of cultures, of geography, of insiders and outsiders, of company men and a corporate raider. But most of all, it was a clash between two individuals: one who wanted to keep control over a public corporation and one who wanted to earn a fast profit on the value of its assets. Both were determined to have their way. To block Icahn, management put in place a series of measures that might well thwart the raider but that brought into question their alleged concern for the shareholders.

Deep Value
by Tobias E. Carlisle
Published 19 Aug 2014

As a lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions he has advised on transactions across a variety of industries in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Singapore, Bermuda, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and Guam. He is a graduate of the University of Queensland in Australia with degrees in Law (2001) and Business (Management) (1999). xvii CHAPTER 1 The Icahn Manifesto Corporate Raider to Activist Investor “Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime. . . —Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress (c. 1650) bouleversement \bool-vair-suh-MAWN\, noun: Complete overthrow; a reversal; an overturning; convulsion; turmoil. —Comes from French, from Old French bouleverser, “to overturn,” from boule, “ball” (from Latin bulla) + verser, “to overturn” (from Latin versare, from vertere, “to turn”).

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As they had with the closed-end mutual funds, Icahn and Kingsley would seek to control the destiny of public companies. Their impact on America’s corporations would be profound. ICAHN’S WALL STREET REFORMATION Icahn’s progression from arbitrageur and liquidator of closed-end funds to full-blown corporate raider started in 1976 with a distillation of the strategy into an investment memorandum distributed to prospective investors:5 It is our opinion that the elements in today’s economic environment have combined in a unique way to create large profit-making 4 DEEP VALUE opportunities with relatively little risk.

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Porter Co., a builder of industrial locomotives, by buying its distressed bonds at 10 to 15 cents on the dollar. He reorganized the company, converting his bonds into equity, and became president at age 28. From then on, “Net Quick” Evans was the “slick-haired, aggressive”35 terror of the sleepy boardrooms of the era, much like the ­stereotype of the corporate raiders in the 1980s. Even Warren Buffett, Graham’s most apt student, tried his hand as a liquidator, briefly turning to Graham-style shareholder activism in his own investment partnership. He obtained control of Dempster Mill Manufacturing Company36 in the early 1960s through a majority shareholding and board seat before almost completely liquidating it.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

In other words, the City Code institutionalised the power of corporate raiders, activist investors, and other short-term shareholders who would come to act as the enforcers of shareholder value ideology. From Thatcher’s perspective, and from that of her friends in the Mont Pelerin Society, corporate raiders like Hanson were heroes, charging into corporate fortresses and taking on the vested interests of the managers who were hoarding the company’s capital for themselves rather than investing it in the interests of shareholders. Thatcher’s Big Bang and the development of the City Code sought to make it as easy as possible for corporate raiders to “shake-up” big, incumbent firms like Imperial Tobacco.

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This, according to the CEO of General Electric, makes shareholder value “the dumbest idea in the world”34. But like many dumb ideas that enrich the powerful, shareholder value took off in the 1980s — and nowhere more so than in the City of London. Corporate Raiders, Hostile Takeovers, and Activist Investors Lord Hanson — aka “Lord Moneybags” — is famous for many things.35 He was engaged to Audrey Hepburn, had a fling with Joan Collins, and also happens to be one of the UK’s most notorious corporate raiders. Although he made his money in the new economy, Hanson didn’t exactly come from humble beginnings. Born into a family that made its money during the industrial revolution, he built multiple successful business ventures on the back of his family’s wealth before teaming up with Lord Gordon White to start Hanson Trust in 1964.

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Building the Future Chapter One The Golden Age of Capitalism How Does Change Happen? The Rise of Global Finance The Political Consequences of Social Democracy Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste Chapter Two Vulture Capitalism: The Financialisation of the Corporation The Big Bang Corporate Raiders, Hostile Takeovers and Activist Investors From Downsize and Distribute to Merge and Monopolise Chapter Three Let Them Eat Houses: The Financialisation of the Household The Enemy Within Privatised Keynesianism Blowing Bubbles Financialisation and Politics Chapter Four Thatcher’s Greatest Achievement: The Financialisation of the State Thatcher’s Greatest Achievement PFI: Profits for Investors The Bond Vigilantes Illiberal Technocracy Chapter Five The Crash Bubble Economics Financial Globalisation Securitisation, Shadow Banking and Inter-Bank Lending Bailout Britain Transatlantic Banking Crisis or Structural Crisis of Financial Capitalism?

The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market
by Tobias E. Carlisle
Published 13 Oct 2017

THE ACQUIRER’S MULTIPLE “In the old legend the wise men finally boiled down the history of mortal affairs into the single phrase, ‘This too shall pass.’” —Benjamin Graham, Security Analysis (1934) The Acquirer’s Multiple is an industrial-strength PE multiple. It’s a throwback to the corporate raiders and buyouts of the 1980s. In dusty, old finance journals, it is described it as the Acquirer’s Multiple because corporate raiders and buyout firms—the acquirers—used it to find whole companies cheap enough to take over. Where most investors only look at profits, the corporate raiders looked to see what a company owned. They used it to find treasure hidden in plain sight on corporate balance sheets. The Acquirer’s Multiple compares the total cost of a business to the operating income flowing into the company.

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…that have failed. But they only do it when the stock is deeply undervalued. Billionaire value-investor Warren Buffett famously says he tries to be “fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” Said in other words, Buffett zigs when the crowd zags. Like Buffett, billionaire corporate-raider Carl Icahn is also a value investor. He has been called the “the contrarian to end all contrarians.”2 Ken Moelis, former chief of investment banking at UBS, said of Icahn, “He’ll buy at the worst possible moment, when there’s no reason to see a sunny side and no one agrees with him.”3 Icahn explains why:4 The consensus thinking is generally wrong.

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He attacked the giants of the public markets, which included Texaco, the “Big Red Star of the American Highway,” for which he bid $12.4 billion. He also attacked U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation, then with a market cap of $6 billion. Other investors took notice. A cottage industry of so-called corporate raiders sprang up. They disappeared with the 1987 stock market crash. But a new breed of activist investors emerged in the wake of the dot-com bust in the early 2000s. We’ll learn about two in the next chapter. 10. NEW GENTLEMEN OF FORTUNE “It seemed a very great world in which these men lived; a world where high rules reigned and every trifle in public conduct counted: a duelling-ground where although the business might be ruthless, and the weapons loaded with ball, there was ceremonious personal courtesy and mutual respect

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
by Robert B. Reich
Published 24 Mar 2020

Meyer Jr. calls Icahn “one of the greediest men on earth.” Greedy or not, Icahn ushered in a systemic change in the American corporation that continues to this day. As Icahn and other corporate raiders made fortunes, CEOs began to devote themselves entirely and obsessively to maximizing the short-term values of their shares of stock in order to prevent a takeover. Before Icahn and the corporate raiders, it was assumed that large corporations had responsibilities to all their stakeholders, not just their shareholders. “The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chair of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address that was typical of the time, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups…stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.”

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Then when your house is in flames, he can hold you up for every penny you have.” Isaac Perlmutter, the CEO of Marvel Comics and a veteran of the Israeli Army, likened dealing with Icahn to negotiating with terrorists. Also like Trump, Icahn came to prominence in the roaring 1980s. As America’s preeminent corporate raider, he was part of the inspiration for the character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. When Oliver Stone was researching the film, he visited Icahn and borrowed one of Icahn’s observations for the Gekko character: “If you need a friend, get a dog.” (Icahn borrowed the phrase from Harry Truman’s description of life in Washington.

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One of Icahn’s other specialties has been investing in distressed debt, and Donald Trump has been among America’s most distressed debtors. By the time Trump’s infamous Taj Mahal gambling casino on the New Jersey shore opened in the early 1990s, it was already deep in the red. Icahn bailed out Trump by purchasing its outstanding bonds at a steep discount. It’s no surprise that the ruthless corporate raider and ruthless real-estate developer were attracted to one another. Within days of his election, Trump asked Icahn to help him staff major government agencies. Once installed in the White House, Trump named Icahn his “special adviser” on regulatory issues. Icahn was assured he didn’t have to divest any of his financial holdings, and he had no qualms about telling Trump to take actions that benefited his own companies—like rolling back environmental regulations affecting CVR Energy, an independent oil refinery in which Icahn held an 82 percent stake.

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone
by David Carey
Published 7 Feb 2012

For all the power and wealth private equity firms had amassed, leveraged buyouts (LBOs or buyouts for short) had always been controversial, a lightning rod for anger over the effects of capitalism. As Blackstone and its peers gobbled up ever-bigger companies in 2006 and 2007, all the fears and criticisms that had dogged the buyout business since the 1980s resurfaced. In part it was guilt by association. The industry had come of age in the heyday of corporate raiders, saber-rattling financiers who launched hostile takeover bids and worked to overthrow managements. Buyout firms rarely made hostile bids, preferring to strike deals with management before buying a company. But in many cases they swooped in to buy companies that were under siege and, once in control, they often laid off workers and broke companies into pieces just like the raiders.

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But it was the advent of a new kind of financing that would have the most profound effect on the buyout business. Junk bonds, and Drexel Burnham Lambert, the upstart investment bank that single-handedly invented them and then pitched them as a means to finance takeovers, would soon provide undreamed-of amounts of new debt for buyout firms. Drexel’s ability to sell junk bonds also sustained the corporate raiders, a rowdy new cast of takeover artists whose bullying tactics shook loose subsidiaries and frequently drove whole companies into the arms of buyout firms. Over the course of five years, Drexel’s innovations revolutionized the LBO business and reshaped the American corporate establishment. A decade earlier buyouts had been a cottage industry with just a handful of new and more established LBO boutiques.

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* * * Buyout specialists weren’t the only financial players benefiting from and dependent on Milken. At the same time that LBO firms were proliferating, Drexel was also staking a new, rude, and belligerent horde that emerged on the corporate scene. The corporate establishment and a skeptical press coined a string of equally unflattering names for the new intruders: corporate raiders, buccaneers, bust-up artists, and, most famously, barbarians. Like wolves, the raiders stalked stumbling or poorly run public companies that had fallen behind the herd, and they bought them in LBOs. Like the buyout firms, the raiders were forever on the lookout for companies whose stocks traded for less than they thought the companies were worth—because they had valuable assets that weren’t reflected in the stock price or because the companies were inefficiently managed.

When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle
by Scott Wapner
Published 23 Apr 2018

James Sterngold, “The Pawns Differ: Icahn Still Winning,” New York Times, February 6, 1985. 10. Tobias Carlisle, “How Carl Icahn Became a Corporate Raider,” Investment News, December 7, 2014. 11. Tobias Carlisle, “The Insight That Enabled Carl Icahn to Become a Corporate Raider,” Crain’s Wealth, December 8, 2014. 12. Carlisle, “How Carl Icahn Became a Corporate Raider.” 13. Paul Richter, “Carl Icahn Relishes His Raider Role,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1985. 14. Slater, The Titans of Takeover. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Carlisle, “How Carl Icahn Became a Corporate Raider.” 20. Robert Cole, “Icahn Makes Dual Offer for Dan River,” New York Times, October 26, 1982. 21.

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Loeb, Nelson Peltz, and others, is defined by an interest not just in owning a piece of a company, but also in using their influence and money to change the way it operates. And no company, large or small, is beyond their reach. Apple, PepsiCo, Yahoo, DuPont, JC Penney, and Macy’s are among the businesses that have been targeted in recent years. While the 1970s and 1980s marked the rise, dominance, and ultimate fall of the corporate raiders, arbitrageurs, and junk bond kings of the day, during the current Era of the Activist, barely a week goes by without one of the aforementioned financiers revealing a stake in a company’s stock and an ambitious plan to propel it higher. Activism isn’t just proliferating—it’s exploding. In 2012 there were seventy-one activist campaigns with a total of $12 billion invested, according to the new regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Boone Pickens, and Michael Milken, the Drexel Burnham Lambert banker whose infamous “junk bonds” helped finance the buying frenzy of the times. Milken’s high-yielding securities had earned him the nickname “The Junk Bond King” since he had all but invented the market for the securities. The men—coined corporate raiders by the media—were shrewd, often ruthless negotiators, stopping at nothing to shake up companies whose CEOs were deemed either too “imperial” or too “country-club,” more interested in their golf scores than their shareholders. It was the era of the leveraged buyout (LBO), a time when deep-pocketed dealmakers like Icahn and others ran roughshod through the nation’s boardrooms and there was little anyone could do to stop them.

Den of Thieves
by James B. Stewart
Published 14 Oct 1991

Nelson Peltz, head of Triangle Industries, acquired National Can and then bought American Can from Primerica. He sold American National Can to Pechiney, the French packaging company. Gerald Tsai was chairman of Primerica, which he reshaped into a financial services concern which owns Smith Barney, the brokerage firm. Irwin Jacobs is a corporate raider based in Minneapolis. The Hafts became corporate raiders, launching an unsuccessful bid for Safeway Stores. The Pritzker family owns Hyatt Hotels Corporation and invests in numerous other ventures. page 104 Carr has denied being part of any scheme to free Posner from the standstill agreement. page 104 While based on independent reporting, the text's account of the Fischbach transaction closely parallels that set forth in Government's Milken memo, pp. 30-37 (redacted).

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Tomilson Hill III, co-head of M&A Steve Waters, co-head of M&A Peter Solomon, investment banker At Bank Leu, Nassau, the Bahamas Bernhard Meier, banker Bruno Pletscher, banker Cast of Characters U At Merrill Lynch & Co., New York Stephen Hammerman, general counsel Richard Drew, vice president, compliance Major investors Carl Icahn, corporate raider and future chairman of TWA John Mulheren, head of Jamie Securities Henry Kravis, principal, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Inc. At Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, New York (counsel for Goldman, Sachs) Martin Lipton, partner Ilan Reich, partner Lawrence Pedowitz, partner At Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, New York (counsel for Michael Milken and Dennis Levine) Arthur Liman, partner Martin Flumenbaum, partner At Williams & Connolly, Washington, D.C.

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Levine's confessions resonated with Reich, who had just gotten married himself. He understood Levine's family milieu, and he often felt frustrated and underappreciated at Wachtell. Levine told Reich that he had big ambitions: he planned to earn from $10 million to $20 million fast, then set up his own operation, maybe as a corporate raider. Then he, Levine, would have the lawyers and investment bankers like himself and Reich working for him. "How are you going to make that kind of money?" Reich asked. Levine leaned forward. "There's a lot of money to be made in information," he said. "Look at the arbitrageurs. They're trading in it.

The Taking of Getty Oil: Pennzoil, Texaco, and the Takeover Battle That Made History
by Steve Coll
Published 12 Jun 2017

Boone Pickens and his allies on Wall Street said unequivocally that it was Sid Petersen’s fault. Pickens might be an opportunist, but he was also a brilliant, articulate oilman, and the critique he proffered of large, publicly held oil companies such as Getty was persuasive. The domestic oil industry, Pickens said, was already in a state of liquidation; corporate raiders such as himself were only accelerating an inexorable trend. For more than ten years, the largest American oil companies had been unable to replace their domestic reserves as fast as they produced and sold them. That meant the companies were living on borrowed time—eventually, their reserves would run out and there would be no oil in the United States to replace them.

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Actually, Petersen was not as hostile to the Pickens movement as some other executives of large oil companies. He, too, was distressed by Getty Oil’s value gap and the company’s foundering stock price. He was distressed above all because the value gap meant that Getty Oil was a prime takeover target for Pickens or some other like-minded corporate raider. What Petersen appreciated better than Gordon Getty did, however, was that the debate on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms over the oil industry’s past errors and future policies had two distinct aspects. On the one hand, there was sometimes a scholarly, academic atmosphere about it all, a sense among industry analysts of reasonable men disagreeing over complex business issues.

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If so, Gordon was likely violating the law; at the very least, he was moving into a precarious legal gray area. Gordon was a director of Getty Oil. In that position, he had certain legal obligations to protect the company’s shareholders. Turning over secret company documents to a competitive, aggressive corporate raider was hardly consistent with those obligations. What Gordon Getty did not realize when he wrote his hopeful, friendly letter to Sid Petersen on December 24 was that only a few days before, concerned about Gordon’s behavior, Petersen had met with his lawyers at Getty Oil headquarters to discuss how they might launch a legal challenge to Gordon’s control of the Sarah Getty Trust.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

Six out of the top ten fastest-growing job categories pay $15 an hour and workforce participation is as low as it’s been since the late 1970s.4 It used to be that as the fortunes of American companies improved, the fortunes of the average American rose, too. But now something has broken that relationship. That something is Wall Street. Just consider that only weeks after Apple announced it would pay off investors with the $17 billion, more sharks began circling. Corporate raider Carl Icahn, one of the original barbarians at the gate who attacked companies from TWA to RJR Nabisco in the 1980s and 1990s, promptly began buying up Apple stock, all the while tweeting demands that Cook spend billions and billions more on buybacks. With each tweet, Apple’s share price jumped.

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Indeed, “shareholder value” has become the rallying cry of many a financially oriented manager making decisions that boost a company’s share price at the expense of longer-term growth. And it has also become the justification for “activist” investors who, in a clever semantic trick, have today been rebranded from their previous incarnation as “corporate raiders”—people like Carl Icahn, Bill Ackman, and Daniel Loeb, who have pushed American companies to pay back their record $2 trillion cash hoard in the form of dividends and share buybacks, rather than pay higher wages or make investments in factories, infrastructure, or worker training.17 And they’ve been quite successful at forcing companies to do just that.

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Never mind that these theories were cooked up in college classrooms and on computers rather than in real businesses. Agency theory took hold quickly. Jensen and Meckling’s ideas were lauded in the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review and used as fuel in the legislative fight to increase limits on executive stock options, as well as justification for corporate raiders and greenmailers, such as T. Boone Pickens. Like many takeover titans, Pickens thought CEOs were mostly lazy, self-interested, and insulated. “US executives…look at takeovers as a threat to their salaries and their perks,” said Pickens at the time. “And the reason they perceive it this way is that they generally own very little stock in their own companies.

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Published 1 Jan 1990

He had developed a fearsome reputation for firing and intimidating people, earning him a spot on Fortune’s list of “America’s toughest bosses.” As chief executive of Gulf + Western, he had faced down corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn. He had also overhauled the company from a sprawling conglomerate to a media and financial power. He knew how to value businesses, and he thought $75 a share to be insulting or bungling or both. Bill Anderson of NCR simply didn’t like junk bonds, corporate raiders, or any of the modern folderol that kept business from doing business. At NCR he preached a homespun philosophy of looking after “stakeholders”: employees, suppliers, and communities whose lives were intertwined with and dependent on a large company.

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Everyone knew LBOs meant deep cuts in research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrificed to pay off debt. Proponents insisted that companies forced to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: The executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich. “The wolf is not at the door,” Johnson said. No corporate raider was forcing him to do this. “This is simply the option that I think is best for our shareholders. I believe it is a doable transaction, and it can be done at prices much higher than the present stock price. We’re not far enough along this road to make firm conclusions or make a proposal at this point, though.”

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Atkins did, and agreed to Goldstone’s request that he and Johnson be allowed to take it upstairs to review it. The press release was a worrisome development, although one Goldstone had anticipated on learning Atkins had been brought along by Hugel. Lifting the veil of secrecy was ordinarily enough to kill a developing buyout in its cradle: Once disclosed, corporate raiders or other unwanted suitors were free to make a run at the company before management had a chance to prepare its own bid. Still, Johnson and his partners hadn’t panicked when the prospect of an announcement was raised. RJR Nabisco was so big that no one in the world seemed likely to top their bid—and certainly not without a friendly management team to lead the way.

Cable Cowboy
by Mark Robichaux
Published 19 Oct 2002

To win new franchises from local governments in Memphis, Tennessee, and Vancouver, Washington, and elsewhere, TCI had promised to pour another $500 million into new construction, an ambitious sum it had no rational basis for embracing, and the mayors and city councils had no intention of letting TCI squirm out of the commitment. Malone knew that if just a few more things went wrong—a sudden spike in f loating interest rates, a default on some old loans—TCI could become vulnerable to a takeover by corporate raiders or its own lenders, and Malone would fail utterly the first time he had a chance to run the show. A 18 9486_Robichaux_01.f.qxd 8/28/02 9:53 AM Page 19 Ru n n i ng t he Show In the lag between accepting the new job and moving to Denver, Malone had willfully ignored an ominous sign: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had suspended trading of the stock of cable giant TelePrompTer on suspicion of accounting fraud, shattering investors’ confidence in cable companies just when Malone needed their support.

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Then, Malone would merge United Artists Communications with another company in which TCI owned a controlling interest, United Cable Television Corporation, creating the country’s third-largest cable company in a $2 billion stock swap. A few years later, TCI would gobble up that merged entity, called United Artists Entertainment. Corporate raiders accelerated the turnover, realizing that cable stocks were priced lower than they should have been because of the antiquated emphasis on earnings. In 1986, their aggressiveness ended up presenting Malone with one of the biggest deals he had ever undertaken: a takeover of Heritage Communications, then the nation’s 10th-largest cable company with about 1 million subscribers.

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Hoak was a Yalie from Des Moines who had worked brief ly as a legal assistant at the FCC in 1968, graduated from Stanford University’s law school, and started a cable company at age 26. Heritage had built a strong operation of choice cable systems in Dallas; Philadelphia; San Jose, California; and elsewhere, relying on a loyal contingent of local investors and a heap of bank debt. Robert Bass, an oilman and corporate raider out of Fort Worth, Texas, had begun a creeping tender offer, quietly buying bite-size chunks of Heritage stock at market prices rather than swooping down and paying a premium for a single large, controlling stake. Before long, Bass 83 9486_Robichaux_01.f.qxd 8/28/02 9:53 AM Page 84 84 C A B L E C O W B OY had accumulated a 9 percent stake, and he vowed to buy more.

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History
by Diana B. Henriques
Published 18 Sep 2017

Machold, Unruh, and Goldin were presiding over a daylong engagement with the key players in a takeover drama being acted out at Phillips Petroleum. In December, the company had made a greenmail payment to deter the corporate raider T. Boone Pickens, who walked away with a $90 million profit. The company now planned to “recapitalize” itself by giving a third of its shares to its employees and offering other stockholders (who included the pension funds run by Machold, Goldin, and Unruh) a package of new stock and bonds whose value was in dispute on Wall Street. That recapitalization scheme prompted another corporate raider, Carl Icahn, to launch his own takeover bid for Phillips, mustering the services of the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert along with several Drexel clients to help him finance an $8.1 billion bid.

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Increasingly, though, takeover deals were squeezing Phelan between two of his important constituencies. The companies listed on the exchange wanted the NYSE to allow them to issue a class of stock that could outvote their common stock. With that “super-voting” stock in friendly hands, the firms would be safe from corporate raiders. But many major pension funds and other giant institutions, the fastest-growing source of trades on the NYSE, were firmly opposed to “super-voting” shares, which diminished their rights as common stockholders. That opposition reflected structural changes in the investment community. Traditionally, disappointed institutional investors “voted with their feet,” selling their shares rather than challenging management.

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John Phelan was automating whatever and wherever he could, but those investments would be wasted if the Big Board did not keep its blue-chip listings. The takeover mania had created an existential threat to those NYSE listings. In July 1984, three prominent Big Board companies, General Motors, Dow Jones and Co., and Coastal Corporation, had created “super-voting” classes of stock to ward off corporate raiders, in violation of the NYSE’s bylaws. That action should have disqualified these companies from being listed on the exchange. If the NYSE stood its ground, raider-wary companies could move their listings to a safer market. Both the American Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq market permitted their listed companies to have multiple classes of stock.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

As this second efficiency revolution hit its stride, we saw not only the declining fortunes for tens of millions of Americans, but also a disturbing shift in the relationship between the self and the marketplace. It’s at this turning point that the story of the Impulse Society resumes. If this unsettled new era of free markets and bold new theories could be distilled to a single character type, it would be that of the corporate raider. Where the dominant figure of the postwar business world was the empire builder (the CEO methodically assembling vast armies of workers and arsenals of products), the new figure on the scene was more like a demolitions expert or a hit man. The raiders’ m.o. was simple: they looked for struggling companies whose sagging share price made them a bargain, quietly bought up a controlling stake (usually with high-interest loans, known as “junk bonds”), and then began what was euphemistically referred to as “restructuring.”

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There was Icahn, who, after raiding TWA, directed the struggling airline to borrow half a billion dollars (most of which he paid to himself), then sold off the airline’s most profitable routes (a practice known as asset stripping) to service the debt. There was even a raiders’ gala—a posh annual conference hosted by the deal-making firm Drexel Burnham Lambert for all the big names in restructuring, known as the “Predators’ Ball.” For many critics, and a great many more traumatized former employees, the corporate raider perfectly captured the “greed is good” zeitgeist that overran American corporate culture in the 1980s. But to an emerging school of conservative economists, the raider was nothing less than an economic savior. Raiders had appeared because share prices were falling, and share prices had fallen in part because the companies were being mismanaged.

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Share prices had plunged—the New York Stock Exchange fell by 50 percent in the early 1970s—and shareholders had watched, powerless, as their investments were nearly halved. For, in those days, shareholders had almost no say in the running of a company: decisions were made largely by corporate executives who treated shareholders (and share price) as a secondary concern, well behind factors such as labor or suppliers. As far as Wall Street was concerned, corporate raiders were the market’s way of correcting years of bad management. That correction was surprisingly swift. As one company after another was taken over and taken apart, corporate America panicked. Even unraided firms scrambled to fend off raiders by keeping their share prices high. Companies cut costs ruthlessly.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

With Welch setting the pace at GE, those numbers exploded. By the end of his tenure, the numbers of deals soared to upward of 14,000 a year, with a combined value of well over $1 trillion. Of the companies that were in the Fortune 500 in 1980, a full 143 of them—28 percent—had been acquired by the end of the decade. At the same time, corporate raiders were on the march. Men like Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, and Nelson Peltz were raising money, mounting aggressive takeover campaigns against unsuspecting companies, and—once they had control—squeezing them for profits by cutting staff and slashing costs. When companies wouldn’t listen to their profit-hungry investors, the raiders would mount campaigns to replace directors, installing themselves or their cronies on the board, and then forcing the company’s hand.

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Kohlberg Kravis Roberts took over RJR Nabisco and Ronald Perelman went after Revlon. The barbarians were at the gate. It was a terrifying new landscape for companies, and workers, too. At any moment, an unknown firm might appear, demanding downsizing, cost cutting, and fatter profits. But GE didn’t have that problem. Because while the corporate raiders and private equity titans were squeezing companies from the outside, Welch, at GE, was doing it from within. “GE is a venture capital company,” said Grossman, the former president of NBC News, and dealmaking, he added, was “what makes the light shine” in Welch’s eyes. “There’s no commitment to people or product.”

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GE Capital was being disassembled. The once profitable power business was failing. The dividend had been cut. Stalwart businesses like plastics and appliances had been sold off. And no matter what, the stock wouldn’t rise. With the news out of GE only getting worse, Nelson Peltz, one of the original corporate raiders, bought a minority stake in the stock and began agitating for change. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who was running for president, had Immelt in his sights as well. In an interview with the New York Daily News, the senator said greedy companies were “destroying the moral fabric of the country.”

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

The lenders were attracted by the higher interest rates, ignoring whether they would receive anything at all. LBOs now relied on paying down debt from selling assets, cost cutting, reducing business investment, and other corporate auto-cannibalism: “We’re always cutting, cutting, cutting.... There’s the risk that you may cut out something that you really need.”9 In the 1980s, corporate raiders—T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, Robert M. Bass, Kirk Kerkorian, Sir James Goldsmith, Saul Steinberg—dominated LBOs. Boone Pickens made a series of raids on major oil companies, realizing that they were literally liquidating themselves by depleting their reserves without investing in exploration and development to replenish them.

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When Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers issued the first junk bonds in 1977, Milken and Drexel seized the opportunity, starting with a $30 million issue for Texas International. Over time, they found new issuers of junk bonds—Milken’s mobsters. Drexel forged relationships with the new robber barons—buyout firms, entrepreneurial outsiders like Turner Broadcasting, MCI, and McCaw Cellular, and aggressive corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Boone Pickens. Drexel’s Christian Anderson summarized the situation: “There are only two kinds of companies—the comers and the goers. We finance the comers.”28 Observers later noted: “Pumped into buyouts, Milken’s junk bonds became a high-octane fuel that transformed the LBO industry from a Volkswagen Beetle into a monstrous drag race belching smoke and fire.”29 Harvard-trained Fred Joseph, Drexel president and CEO, wanted to build the firm to rival Goldman Sachs, then, as now, the benchmark for excellence.

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Milken evolved the highly confident letter, which stated that Drexel was “highly confident” that it could obtain the necessary financing. Originally nicknamed the Air Fund, the highly confident letter lacked legal status, relying on Milken and Drexel’s ability to underwrite and place bonds to raise the money. Drexel’s reputation meant that the letter was as good as cash. Modestly resourced corporate raiders, backed by a highly confident letter, were suddenly credible. Jay Higgins, head of mergers and acquisitions at rival Salomon Brothers, observed: “Big companies used to worry only about threats from other big companies. But with Drexel doing the financing, anybody long on ideas and short on capital is a threat.”31 Drexel moved from providing advice to bankrolling transactions as a principal.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

But then, seemingly out of nowhere, a new type of corporation emerged and suddenly threatened the old-line corporation. Going by various names, from leveraged buyout shops to private equity firms to corporate raiders, these new firms were the antithesis of the corporate giants of the day. They were small, nimble, and leanly staffed, operating out of single offices. But they were all united in a belief that, somewhere along the line, the corporation had lost a step. Management had gotten fat and lazy. Directors had grown cocky. Executives lacked discipline. And so, slowly at first, then faster and faster, corporate raiders took aim at these corporations and took them over. They all followed a similar playbook first developed by the undisputed champion of them all, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

…

Their firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), would launch broadsides against many of the country’s biggest companies, accusing them of mismanagement and waste. Their raids proved spectacularly successful, and soon an entire industry of copycats sprang up to mirror their tactics. The age of the corporate raider had begun. I LIKE TO tell my students that private equity is a tale of two Gordons. The first Gordon is Gordon Gekko. In this lens, private equity firms and their managers are real-life versions of Oliver Stone’s immoral banker from the movie Wall Street. They believe that “greed is good,” that all is fair in love and business, and that, in the free market, avarice is a competitive advantage.

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In an interview with Esquire, Roehm described their social lives: “Here we all were, and I looked around, and all the women were very attractive, and they all had successful husbands, and I was listening to the wonderful band music and looking at this incredible environment that [the host] and her decorator had created, and I thought, ‘We are truly lucky.’”27 THE EXTRAORDINARY SUCCESS OF THE KKR MODEL OF CAPITALISM swept through the corporate world like a tsunami, with more and more companies succumbing to the deluge of corporate raiders. But as private equity worked its way through boardrooms across the nation, a mounting chorus of critics emerged. These critics raised concerns about the private equity revolution and its effects on corporations, workers, and society. Some of the harshest criticism came from within the ranks of private equity itself.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

Other narratives in the same constellation with the Laffer curve sprang up around the same time. The terms leveraged buyouts and corporate raiders also went viral in the 1980s, often in admiring stories about companies that responded well to true incentives and that produced high profits as a result. One marker for such stories is the phrase maximize shareholder value, which, according to ProQuest News & Newspapers and Google Ngrams, was not used until the 1970s and whose usage grew steadily until the twenty-first century. The phrase maximize shareholder value puts a nice spin on questionable corporate raider practices, such as saddling the company with extreme levels of debt and ignoring implicit contracts with employees and stakeholders.

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His suggestion for people who mislay their keys: As you drop your keys into the flowerpot, form a mental image of the two vital entities—the keys and the place where you’re putting them. Make it a silly or impossible image. Example: “See” a gigantic key growing in a flowerpot.17 As neuroscience has shown us, long-term memory formation involves many regions of the brain, including visual-image processing regions.18 Rubik’s Cube, Corporate Raiders, and Other Parallel Epidemics Another fad appeared around the same time as the Laffer curve. Rubik’s Cube, invented in 1974 by Ernő Rubik, is a puzzle in the form of a cube-shaped stack of multicolored smaller cubes. As the narrative went, Rubik was a creative Hungarian sculptor and architect whose puzzle captivated the scientific and mathematics community worldwide because it fostered a narrative that it represented some interesting mathematical principles.

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Shareholder reminds the listener that there are people whose money started the whole enterprise, and who may sometimes be forgotten. Value sounds better, more idealistic, than wealth or profit. Use of the three words together as a phrase is an invention of the 1980s, used to tell stories of corporate raiders and their success. The term maximize shareholder value is a contagious justification for aggressiveness and the pursuit of wealth, and the narratives that exploited the term are most certainly economically significant. The Laffer Curve, Supply-Side Economics, and Narrative Constellations After the Laffer curve epidemic, the Reagan administration (1981–89) reduced the top US federal income tax bracket from 70% to 28%.

Outliers
by Malcolm Gladwell
Published 29 May 2017

“Among my classmates at Harvard, the thing that bright young guys did was securities work or tax,” another white-shoe partner remembers. “Those were the distinguished fields. Litiga tion was for hams, not for serious people. Corporations just didn't sue each other in those days.” What the old-line firms also did not do was involve themselves in hostile corporate takeovers. It's hard to imagine today, when corporate raiders and private-equity firms are constantly swallowing up one company after another, but until the 1970s, it was considered scandalous for one company to buy another company without the target agreeing to be bought. Places like Mudge Rose and the other establishment firms on Wall Street would not touch those kinds of deals.

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Places like Mudge Rose and the other establishment firms on Wall Street would not touch those kinds of deals. “The problem with hostile takeovers is that they were hostile/' says Steven Brill, who founded the trade magazine American Lawyer. ”It wasn't gentlemanly. If your best buddy from Princeton is the CEO of Company X, and he's been coasting for a long time, and some corporate raider shows up and says this company sucks, it makes you uncomfortable. You think, If he goes, then maybe I go too. It's this whole notion of not upsetting the basic calm and stable order of things."* The work that “came in the door” to the generation of Jewish lawyers from the Bronx and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, then, was the work the white-shoe firms disdained: litigation and, more important, “proxy fights,” * The lawyer and novelist Louis Auchincloss, who very much belongs to the old WASP-y white-shoe legal establishment in New York, has a scene in his book The Scarlet Letters that perfectly captures the antipathy the downtown firms felt toward takeover law.

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Flom was fat (a hundred pounds overweight then, one lawyer said...), physically unattractive (to a partner, he resembled a frog), and indifferent to social niceties (he would fart in public or jab a cigar close to the face of someone he was talking to, without apology). But in the judgment of colleagues and of some adversaries, his will to win was unsurpassed and he was often masterful. The white-shoe law firms would call in Flom as well whenever some corporate raider made a run at one of their establishment clients. They wouldn't touch the case. But they were happy to outsource it to Skadden, Arps. “Flom's early specialty was proxy fights, and that was not what we did, just like we don't do matrimonial work,” said Robert Rif kind, a longtime partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore.

file:///C:/Documents%20and%...
by vpavan

In the 1970s and '80s, activist religious and political groups began using company annual meetings to push shareholder proposals that denounced investment in apartheid South Africa as well as companies dealing in weapons and tobacco. Shareholder groups also began invoking federal securities laws in place since the 1930s to support their corporate governance struggles. Corporate Raiders and Poison Pills The biggest boost for corporate governance, however, came in the 1980s, when corporate raiders and leveraged buyout firms vied for control of struggling corporations. Many companies resisted being taken over, and enacted protections such as special share-voting devices and poison pills. The share-voting devices block hostile takeovers by, for example, providing for super-voting rights to be cast in favor of management when an unwanted suitor appears on the scene.

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They water down shareholders' votes and deprive them of a meaningful voice in corporate affairs. And they deprive investors of a contest for their shares— and the possibility that they will receive a premium price from a new owner. Numerous courtroom battles were waged over poison pills and other antitakeover measures. The corporate raider era shook up many complacent management teams and corporate boards, which often were smack in the middle of these legal dramas. The mergers-and-acquisitions divisions of Wall Street firms became more profitable than their brokerage departments. But overall, the 1980s "was a mixed bag" for governance, says Harvey Goldschmid, a securities law professor at Columbia University.

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Boone Pickens, and Saul Steinberg— caused much bitterness, and not just among unhappy managers turned out of their corner offices. Dozens of acquired companies were broken up and sold in pieces, thousands of people were laid off, suppliers and customers were disrupted, and local communities were torn apart. The corporate raider movement caused governance experts to look for better ways to improve corporate performance, but with far less turmoil. Goldschmid and others focused on forcing directors to switch their allegiance from management to shareholders. And that gave rise to a new and powerful special interest group: activist shareholders.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

In the 1950s, for example, hard-charging takeover artists targeted firms led by the idle rich—as one of them put it, the “third-generation Yale man who spends his afternoons drinking martinis at the club.” But these corporate raiders who threatened the leisure class were “treated as uncouth ruffians,” censured by government investigators, and threatened with legislative sanction. Even in the breach, norms reaffirmed and enforced the facts of life among the leisured elite. Midcentury Wall Street, moreover, was not unique or even distinctive in its taste for leisure. The corporate raiders just mentioned took aim at firms run by comfortably lazy managers who, as one contemporary observer noted, behaved as if they were gentlemen of independent means.

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Beginning in the 1980s, an unprecedented wave of corporate restructurings streamlined American firms. It is almost impossible to find any case of corporate downsizing before the mid-1980s, and some large companies even adopted express “no layoff” policies. But now the reorganizations expressly sought to eliminate what the corporate raider Carl Icahn once called “incompetent” and “inbred” middle managers, “layers of bureaucrats reporting to bureaucrats.” The cull was dramatic: AT&T, for example, restructured one of its units with the express aim of reducing the ratio of managers to nonmanagers from 1:5 to 1:30. Across restructurings in the 1980s and 1990s, middle managers were downsized at nearly twice the rate of nonmanagerial workers.

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Law firms such as Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom developed the legal frameworks to implement activist investing on a massive scale. And investment banks such as Drexel Burnham Lambert and private equity firms such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company embraced and expanded the tactics of earlier corporate raiders, bringing corporate takeovers from the eccentric fringes of finance to Wall Street’s charismatic center. The dollar volume of mergers and acquisitions in the United States—a good if rough overall measure of the shareholder activism—grew by over 200 percent between 1982 and 1987 (similar years in the business cycle) and then by nearly 500 percent again between 1988 and 1999.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
by Joshua Green
Published 17 Jul 2017

So Milken and his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, devised an ingenious new use for them: they used junk bonds to finance raids on undervalued blue-chip corporations. Milken and Drexel would fund these hostile takeovers by pledging the assets of the target corporation as collateral, in the same way that a home buyer obtains a mortgage by pledging the collateral of the home against the loan. This practice gave rise to an army of corporate raiders, men such as Ron Perelman, Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, and Nelson Peltz, who became rich selling junk bonds through Drexel Burnham to finance predatory raids on such Fortune 100 companies as TWA, Disney, Revlon, and Phillips Petroleum. So fearsome did Milken’s reputation become that sometimes the mere rumor that a company might come under siege was enough to send it scrambling toward a defensive merger.

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The attacks by Milken had a corollary effect on the companies he targeted: they needed help staving off the barbarians at the gates. This, too, created profitable new business opportunities. Goldman Sachs, not yet evolved into the money-grubbing “vampire squid” it would later become, was a white-shoe firm that wouldn’t deign to represent corporate raiders in hostile takeover bids. Instead, Goldman developed a specialty in raid defense for blue-chip companies targeted by the likes of Drexel Burnham and First Boston. Bannon landed in the firm’s mergers-and-acquisitions department, the SWAT team that companies called in to advise and protect them when the raiders came calling.

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But it was also because the federal government under Reagan had relaxed antitrust restrictions, which meant that the media and entertainment industries—like the oil-and-gas, retail-clothing, and pharmaceutical industries—were taking a page from Wall Street and embarking on an orgy of mergers and acquisitions. Some of these media mergers, such as Time Inc.’s $14 billion merger with Warner Communications in 1989 to create the world’s largest entertainment conglomerate, were defensive in nature, intended to make companies large enough that they wouldn’t fall prey to corporate raiders. Others were strategic acquisitions, like General Electric’s 1985 takeover of RCA and its NBC division for $6.3 billion, a deal Bannon worked on for Goldman in its capacity as an adviser to GE. “A lot of people were coming from outside buying media companies,” he said. “There was just huge consolidation going on.”

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture
by David Boyle and Andrew Simms
Published 14 Jun 2009

At least a third of the price of the goods we pay for, or the rooms we rent, goes on interest payments to cover the money borrowed. An average of 28 per cent of the income of UK businesses goes to service their debt.16 The rise of indebtedness is not just among individuals but among companies that are forced to take on debt to avoid their clean balance sheets being used against them by corporate raiders (see Chapter 10), who will load prudent companies up with debt in order to pay for their own takeover. More debt means that money increasingly has to be directed at the most profitable aspects of the economy, often financial services or the pillaging of natural resources, so that it can be paid off; just as we have to accept the best paid jobs, rather than the jobs which suit us, in order to pay our mortgages.

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A nonsense world ruled over by capricious, self-absorbed financial royalty who were careless about the consequences of their actions on the rest of the world. The vast rewards for those in charge of the system have often been belied by their miserably indebted companies. This is partly a side effect of the junk bond revolution in the 1980s, which fuelled the activities of corporate raiders like T. Boone Pickens and Sir James Goldsmith. The main complaint by critics was that these takeover ventures, tailored to reap short-term profits for high rollers, left many companies deeply in debt or dismembered. If a company had been prudent and paid off too much debt, then a raider could potentially use that as their own asset for grabbing control of the company, loading it with debt to pay for the takeover, stripping it of saleable assets and then selling the remains on.

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(Gilbert Keith) 18, 20, 21, 81 Chicago (Illinois) 87, 127, 131 chief executives 19, 141, 142 children 4, 46–7, 82, 86, 87 Chile 51 China 28, 50, 60, 82, 100, 116, 154 CHP (combined heat and power) plants 102, 103 cities 3, 61, 75, 80, 105–6, 110, 116 and energy 102, 103 traffic speeds 65–6 citizen’s incomes 45, 58, 73, 91–2, 148 Clarke, Otto 21 classical economics 28–9, 34–5, 44, 67, 89, 123 assumptions 71, 72, 85 Cleveland (Ohio) 6 climate change 3–4, 40, 96, 112, 115 tackling 45, 90, 155, 157 Clinton, Bill 27, 52, 145 co-generation of energy 102, 103 co-production 88–9, 127–31, 132, 158, 159 Cobb, Clifford 39, 40–1 Cobb, John 22, 40–1 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 5–6 Colombia 33, 51 Columbus, Christopher 139 combined heat and power see CHP commodities 11, 57, 139 currencies based on 60, 90, 120 commons 79, 82, 113, 148 communications technologies 58, 59, 78, 158 communities 2, 27, 42, 43, 89, 92 assets 57–8, 106 investing in 118 money in 103–5, 107, 124, 151–2 Wal-mart and 124–5 community 32, 33, 54, 89, 158 community banks 26, 145 community land trusts 46, 73, 151 Community Way model 58 community-supported agriculture 26, 119 companies 74–5, 84, 137–8, 142–3 see also corporations comparative advantage 26, 75, 109, 116 competition 90 regulation 85, 113, 125, 126, 133 complementary currencies 26, 57–8, 59, 62, 154 consumerism 20, 44, 132 consumers 44, 67–8 consumption 11, 34, 39–40, 100, 158 ‘defensive’ 37 contributing, need for 128–9 conventional economics 10–12, 82, 97, 127 cooperatives 20, 26, 153 ‘core economy’ 54–5, 88, 89, 127, 158 corporate debt 84, 142–3 corporate power 20, 28, 85 corporate raiders 84, 142 corporate responsibility 26, 153–4 corporations 4, 8, 13, 82, 90, 116, 142, 158 tax gap 52, 137, 157 Costa Rica 99 Country Party 18 crashes 1, 51, 91 2008–9 crash 2, 3, 5, 6–7, 8, 15, 84, 85, 154–5 creativity 38, 46, 75, 79, 91 credit 91, 145–6 see also debt credit cards 84 credit crunch 3, 91, 144, 157 credit unions 26, 144, 145, 146 crime 10, 35, 37, 38, 87, 127, 128 crises, fundamental 3–5 Cuba 95–7, 101, 105 culture 43, 44, 111, 115, 127, 158 INDEX 183 currencies 26, 55, 56–8, 81 barter currencies 58, 59 based on commodities 60, 90, 120 based on emissions rights 90, 148 big 53, 54, 55–6, 58, 59 complementary 26, 57–8, 59, 62, 154 global 56, 61, 120, 147–8 local 26, 27, 56, 57, 58, 60, 151–2, 153 multiple 58, 59–60, 60, 90 regional 58, 59, 60 domestic tradeable quotas (DTQs) 117–18 Douthwaite, Richard 56–7, 148 Downs-Thomson Paradox 66 downshifting 2, 4–5, 11, 35, 69, 73 Drexel Burnham Lambert 142 drugs, generic 113, 116, 117 DTQs (domestic tradeable quotas) 117–18 Dublin (Ireland) 52, 106 DuPont 85 dynamic equilibrium 43, 44 Daly, Herman 22, 23, 40–1, 43, 97 Dawnay, Emma 71 debt 4, 7, 11–12, 81, 83–4 cancellation 137, 148 corporate 84, 142–3 and development 138–43 GM crops and 91, 119, 140 Malawi 135–6 medieval freedom from 79, 80–1 money creation 7, 8, 11, 56, 60, 84, 90, 138 national 49–50, 83, 84, 139, 141 personal 7, 36, 83–4, 91, 140, 141 repayments 90, 137 small-scale 143–4 see also sub-prime loans decentralized energy generation 102–3, 106, 114, 155 decision making 67–8, 71, 158 ‘defensive consumption’ 37 democracy 31, 55, 91, 141, 158 demurrage 57 depression 4, 10, 11, 35, 38, 68, 75, 83 deregulation 8, 12, 22, 28 developing countries 11, 81, 136–8, 143 development 24, 27, 116, 138–43 development projects 82 Dickens, Charles 36 Diggers 18 Disney 141 Distributism 19–21, 29 District of Columbia School of Law 131 diversity 82, 90, 152 Earth, Apollo pictures of 101–2 EBCU (emissions-backed currency unit) 148 ecological debt 113–14 ecological footprints 31, 33, 34, 112 ecological issues 3–4, 12, 25 economic activity 25, 148 economic development 24, 27, 116, 138–43 economic growth see growth economic indicators, alternative 26 economic institutions 29, 82, 153, 154 economic processes 97–8, 99 economic system 2, 11, 21–2, 23, 29, 112, 138 and poverty 13–14, 18, 29, 81–2, 154 economics 10–12, 18, 19, 29, 72–3, 98 assumptions 10, 25, 28, 29, 69, 71, 72, 82, 85, 97, 99, 115 medieval 78–80, 80–1 post-autistic 9–10, 71–2 and psychology 67–8, 71, 72–3 as a science 15, 34–5, 98, 152 and sustainability 24 see also classical economics; conventional economics; new economics economy 12, 26, 84–5, 158 creating poverty 13–14, 18, 29, 81, 154 ecosystems 99, 112, 114 Edison, Thomas 58, 90, 147 education 13, 33, 35, 46, 113 efficiency 4, 13, 99, 100, 123, 126, 131–2 E.F.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Yes, the market is increasingly made of complex financial derivatives that no human can truly understand. But the key lesson is one we have seen again and again. The design of a system determines its outcomes. The robots did not force a human-hostile future upon us; we chose it ourselves. The 1980s were the years of “corporate raiders” celebrated by Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie Wall Street, who so memorably said, “Greed is good.” The theory was that by discovering and rooting out bad managers and finding efficiencies in underperforming businesses, these raiders were actually improving the operation of the capitalist system.

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“The normal economics of maximizing economic value is replaced by the topsy-turvy economics of maximizing current extractable value, which tends to drive the firm’s economic net worth deeply negative. . . . A dollar in increased dividends today is worth a dollar to owners, but a dollar in increased future earnings of the firm is worth nothing because future payments accrue to the creditors who will be left holding the bag.” This was the game plan of many corporate raiders, who laid off workers and stripped firms of their assets, even taking them through bankruptcy to eliminate their pension plans. It was also at the heart of a series of booms and busts in real estate and finance that decimated the economy while enormously enriching a tiny group of economic looters and lucky bystanders.

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Author Douglas Rushkoff told me the story of one Fortune 100 CEO who broke down in tears as she told him how her attempts to inject social value into decision making at her company had resulted in quick punishment by “the market,” forcing her to reverse course. Who is the market? It is algorithmic traders who pop in and out of companies at millisecond speed, turning what was once a vehicle for capital investment in the real economy into a casino where the rules always favor the house. It is corporate raiders like Carl Icahn (now rebranded as a “shareholder activist”) who buy large blocks of shares and demand that companies that wish to remain independent instead put themselves up for sale, or that a company like Apple disgorge its cash into their pockets rather than using it to lower prices for customers or raise wages for workers.

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
by William D. Cohan
Published 25 Dec 2015

Damon Mezzacappa had begun to build a small but profitable capital markets business. Overheads remained low. Lazard was poised for what proved to be a remarkable run of increasing profitability, just as the M&A market exploded in a rare confluence of large strategic mergers and the emergence of well-financed corporate raiders and buyout shops. Nineteen eighty-one was also the year that Felix and Lazard were able to--finally and quietly--put the ITT scandal behind them. ITT reached its $17.8 million tax settlement with the federal government in May, effectively ending a seven-year legal battle. (In 1981, Felix also turned over his ITT board seat to Michel.)

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Felix represented Revlon, thanks to his enduring friendship with its CEO, Michel Bergerac, a Frenchman whom Felix had met when Bergerac was one of Geneen's top lieutenants at ITT. While far from the biggest deal, at a mere $1.83 billion, the Perelman-Revlon fight seemed to have it all: an upstart corporate raider, using money borrowed with the help of Michael Milken, trying to buy one of the world's best-known consumer brands, versus a proud corporate pillar, run by a sophisticated Frenchman, desperately hoping to avoid his clutches. The process dragged on for months, with Bergerac and Felix bringing in Forstmann Little, the buyout firm, to put together a competing bid.

…

"I think a lot is taken out of you by the urge to conform, and I never had that. I had no urge to conform. I was not with other kids. I was not part of a group." This sense of being apart informed the way Michel and Felix directed the firm professionally, too. Felix, of course, was a leading critic of the Wall Street fads of junk bonds, bridge loans, and advising corporate raiders, a source of huge but unsustainable profits at places like First Boston and Drexel Burnham in the 1980s. Michel defended Felix and the firm's decision to keep away from most of the faddish behavior, a variation of the ability to just say no. "We pride ourselves that we don't have to do anything," Michel said often.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

It required swashbuckling, swaggering change agents to take on powerful CEOs. Buttoned-up mutual fund managers and diligent Wall Street analysts were no match for the alpha males who had climbed to the top of their respective corporate ladders, but these new men, often denigrated as greenmailers and corporate raiders, seemed to be fully up to the task. With their rise, American culture had new villains, icons, movie characters, and caricatures that remain one part of the enduring imagery of the eighties. The best juxtaposition of the opposing viewpoints of the essential purpose of the corporation came from American cinema.

…

Just as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs needed venture capital, their equivalents on Wall Street needed their own specialized financing. The best and the brightest among them looked west to Beverly Hills, where Michael Milken could raise billions of dollars when the need arose, junk bonds becoming the pirate ship on which the corporate raiders sailed. • • • IF THERE WAS A COMPETITION to find a real-life equivalent to Larry the Liquidator, who relished the persona of financial agitator in the 1980s, the award would have gone to Carl Icahn. Raised in a middle-class home in Queens, Icahn went to Princeton and then enrolled at NYU School of Medicine for two years.

…

To win the support of the unions for his bid, Icahn made a series of concessions that he would live up to if he gained control. The unions, shockingly, threw their full support behind Icahn’s bid. In the court of public opinion, this effectively neutralized any notion of the airline’s management as victims. As far as the unions were concerned, in one of the most visible hostile takeovers, their white knight was the corporate raider. By the fall, Icahn ended up in control of TWA, functioning as the actual CEO, a feat he would be loath to repeat in the future. But the actions of men like Icahn also set the template for a new type of acquirer, men who were decidedly less rough around the edges or, at the very least, smart enough to appear so.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

It required swashbuckling, swaggering change agents to take on powerful CEOs. Buttoned-up mutual fund managers and diligent Wall Street analysts were no match for the alpha males who had climbed to the top of their respective corporate ladders, but these new men, often denigrated as greenmailers and corporate raiders, seemed to be fully up to the task. With their rise, American culture had new villains, icons, movie characters, and caricatures that remain one part of the enduring imagery of the eighties. The best juxtaposition of the opposing viewpoints of the essential purpose of the corporation came from American cinema.

…

Just as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs needed venture capital, their equivalents on Wall Street needed their own specialized financing. The best and the brightest among them looked west to Beverly Hills, where Michael Milken could raise billions of dollars when the need arose, junk bonds becoming the pirate ship on which the corporate raiders sailed. • • • IF THERE WAS A COMPETITION to find a real-life equivalent to Larry the Liquidator, who relished the persona of financial agitator in the 1980s, the award would have gone to Carl Icahn. Raised in a middle-class home in Queens, Icahn went to Princeton and then enrolled at NYU School of Medicine for two years.

…

To win the support of the unions for his bid, Icahn made a series of concessions that he would live up to if he gained control. The unions, shockingly, threw their full support behind Icahn’s bid. In the court of public opinion, this effectively neutralized any notion of the airline’s management as victims. As far as the unions were concerned, in one of the most visible hostile takeovers, their white knight was the corporate raider. By the fall, Icahn ended up in control of TWA, functioning as the actual CEO, a feat he would be loath to repeat in the future. But the actions of men like Icahn also set the template for a new type of acquirer, men who were decidedly less rough around the edges or, at the very least, smart enough to appear so.

One Up on Wall Street
by Peter Lynch
Published 11 May 2012

Merck, having washed its hands of Calgon and a few other minor distractions, is once again concentrating on its ethical drugs. It has four new drugs in clinical trials and two that have passed FDA approval, and the earnings are picking up. THE ASSET PLAYS An asset play is any company that’s sitting on something valuable that you know about, but that the Wall Street crowd has overlooked. With so many analysts and corporate raiders snooping around, it doesn’t seem possible that there are any assets that Wall Street hasn’t noticed, but believe me, there are. The asset play is where the local edge can be used to greatest advantage. The asset may be as simple as a pile of cash. Sometimes it’s real estate. I’ve already mentioned Pebble Beach as a great asset play.

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The emergence of merger and acquisition groups, and other buyout groups, that are willing and able to finance $20-billion purchases. Between the domestic buyout groups (Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts; Kelso; Coniston Partners; Odyssey Partners; and Wesray), the European firms and buyout groups (Hanson Trust, Imperial Chemical, Electrolux, Unilever, Nestlé, etc.), and the individual corporate raiders with sizable bankrolls (David Murdock, Donald Trump, Sam Hyman, Paul Bilzerian, the Bass brothers, the Reichmanns, the Hafts, Rupert Murdoch, Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Asher Edelman, et al.) any company, large or small, is up for grabs. The popularity of the leveraged buyout, or LBO, through which entire companies or divisions are “taken private”—purchased by outsiders or by current management with money that’s borrowed from banks or raised via junk bonds.

…

Why does the emperor of Wall Street always have to have no clothes? We’re so anxious to catch that act that every time he parades around in full regalia we think we’re seeing a nude. I’ve been hearing that investors ought to be delighted when companies in which they’ve invested are bought out by corporate raiders, or taken private by management, sometimes doubling the stock price overnight. When a raider comes in to buy out a solid and prosperous enterprise, it’s the shareholders who get robbed. Maybe it looks like a good deal to the shareholders today, but they’re giving away their stake in the future growth.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

Soon, money managers no longer looked as though they were playing roulette with investors’ money by putting high-paying junk bonds in their portfolios. Indeed, it quickly became more respectable to issue new junk bonds—quite a different thing. Another short hop and takeovers of strong, well-financed companies could be financed with junk, turning formerly sound balance sheets into debt-riddled Swiss cheese. Corporate raiders armed with junk bonds, intent on “hostile takeovers” whose goal was to pluck a company clean, suddenly stalked companies that had been waddling along complacently. Their targets lunged toward any buyer who might conceivably be more friendly; in the end the target company was usually sold to someone or another and financially gutted.

…

This orgy of mergers that often took place with the consent of only one party riveted the public; the clashes of titanic egos filled the daily papers. Michael Milken’s annual junk-bond conference, the Predators’ Ball,6 lent its name to the entire era. Buffett scorned the way these deals transferred riches from shareholders to managers and corporate raiders, helped by a long, long line of toll-taking bankers, brokers, and lawyers.7 “We don’t do hostile takeovers,” he said. The deals of the 1980s repelled him above all because they were loaded with debt. To those reared during the Depression, debt was something to be used only with a careful eye for the worst-case scenario.

…

Buffett still paid cash and chose the role of the white knight in takeovers. Early one morning in February 1985, while he was in Washington, Tom Murphy called and woke him to say he had just bought the ABC television network. “You’ve got to come and tell me how I’m going to pay for it,” Murphy said.8 ABC was caught in the crosshairs of the corporate raiders. The company had hung a lure out to see whether Murphy would save it by doing a friendly deal—and Murphy bit.9 “Think about how it will change your life,” Buffett said. Murphy was a devout Catholic who never wasted money on anything—and this was Hollywood. Buffett may well have been thinking about the incongruity between the modest, retiring Murphy and the glamorous world of television, as Murphy believed10—but Buffett’s next move signaled that he wouldn’t mind such a change himself.

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
by William D. Cohan
Published 11 Apr 2011

Seventeen years after that somewhat quaint description of M&A bankers, it seemed the supposedly press-shy Goldman partners were willing to make an exception for writer Tim Metz’s 1982 page-one story, which portrayed the firm—virtually alone on Wall Street—as unwilling to represent a corporate raider in an unfriendly, hostile deal for a company. Whether intentional or not, in one fell swoop, Goldman had whitewashed a meaningful chunk of Levy’s role in the 1950s and 1960s on behalf of raiders—such as the Murchison brothers and Norton Simon—in mounting hostile takeover attempts. The Journal’s story would not only prove invaluable in marketing Goldman’s M&A business but would also ratify what Levy had told Institutional Investor, in December 1973, that the firm would not work for corporate raiders on hostile deals. Indeed, the story’s headline said it all: “The Pacifist: Goldman Sachs Avoids Bitter Takeover Fights but Leads in Mergers.”

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Goldman had even devised a rare advertising campaign based on just that notion of hiring their firm in the event of a hostile corporate takeover. “Who do you want in your corner?” the ad asked. Companies signed up “in droves,” Whitehead said, paying a $50,000 annual retainer to have Goldman in its corner in case of a hostile attack. Friedman told the Journal that Goldman’s refusal to represent “corporate raiders” actually enhanced the firm’s “credibility” and “effectiveness,” since Goldman would not even show a potential acquisition to a buyer unless the buyer agreed, in advance, that a hostile approach would not later be made. “That lets us approach just about anyone at any time and talk openly with them,” he said.

…

Specifically, in his complaint, Doonan claimed Freeman and his “co-conspirators” at Kidder had twice used inside information to make illegal profits: In April 1985, Doonan claimed Freeman disclosed to Kidder, Peabody “non-public inside information material to the efforts of Unocal Corporation to resist a hostile takeover,” information Freeman had supposedly gleaned from his fellow M&A bankers at Goldman who were helping Unocal craft its (ultimately successful) defense to keep from being taken over by corporate raider T. Boone Pickens. According to Doonan, at the time Pickens announced his hostile takeover of Unocal, Kidder’s arbitrage department “had purchased a substantial amount of Unocal’s stock for its own account” to bet on whether or not the deal would happen. Soon thereafter, Doonan alleged, Freeman called Siegel at Kidder and disclosed “confidential, non-public details” about the defense strategy that Goldman had developed for its client whereby Unocal would buy back some but not all of its common stock and specifically would exclude the stock Pickens had accumulated in Unocal from the buyback.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 4 Mar 2003

If the archetypical figure of the Gilded Age was the robber baron, his successor was the professional manager—a more tedious character, perhaps, but one who turned out to be surprisingly controversial. In the 1940s, left-wing writers like the lapsed-Trotskyite James Burnham argued that a new managerial ruling class had stealthily obliterated the difference between capitalism and socialism; in the 1980s, corporate raiders said much the same thing. SLOAN’S REVOLUTION In the first two decades of the twentieth century, a silent takeover began: the gradual separation of ownership from control. The robber barons may have kept the big strategic decisions in their own hands, but they couldn’t personally oversee every detail of their gigantic business empires.

…

Soon mathematicians were dreaming up ever more ingenious forms of swaps, options, and other derivatives. The first hedge funds appeared, while other phrases such as “off balance sheet liabilities” acquired new meanings. Yet, the Wall Street figures who struck most fear into managers were the corporate raiders—particularly now that they focused on using debt to dismantle companies. One of the pioneers was Hanson Trust, a British conglomerate that did half its deals in America. Set up in 1964 by two buccaneering Yorkshiremen, James Hanson and Gordon White, it rose to prominence in the 1970s by taking over a series of unglamorous but cash-rich businesses, such as brick firms and tobacco firms.

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire
by Dale van Atta
Published 14 Aug 2019

One of the reasons for the board’s regular multimillion-share buyback of Marriott stock was to prevent anyone else from accumulating enough to seize control of the company. The fact that the Marriott family owned a quarter of the stock also was a healthy deterrent to corporate raiders. But by November 1990, the company was vulnerable to moves by any determined corporate raider with a pile of cash. Richard Rainwater, the financial genius who had made the Bass family billions, called Bill and said he was considering “taking a position” in Marriott with the stock at such a low price. Bill politely told Rainwater to back off, and he did; he was not interested in a hostile takeover.

…

Bill didn’t want to be involved in a hostile takeover; it wasn’t his style. But he gave Wilson one last hope in late 1983—if a buyer could be found for a spun-off Disney film division, Bill would take a run at buying Disney. No buyer could be found for that portion, and after three years Bill put an end to the plan. In February 1984, corporate raider Saul Steinberg took advantage of the golden opportunity Wilson had discerned. After secretly buying more than 6 percent of Disney stock, he announced his plan to buy up to 25 percent of the shares, which put Disney “in play.” Ironically, at that point, the main thing that saved Disney from a hostile takeover was the Marriott connection.

…

Less gratifying, however, was a related shareholder vote, which became the only one Bill lost in his storied career. During the merger-mania decade of the 1980s, many companies adopted a dual-class stock position, which involved giving existing stockholders more votes with “super voting stock” so future corporate raiders buying one-vote stock shares could not prevail as easily in a hostile takeover attempt. Long-term investors in a company, such as owners and employees, appreciated the extra power it gave them. But institutional investors sometimes opposed the idea because it was better for them to get the windfall of cash that came with takeovers.

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
by Kevin Phillips
Published 31 Mar 2008

But so promoted, and in less than half a century, finance has ascended from its image as a mistrusted casino (a memory from 1929) to secular altar, from emotional cockpit to Efficient Market, from a battlefield of scamps to a playing field of such Efficient Market exemplars as speculators, arbitrageurs, credit-derivative designers, and corporate raiders. Hedge funds were useful participants, erudite citadels of Ph.D.’s and professors. Derivatives, even though mere fifteen- to twenty-year-old conceptual adolescents, were, well . . . as safe as houses. “Democratization of capital” had allowed “We the People” to end-run around yesteryear’s elite market riggers.

…

The place to start, though, is with Bullnomics, the pied-piping of America toward a misleading financial ideology (the efficiency and reliability of markets), buttressed by a spectrum of dubious thinkers, doctrines, and enablers: monetarist economists with their dismissal of government; economic-deregulation enthusiasts; and gurus of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, with its validation of speculators, corporate raiders, assets shuffling, debt, and derivative instruments. That is not the entire tool kit, but it is a fair summary. MARKET WORSHIP: ITS DEITIES, DISCIPLES, AND DOCTRINES Many Americans of the late 1940s, the 1950s, and the early 1960s still adhered to the nation’s powerful Depression-era disillusionment with speculation, finance, and big business.

…

The 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s were also decades in which the stock market averages were propelled by high levels of mergers, reorganizations, and leveraged buyouts. Under the new Internal Revenue provisions of the 1980s, debt seemed rational from a tax standpoint, rather than immoral or indulgent. That same decade saw corporate raiders posture as outsiders tackling a bloated “corpocracy,” as promoters of the ability of the small to challenge the big, and as standard-bearers of “a democratization of capital” that unlocked “shareholder value.” Business school realpolitik was more appealing to the public when rephrased to emphasize commitment to shareholders.

Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire
by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes
Published 16 Mar 2021

This was the moment Millstein had been dreading. There was an old expression in complex restructurings—“just get everybody into a room”—about hashing out a lasting compromise. That approach suddenly did not look so promising. Millstein had cut his teeth as a lawyer in the mid-1980s just as corporate raiders and private equity firms were emerging on Wall Street. They were called “barbarians,” both for their slash-and-burn tactics and their insatiable thirst for profits and glory. Thirty years later, private equity had become a mainstream, if not celebrated, part of the financial establishment. No longer were private equity firms condemned as savages; rather they were earnest entrepreneurs, builders of businesses, and saviors of pensioners.

…

In the 1980s, commercial banks and insurance companies were typical corporate creditors who were mostly looking for ways to get paid back. But in the aftermath of the junk bond collapse, more specialized funds were created to buy troubled bonds and loans. Distressed investors in those early years were considered misfits, those who could not get jobs in investment banking or as corporate raiders. Yet the newness of the distressed market allowed these early investors to make fortunes. Distressed debt was the natural extension of Milken’s insight about mispriced risk and reward in the junk bond market. By 2008, the distressed debt market was a mainstream asset class with hundreds of billions of dollars dedicated to the strategy.

…

Its staff served, before or after their Paul, Weiss tenures, at the highest levels of government, and contributed their talents to pro bono civil rights work and other various civic and social causes that required elite legal skills. Its alumni included the likes presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, US Supreme Court Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg, and Ted Sorenson, White House adviser to President John F. Kennedy. In the 1980s, Paul, Weiss’s legendary partner Arthur Liman had represented Revlon in its fight with corporate raider Ron Perelman, who was using Drexel-issued junk bonds in a take-over. And later when Michael Milken needed a criminal lawyer, he went to Liman and another Paul, Weiss litigator, Martin Flumenbaum, to defend him in the case brought by the Department of Justice. Brad Karp was a junior associate at Paul, Weiss in the 1980s, a protégé of Liman and Flumenbaum.

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1990

As Bob Greenhill explained, “Morgan was building a high-technology effort at that time, and I said, ‘How can we not be in a business that is so necessary for so many of our growing clients?’ ”31 Junk bonds revolutionized Wall Street by magnifying the money available to corporate raiders. Where conglomerate takeovers in the 1960s used share exchanges, and cash was the method of choice in the 1970s, the junk bond market let corporate raiders flout the Wall Street establishment and finance their incursions by selling bonds to investors. The merger frenzy was also fueled by abundant money from commercial banks, whose dwindling prospects in wholesale lending attracted them to the financing of takeovers.

…

(In early 1989, it was still America’s top merger adviser, claiming $60 billion in deals during the year’s first half.) In the 1980s, it gentrified junk bonds and amassed a huge two-billion-dollar war chest for leveraged buyouts, the decade’s riskiest innovation. After shocking Wall Street by siding with corporate raiders, it became a raider itself, acquiring stakes in forty companies. For more than a decade, an incredulous business press has exclaimed, “This is Morgan Stanley?” All the while, with its 30-percent return on equity, it has consistently rated as the most profitable of publicly traded securities firms.

…

Ramsdell, then an Allegh-any vice-president.19 Young revived ancient myths that a single Morgan director on a board could bully the rest, claiming the “real issue” was whether the railroad would “continue to submit to a Morgan non-ownership board with countless conflicting interests.”20 The Brandeisian rhetoric is less notable than its application by a millionaire corporate raider in the middle of a takeover battle. The New Deal had only wanted to curb Morgan power; Robert Young wished to appropriate it. There was an element of bear baiting in Young’s attacks on the Morgan interests. He must have known these proper gentlemen wouldn’t emerge from their clubs, roll up their sleeves, and resort to fisticuffs, they had no tactical repertoire for street fights, which they considered ill-bred and highly offensive.

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees
by Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon
Published 2 Mar 2010

In 1980, at the time of the Pacific Homes trial, CEO pay was forty-two times the pay of the average worker in the United States. Twenty years later CEOs would make 531 times the amount of their workers. In 1980, at least in San Diego, the business of American business wasn’t yet epitomized by high-profile takeover artists, corporate raiders, and privatizing buccaneers dedicated to amassing more wealth than they could ever have spent in three lifetimes, at the cost of breaking companies apart, laying off workers, and moving jobs offshore. Nor was the profession of the law yet exemplified by rapacious trial attorneys whose monumental judgments and staggering legal fees amounted to a redistribution of wealth in its own right.

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His client base included comedian Lenny Bruce, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, Broadway producer David Merrick, and Johnny Rivers, who told The Wall Street Journal that Lazar helped him negotiate his first recording contract shortly before he generated a string of hits, including “Secret Agent Man.” Lazar’s array of friends encompassed beat poet Allen Ginsberg, criminal defense lawyer Melvin Belli, LSD guru Timothy Leary, and corporate raider Meshulam Riklis. Still another was a young Hollywood cabaret singer from the 1950s. “I was very shapely and nice to look at, but Seymour saw more than that,” recalled Maya Angelou, the singer-turned-poet-laureate. “He knew I was always writing and encouraged me to be more than a cocktail singer.”

…

Before he could file for an injunction to stop the railroad transaction, Lerach received a phone call from a conciliatory Bob Warren, representing the defense. Warren proposed a settlement in return for dropping the case. Lerach agreed. Within weeks of the settlement Lerach heard the news he had been expecting: the Disney company was indeed the target of a hostile takeover attempt. The man trying to get it was Saul P. Steinberg, a notorious corporate raider, whose Disney foray popularized the term greenmail—the act of taking money midway through a takeover bid just to go away. Helping Steinberg finance the assault on Disney was Drexel Burnham Lambert, along with a rogues’ gallery of other operators, some with their own agendas: Ivan F. Boesky, Sid Richardson Bass, Irwin “Irv the Liquidator” Jacobs—and Lerach’s previous foil, Kirk Kerkorian.

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino
by Jim McTague
Published 1 Mar 2011

Prechter, editor of the Elliot Wave Theorist newsletter, seemed prescient. The DJIA rose to what was to be its high that year of 2,722.42 in August—a level that contrarians felt was overvalued.2 But this had been a year of buying frenzy fueled by takeovers funded by junk bonds. The deals enriched corporate raiders, investment bankers, and investors, and the fever had not abated even when one of the era’s most successful buccaneers, Ivan Boesky, had been taken down on fraud charges by a young U.S. attorney named Rudolph Giuliani. Analysts cited the takeover boom plus a surge in cash from foreign and American investors as the basis for their bullish predictions.3 The public was so eager to swallow their malarkey that the market had continued its climb even when interest rates suddenly turned upward in April.

…

He switched his major to business, and after earning his undergraduate degree, he continued on toward an MBA. Beginning in 1973, Houtkin worked for a succession of firms. This was a brutal period on Wall Street because of the bear market that had its roots in the 1969 crash. He looked on the period as an extension of his education. About the middle of the decade, he worked for corporate raiders Carl Ichan and Asher Edelman and was inspired to start his own company, which he did in 1979. Houtkin possessed enough experience and ample smarts to know that the market makers for OTC stocks in the NASDAQ system were cheats. They’d often display quotes at a favorable price and then, when a trader placed an order with them over the telephone—which was the preferred way they did business in those days—they’d announce that the price had changed.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

To accompHsh that subduing, WaU Street has tried several strategies over the last two decades. First was the wave of hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts that dominated the financial landscape of the 1980s. Underperforming companies—those generating insufficient profits to satisfy shareholders—^were taken over, either by allegedly more competent rivals or by corporate raiders (or, as Alan Greenspan dubbed them at the time, "unaffiliated corporate restructurers"), or they were taken private by a management team in partnership with outside investors using lots of borrowed money. Regardless of the financial maneuver, the operational strategy was similar: shut or sell weak divisions, lay off workers, cut wages, break unions (where they existed), speed up the Hne, get the profit rate up.

…

, 161 eBay, 199-200,234 ecofeminism, 168—169 economics on finance, 192-193 education as character reference, 75—76 race and, 98-99 efficient market theory, 193-194,239 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 29 electricity crisis, California, 34,200 Ehot,T.S., 169 Ellwood, Wayne, 171 employment intensity of growth, 71 empowerment, 76,163 energy industry, 200—201; 5ee also Enron Enion, 33-36,200-201 Esping-Andersen, Gosta, 139 Esprit, 161,162 eToys, 201 Euro-envy, 7 Europe, slow growth rates, 69 European economic integration, 177 executive pay, 217 family vs. household, 237 fear, value of, 206-207,215-216 federal funds rate, 208 Federal Reserve and class war, 207-211 Survey of Consumer Finances, 118—119 fetishism, 46, 67 fmance economics on, 192—193 global, Americanization of, 217-225 and power, 202—207 stock- vs. bank-centered systems, 218 financialization of everything, 191 financial assets, growth in, 191 financial lifespans, household, 124—125 Financial Markets Center, 127 Fisher, George, 107 Food Stamps, 237 Forfce5 400,119-121 foreign competition, 153 foreign direct investment, 221—222; see also multinational corporations (MNCs) Foreign Policy, 153 Foreman, Dave, 161 Forrester, Viviane, 69 Foucault, Michel, 185 Foundation for Deep Ecology, 161—163 Frank, Tom, 8-9 Friedman, Thomas, 177 fiill employment, 206-207,220 Galbraith,John Kenneth, 213-214 Gates, Bill, 1,177-178 GDP growth, 4—5 distribution of, 88 employment intensity of, 71 and happiness, 168 and human welfare, 61 potential, 47 Gekko, Gordon, 214 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 219 Index General Electric, 164 Gilder, George, 232 as cheerleader, 196 faith in downfallen, 36 intellectual history, 9—14 Gini index, 84, 88-89 global, 131 Glass-Steagall Act, 200 globahzation, 37,145-186 bibliometrics, 145-146 common claims about, 148—154 definitions, 145-148 and inequality, 152—155 localist critiques of, 159-165 MNCs and, 155-159 novelty of, 148-150 place and, 147-148 vs. regionalization, 159 and retreat of state, 150-152 global assembly line, 158 Global Crossing, 197 global ruling class, 174—178 Golden Age myths, 164 Gordon, Robert, 53, 62—63 Gottschalk, Peter, 115 Gramm, Phil, 200-201 Gramm, Wendy, 200-201 Greenhouse, Steven, 38 Greenspan, Alan, 1,45,228 as bubble apologist, 193 on corporate raiders, 214 history of reign, 209 New Economy promoter, 7 on tininess, 14—16 on unemployment, 206,216 gross domestic product. See GDP Grubman,Jack, 197-198 happiness, 168 Hardt, Michael, 180-186 Harris, Jerry, 175—176 Hayek, Friedrich, 174 hedonic pricing, 44 Henderson, David, 179 Hilferding, Rudolf, 181 HITEK2, 52-54 household structures and poverty, 112 household vs. family, 237 Huws, Ursula, 28 idealab, 201 imperialism Lenin on, 181 privatized, 169 import-substitution industrialization, 170, 220 income household, median, 87-88 and productivity, 45, 56 income distribution discrimination and, 94-101 educational attainment and, 99—100 global, 127-133 health consequences, 81—82 historical perspective, 82-90 long view, 82—84 recent view, 84—90 increasing returns to skill, 86—87 international comparisons, 133—141 in New Economy hotbeds, 103 productivity and, 46 race and, 90-91, 93,98-99 race and sex together, 93—94 sex and, 91-93,95-97 voting and, 81 see also poverty income mobility, 80,114-118 international comparisons of, 136-138 inequality globahzation and, 152—155 increase in, ubiquity of, 116—117 as poUtical issue, 79-81 265 see also income distribution; wealth distribution inflation, 42 pobticaJ analysis, 204—206 initial pubUc offerings (IPOs), 187-188 fees, 201 innovation, 17 historical perspective, 54—55 intangibles, 204 accounting for, 17—22,232 intellectual property, 229, 231 interest, source of, 203 International Fonim on Globalization, 160-162 Internet bubble, natural history, 188-189 and New Economy, 24—26 public subsidy, 6 IQ, corporate America's, 21-22 irrational exuberance, 7 Jameson, Fredric, 27-28 Jencks, Christopher, 75 Jensen, Michael, 203 Jessop, Bob, 147 jobs of the future, 71—74 job skills, 73-77 Jorgenson, Dale, 51, 57 Kahn, Lawrence, 97 Kaldor paradox, 158 Kalecki, Michal, 206 KeUy Kevin, 24, 79 Kemp, Jack, 230 Kennedy Ted, 208 Kennickell, Arthur, 119 Kenworthy, Lane, 135—136 Keynes, John Maynard, 148-149,188,219 Klein, Naomi, 18 Knight, Phil, 159 Korten, David, 162-169,173 Kovel,Joel, 174 Krueger,Anne O., 149 Kuznets, Simon, 83 labor class war, 208-209,227 fear among workers, 206-207, 215—216 inputs, 45, 57 quality, 58 war on, 208-209 labor force participation rate, 40 Labor Notes, 25 Lawrence, Robert Z., 145 Lay, Kenneth, 33 Lenin, V.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats.”5 Over the final years of the twentieth century, Friedman’s dictate found its way into corporate thinking as well as the political class. It helped pave the way for the rise of free market politicians like Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, and the rise of corporate raiders and buyout firms that attacked companies with complacent and underperforming leadership. For the last quarter of the twentieth century, Friedman’s doctrine seemed to be the rule of the land. The business of business was business. Companies existed for the benefit of their shareholders. Society could take care of itself.

…

There is something about this epoch in history that really puts a premium on incentives, on decentralization, on allowing small economic energy to bubble up rather than a more top-down, more directed approach.” As for his views of Friedman, Summers said at the time, “I… ultimately have come to have an enormous respect for Friedman’s views on a wide range of questions.”8 In the corporate world, those last fifteen years of the twentieth century were also a period of upheaval, led by corporate raiders and private equity firms who attacked companies they viewed as having underperforming leadership. Their view was that many CEOs weren’t looking after the best interests of their owners—the shareholders—and needed to be displaced. One of the most famous early examples was the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, led by Henry Kravis and his cousin George Roberts, and chronicled in Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s classic book, Barbarians at the Gates.

The America That Reagan Built
by J. David Woodard
Published 15 Mar 2006

As in any business, a few successful corporate raiders operated outside the law. On May 12, 1986, Dennis Levine, who had made $12.6 million on insider-trading deals, implicated two well-known Wall Street traders: Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. Both men 68 THE AMERICA THAT REAGAN BUILT were charged with violations of federal securities law. Boesky agreed to pay $100 million in forfeitures and penalties, and Michael Milken admitted to six felonies and agreed to pay $600 million in fines. The amount of the fines was staggering, but more revealing was the corporate raider lifestyle the investigations uncovered.

…

If the people who bought the bonds were successful in the takeover, then they were handsomely rewarded; but if they failed, then there was the possibility that the bonds would not be repaid. Companies with low debt loads were attractive targets for leveraged buyouts, which meant that successful businessmen found themselves the object of ‘‘corporate raiders.’’ Benjamin Franklin’s age-old virtues of thrift and frugality resulted in business success, so much so that the entrepreneurial founders lost control of their companies. Sometimes, to prevent these unwanted effects, recently acquired companies bought back their stock at higher than market prices—in effect, paying raiders to go away.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Published 29 May 2009

Says Alfred Rappaport, professor of accounting and finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School and a leading student of stock values: “You can’t justify today’s stock prices without looking at profits into the 21st century.”15 It took a while for CEOs other than Welch and Goizueta to catch on to this idea. Many still had to be pushed. Corporate raiders did the pushing in the 1980s, but if they had remained the most visible agitators for shareholder value it never would have taken root in the popular imagination the way it did. With the possible exception of colorful Texan T. Boone Pickens, the LBO artists weren’t made out to be folk heroes.

…

Less than two decades after Milton Friedman scandalized liberal readers of the New York Times with his argument that the job of corporations was to make money, union pension funds and liberal state politicians were joining hands to pressure CEOs to…make more money. Years later, as pension funds heeded their consultants’ calls to diversify into new asset classes, many even began investing in the funds of 1980s corporate raiders that had rebranded themselves as “private equity” firms. Unruh died in 1987, but Dale Hanson—hired away from Wisconsin’s state pension fund that year to run Calpers—proved a more than capable successor as a shareholder activist. Hanson saw that his potential allies weren’t just the other pension funds that belonged to the Council of Institutional Investors, but mutual fund companies such as Fidelity and Vanguard.

…

Stern with Irwin Ross, Against the Grain: How to Succeed in Business by Peddling Heresy (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 171–77. 27. Alfred Rappaport, “Selecting strategies that create shareholder value,” Harvard Business Review (May–June 1981): 139–49. 28. Diana Henriques, The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders (New York: A Lisa Drew Book/Scribner, 2000), 150–58. 29. Cited in Daniel R. Fischel, “Efficient Capital Market Theory, the Market for Corporate Control, and the Regulation of Cash Tender Offers,” Texas Law Review 57, no. 1 (Dec. 1978): 17. 30. Henry G. Manne, “Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control,” Journal of Political Economy (April 1965): 113. 31.

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs
by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley
Published 22 Jul 2009

Unlike the other oligarchs, Deripaska did not acquire his fortune through the privatization auctions or via political connections. His control of the aluminium industry was largely due to the way in which he outmuscled and outwitted his competitors and his prowess with the hostile takeover. Deripaska was a post-Soviet corporate raider, borrowing from techniques pioneered by American and British tycoons, notably Sir James Goldsmith. In person, Deripaska, tall with cropped blond hair and deep blue eyes, is deceptive, a man of few words. Negotiations were more like poker or chess than orthodox business deals. He shared many of the characteristics of his friend Roman Abramovich - externally reserved and even more boyish-looking.

…

Abramovich and his representatives refused to comment. 4Kevin Dowling, Sunday Times, 7 October 2007. 5‘Berezovsky v Abramovich’, [2008] EWHC 1138 (Comm) (22 May 2008) paras 4(e) and 2; ‘Particulars of Claim’, Berezovsky v Abramovich, High Court, 8 January, 2008, p. 17. 6Dominic Midgley and Chris Hutchins, Abramovich: The Billionaire from Nowhere, HarperCollins, 2004, p. 239. 7Eric Reguly, Toronto Globe & Mail, 12 November 2007. 8Luke Harding, Guardian, 24 July 2007. 9Belton, op. cit. 10Ibid. 11Andrew Kramer, New York Times, 20 August 2006. 12Ruling by Justice Clarke, ‘Cherney v Deripaska’ - 2008 EWHC 1530 (Comm), Queen’s Bench Division, High Court, 3 July 2008, para. 58. 13Belton, op. cit. 14Quoted in ruling by Justice Clarke, para. 9. 15Ibid., para. 9. 16Ibid., para. 166. 17Sabrina Tavernise, ‘Handful of Corporate Raiders Transform Russia’s Economy’, New York Times, 13 August 2002. 18Rusal always claimed that the dispute between Cherney and Deripaska was a matter for them and not the company, making the company’s main owner the sole defendant. 19Ruling by Justice Langley, ‘Cherney v Deripaska’ - 2007 EWHC 965 (Comm) - Case No. 2006 Folio 1218, Queen’s Bench High Court, 3 May 2007, para. 39. 20Ibid., para. 45. 21Ruling by Justice Clarke, op. cit., para. 264. 22Ibid., para. 47. 23Ibid., para. 10. 24Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, Guardian Blog, Guardian, 23 October 2008. 25Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Nicola Smith, ‘The Secret World of Lord Freebie’, Sunday Times, 10 October 2008. 26Washington Post, 25 January 2008. 27John Helmer, ‘Deripaska Settles Big London Claim to Speed Aluminium IPO’, www.johnhelmer.net, May 2007. 28Quoted in Toronto Star, 13 November 2007. 29‘Jim Pettit: Immigration from Russia to the US Seems to Have Peaked and Is Now Falling’, Interfax, 2007. 30Martin Sixsmith, The Litvinenko File, Macmillan, 2007, p. 135. 31Belton, op. cit., 13 July 2007. 32Nicolas van Praet, ‘Magna’s Man in Moscow Remains a Mystery’, Financial Post, 25 August 2007. 33Financial Times, 19 July 2005. 34Mail on Sunday, 30 April 2006. 35St Petersburg Times, 2 May 2006. 36Terry Macalister.

…

.: Failed Crusade 63 Coleman, John 147-8, 149 Collins, James 32 Collins, Tim 109 Collongues-Popova, Elena 219-20 Colony Club, Hertford Street, Mayfair 119 Commercial Court, London 317 Committee to Protect Journalists 271-2 communism collapse of (1991) 13, 32, 46, 273 Russian attitude to 49 Communist Party, backs Khodorkovsky 46 Confederation of Independent States 54 Connery, Sean 138 Conservative Party 58, 334 Constellation (ship) 229-30 Cook, Robin 160 Cooperative Insurance Society 341 Corbin, Arnaud 368 Corfe Holdings Ltd 236 Corker Binning 213 Cossacks 56, 171 Côte d’Azur 198, 203, 264 Courchevel ski resort, France 158, 181, 198, 204-7 Cowdray, Lord 236 Crown Prosecution Service 261 Crown Protection Services 351 CSKA Moscow 160 CSS 202 Curtis, Louise 11 Curtis, Sarah 10, 11, 12, 13 Curtis, Stephen Langford 89, 266 covert cooperation with NCIS 6, 7 covert custodian of Russian personal fortunes 3-4 death threats 6-7, 10 decision to co-operate with British police 5 early career 94 fatal helicopter crash follows threats 1-10 finds working for Russians exciting and challenging 93-4 and Fomichev 104, 105 funeral 10-13 guardian of Russian clients’ secrets 4 health 10 and ISC Global 237 and Khodorkovsky 4, 5, 6, 46, 93, 215, 234 meets Berezovsky 94 and Menatep 5, 6, 94, 216, 217, 237, 240 personal fortune 4-5, 236 personality 4, 10, 94, 95, 234 and security 237, 239, 240-41 sets up New World Value Fund Ltd 235 and Sibneft 98, 99 works for Berezovsky 4, 6, 95-6, 107, 110, 261, 262 and the Yukos curse 246 Curtis & Co. 94, 95, 235, 238, 240-41 Cyprus 213, 215, 216, 247, 321, 322 Daily Mail 346 Daiwa Bank 218 Daresbury, Lord 161 Darling, Alistair 301, 356 Dart, Kenneth 240 Dartmouth, Earl of 147 Davidson, Rod 11-12 Davis, Alan 9 Davis, Rick 336 Davos, Switzerland 49, 214 World Economic Forum 49, 275, 330 ‘Davos Pact’ 49-50 de Klerk, F.W. 257, 276 de Kooning, Willem: Woman III 186 de Sancha, Antonia 257 de Saumarez family 350 de Waal, Thomas 288 Del Ponte, Carla 79 Deloitte Touche 137 Deng, Wendi 280 Dent-Brocklehurst, Molly 202 Derby, Earl of 161 Deripaska, Oleg 151, 157, 162, 165, 167, 256, 315, 342, 353 aluminium magnate 15, 55 appearance 55, 319 and Bob Dole 335-6 buys racehorses 356-7 and Cherney 318-19, 322-8, 339, 342, 343 Conservative Party donation issue 334 as a dollar billionaire 363 early life 56 enemies 326 entry problems to United States 16, 328-9, 335, 336, 337 and the ‘family’ 56 friendship with Abramovich 55, 319 global business empire 16 Jewish background and Cossack heritage 56 losses 364 and Magna 328, 339, 364 marriage 56 and Nat Rothschild 329-30 personality 55, 319 a post-Soviet corporate raider 55 property purchaser 145, 320-21 and Putin 15, 66, 343 ruthless young pretender 15, 55 Deripaska, Polina 165, 181, 320 Devonshire, Duke of 114 Diana, Princess of Wales 133, 171 Dickens, Charles 196 Dinamo Tbilisi Football Club 277 Disdale, Terence 153, 154, 351-2 Doig, Peter: White Canoe 185-6, 193 Dolce & Gabbana 315 Dole, Bob 335-6 Dom-2 (reality TV programme) 189 Donde, Daniel Ermes 201 Dorchester Hotel, London 26, 223, 322, 323 Doronin, Vladimir 169-70 Downside Manor, Leatherhead, Surrey 277-8, 279 Draycott House, off Sloane Square 339 Dresner-Wickers 50 Dubai 99, 142, 198 Dubov, Yuli 267-8, 279 Bolshaya Paika (The Lion’s Share) 30, 267 The Lesser Evil 267-8 Ducasse, Alain 203 Dulwich College 166 Dyachenko, Boris 165 Dyachenko, Tatyana (Tanya) 50, 52, 145, 162, 165, 204 Dzerzhinsky, Felix 173 East End, London 21, 190 Eastern Bloc, collapse of (late 1980s) 22 Eastern Oil Company 210 Easton, Isle of Portland 11, 12 Easton Neston, neat Towcester 146 Eaton Square, London 136, 137, 140-41 Ecclestone, Bernie 162 Eclipse (yacht) 155-6 Economic and Trade Ministry 61 Economist, The 221 Ecstasea (yacht) 154 Ekho Moskvy radio station 25, 75, 271, 280 Elizabeth II, Queen 142 Elliott Hotel, Gibraltar 235 Ellison, Larry 153 Enron scandal 337 Esher, Surrey 143 Eurocement 157 Eurocement Holding AG 157 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) 126, 127, 128 European Champions League 154 European Union 330, 331, 332 Evans, Chris 111, 112 Evans, Jonathan 270 Evening Standard 132, 346, 365 Evraz 157, 363 Exclusive London 174-5 ExxonMobil 230, 245 Fabergé 192 Falileyev, Judge Igor 357 ‘family, the’ 51-2, 56 Farnborough Airport 152 Farouk, King of Egypt 129 Fatherland All-Russia Party 73 Fayed, Camilla 181 FBI 359 Federal Law N 153-F3 310-11 Feldman, Andrew 334 Felshtinsky, Yuri 292 Fennell, Theo (jewellers) 26 Fezan Ltd 236 Fiat 38 financial crash (1998) 218, 221 Financial Dynamics 256 Financial Times 63, 131, 236, 275, 323, 339 Finans business magazine 55, 363 Finsbury 256 Firebird Fund 80 first Gulf War 130, 131 Fitasc Sporting British clay pigeon shooting Grand Prix 148 Fitzgerald, Edward, QC 213 Fleming, Roddie 161 Florida International University 61 Fomichev, Katya 104-5, 181 Fomichev, Ruslan 104-5, 181 Forbes magazine 24, 77, 363 Forbes Russia 246, 272, 273 Ford, Tom 179 Foreign Office 7, 241, 261, 270, 282, 303, 307 Foreign Policy Centre (FPC) 225 Fortnum & Mason 24 Forus 40, 78, 79, 80 Forward Media Group 320 Fox, James 125 Fox and Gibbons 94 Foxwell, Gavin 8 France, affluent Russians move to 22 Francis I, King of France 149 Fraud Squad 261 Fredriksen, John 128, 132 Freeland, Chrystia 63 French Foreign Legion 108 French Special Forces 108 Freud, Lucian: Benefits Supervisor Sleeping 201 Fridman, Mikhail 49 Friedman, Thomas 61-2 Frieze Fair 188, 192 Frontline (American news programme) 63, 76 Frontline Club, London 36 FSB (Federal Security Service) 53, 62, 71, 74, 86, 103, 106, 115, 230, 231, 262, 267, 275, 281, 285, 286, 287, 289-90, 292, 293, 296, 305-9, 312, 313, 338 Fulham Football Club 163 Fyning Hill, Rogate, West Sussex 124, 130, 152, 161, 163, 200, 201, 353 G8 summits 259-60, 309, 360 Gagosian, Larry 202 Gallitzin, Prince Gregory 167 Garda Worldwide 130 GAZ 157 Gazprom 76, 157, 173, 233, 270-71, 317, 341, 362 Geffen, David 194 Geldof, Bob 172 General Motors 39, 244, 325 George V, King 114 Giacometti, Alberto 201 Gibraltar 19, 100, 104, 215, 216, 235, 236, 241 Gibraltar Criminal Intelligence Agency 241 Gillford, Lord (‘Paddy’) 226-7 Glencore 340 global economic crisis (2008) 17 Global Leadership Foundation (GLF) 275-6 Global Options Group Inc 335, 336 Glushkov, Nikolai 92, 96, 102-3, 279 Goldfarb, Alex 65, 80, 82-3, 275, 281, 291, 297, 298, 337 Goldfarb, Alex with Litivinenko, Marina: Death of a Dissident 307 Goldsmith, Sir James 55 Goldsmith, Lord (Peter) 279 Golubev, Yuri 245 Goodwin, James 334 Gorbachev, Mikhail 32, 35, 40, 171, 173, 199, 312 Gorbunova, Yelena 72, 110, 111, 113, 114 GPW Ltd 351 Grand Bleu, Le (yacht) 153, 154, 155, 203 Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat 203-4 Grayson, Patrick 351 Gref, German 330 Greig, Geordie 171, 172, 345-6, 365 Grey Advertising 222 Grigoriev, Boris Dmitrievich: Faces of Russia 194 Group Menatep Ltd (GML) 215-16, 227, 235, 236 Group of Seven 49 GRU 270, 287 GSS Global 248 Gstaad, Switzerland 19 Guardian 195, 268, 280, 281, 369 Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas, Moscow 43 Gucci 179 Guernsey 236 Guinness, Lady Honor 320-21 Gulf States 99 Gusinsky, Vladimir 49, 75-6, 82, 83, 86, 132, 196, 280 Gutseriyev, Mikhail 165, 360-62 Gyunel 169 Hague, Ian 80 Hakkasan restaurant, London 176 Hamnett, Professor Chris 353 Hampton Court Palace 171 Hamstone House, St George’s Hill, Weybridge 145 Hannant, Paul 8 Hanson, Lord 226 Hanson Plc 226 Harding, James 17 Harewood estate, near Windsor 142, 203 Harrods department store, London 26, 123, 125, 137, 163, 174 Harrods Estates 135 Harrogate Ladies’ College 166 Harrow School 165 Harry’s Bar restaurant, South Audley Street, London 101, 109 Hartlands 145-6 Harvard University-Dow Jones US-Russian Investment Symposium 328 Harvey, David 17-18 Harvey Nichols department store, London 174, 180 Fifth Floor Restaurant 26 Hascombe Court, near Godalming, Surrey 111-12 Haslam, Nicholas 105, 136 Hawksmoor, Nicholas 146 Hazlitt, William 191 Health Protection Agency 298, 300 Heath Lodge, Iver, Buckinghamshire 110 Heath, Sir Edward 304 Hello!

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles
by Michael Gross
Published 1 Nov 2011

A brother of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah owns three lots near Mulholland Drive (literally around the bend from Jack Nicholson) totaling 55,000 square feet; Bambang Trihatmodjo, the late Indonesian dictator Suharto’s second son, is said to have bought two or three (after Suharto family business associates reportedly invested in Adler and Ezralow’s purchase of the tract); former Disney boss Michael Eisner bought and sold three properties; mobile home park operator Lee Kort sold his 27,000-square-foot mansion for $36.7 million to public-works builder Ronald Tutor in 2008. Other owners in the north have included Indonesian billionaire Peter Sondakh; the comedian Paul Reiser; California Pizza Kitchen founder Larry Fink; Michael Jackson lawyer John Branca; the St. Petersburg, Russia–based corporate raider Alexander Sabadash; the leveraged buyout specialist Alec Gores; former Marvel Entertainment chairman Avi Arad; tech tycoon and Tesla Motors CEO Ze’ev Drori; baseball’s Barry Bonds; Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Ed Glazer; the former head of Noble Group, a Hong Kong–based commodities trading giant, Michel Harouche; financier and fashion executive Fabian Oberfeld; former studio heads Richard Frank and Mike Medavoy; casino executive Paul Alanis; Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and nose-job specialist Paul Nassif and his wife Adrienne Maloof, whose family owns the Sacramento Kings (and who is a “real housewife” of Beverly Hills); hand tool and hardware mogul Eric Smidt; and Perfect 10 magazine publisher and Hugh Hefner–wannabe Norman Zadeh.

…

Shortly after moving into Bellagio House, Murdock made his most public move yet, earning a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal—he put together a deal to have Occidental Petroleum buy Iowa Beef, and came away with a 2.8 percent share of Occidental, which made him the company’s top shareholder, barely edging out its chairman, Dr. Armand Hammer. The Journal painted him as a greenmailer, one of those eighties corporate raiders who bought stakes in companies in the hope management would pay a premium to be rid of them. But he was really chasing deals, and the excitement of reinforcing his self-image. “Anything man’s mind can imagine, he can do,” he told the Journal. In 1982, Murdock bought Cannon Mills for $414 million.

…

With that, I said, ‘What I want to do is find a cure for cancer.’ ” Gabriele’s death spurred an interest in brain, nutrition, and biotechnology research, which became his philanthropic focus. Another heartache followed the same year, when their eldest son from Gabriele’s first marriage drowned in an accident at twenty-three. Though devastated, Murdock didn’t falter in business. Within a year, he’d beaten another corporate raider, Irwin Jacobs, and taken over a troubled 104-year-old real estate company called Castle & Cook, which owned almost the entire 90,000-acre Hawaiian island of Lanai, and Dole Food, the pineapple and banana company that had been born there. Dole also owned 60,000 acres on other Hawaiian islands, 6,600 acres in California, and plantations in Thailand and the Philippines, where most of its fruit was grown.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

Typically interventions were driven less by improving the health of the companies they targeted or their employees, but how much money could be made. They had taken a lesson from Lord White—one of the pioneering British corporate raiders of the 1970s and 1980s. White used to boast that he had never stepped foot on the shop floor of any of the companies that he had bought. As his business partner, James Hanson, later acknowledged, the name of the game was to get hold of ‘tomorrow’s money today’. 190 It was a philosophy embraced in full by this new breed of corporate raider. In the UK and the US, the great majority of mergers have occurred as a result of pressure from investment banks which both advise the boardrooms and raise the finance to fund the deals.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

Apart from facing lighter regulation, there are many ways for the private equity buyer to cut costs in the acquired company. One lump of cost is often the obligation to pay into the pension scheme, and if the company is a long-established one the pension scheme liabilities may be huge. So much so that, to a financial analyst or corporate raider, a company like BT or British Airways is really a pension scheme with a company attached: BT has a market value of £11 billion with pension liabilities of £65 billion, while British Airways has a market value of £7 billion with pension liabilities of £31 billion. This demonstrates the potential attraction for acquirers of escaping pension commitments.

…

It is also highly convenient for the multinationals that the bulk of the UK’s tax load is borne by workers through payroll taxes and by consumers via VAT.40 As the footprint of the US multinationals expands, the burden on UK workers and savers increases. There is a further associated tax effect: the ability of US corporations to eliminate tax has also encouraged the swallowing up of local companies: the first cost that a US corporate raider cuts when acquiring a British company is the payment of tax. And, like a ratchet, this progressively erodes the UK’s tax base of those who can be relied on to contribute towards the nation’s hospitals, essential services and state pension. Global tax deal means multinationals will pay 15 per cent – or less For decades there has been a desire to stop multinationals shifting profits to tax havens and to prevent countries from competing by setting ever lower rates of company tax.

All the Money in the World
by Peter W. Bernstein
Published 17 Dec 2008

These two sectors, more than any others, represented “Oklahoma” in the money rush of the last twenty-five years. More traditional fields for making big money, such as oil and manufacturing, grew at a much slower rate. In the 1980s, as the chapter on finance, Beyond Wall Street, chronicles, corporate raiders dominated the news, with Michael Milken (the so-called junk bond king) becoming the financial poster boy of his generation. Milken and other leveraged buyout (LBO) players would, in the popular phrase, “unlock” the value of the American corporation; typically, they would buy a company with borrowed money and then sell off some of its pieces and ruthlessly streamline others until they repaid their debt and made back their investment many times over.

…

Even when they make it to the top, many of the 400 do not stop gambling. Shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig6 poured as much as $850 million into building a wood pulp factory in the middle of the Amazon. Donald Trump borrowed7 hundreds of millions of dollars to build on his father’s substantial real-estate empire. And oilman and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens8 bet his entire company, Mesa Petroleum, which he had spent most of his life building, on his instinct that the falling price of natural gas would eventually go up. (Although the price later went up, it didn’t at the time, and Pickens was bought out.) Big-time entrepreneurs don’t just capture the imagination: They embody something of the American Dream.

…

And billionaire industrialist Dennis Washington: Contavespi, “Tips from Winners in the Game of Wealth.” 6. Shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig: “Daniel Ludwig, Billionaire Businessman Dies at 95,” obituary, New York Times, Aug. 29, 1992. 7. Donald Trump borrowed: Mark Singer, “Trump Solo,” The New Yorker, May 19, 1997. 8. And oilman and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens: Joseph Nocera, “Return of the Raider,” Fortune, May 27, 2002. 9. Among the men: Christopher Palmeri and Marla Matzer, “The Plaza Hotel, That’s Not My Style,” Forbes, Feb. 26, 1996. 10. “I figured my worst risk”: Richard L. Stern, “Denny’s Always the Low-Cost Producer,” Forbes, May 15, 1989. 11.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

The government largely stood back while all this restructuring took place on the grounds that corporate turmoil promoted wealth creation. Antitrust legislators stood pat for WorldCom’s $37 billion merger with MCI, and Citicorp’s $70 billion merger with Travelers. There were a few exceptions. Rudy Giuliani stepped in to discipline two of the greatest corporate raiders, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, and the antitrust authorities fought an intense battle with Bill Gates. Much discussed though they were at the time, however, these exceptions did little to change the character of the era. THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION Ronald Reagan inaugurated the most exuberant era on Wall Street since the 1920s.

…

These “junk bonds,” as they were dubbed, helped to finance America’s entrepreneurial revolution: Milken’s clients included Ted Turner, the founder of Turner Broadcasting; Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News International; Leonard Riggio, the founder of Barnes & Noble; and William McGowan, the founder of MCI Communications, the first serious challenger to AT&T’s monopoly on long-distance telephone calls. They also became some of the most valuable tools in the restructuring wars: corporate raiders used them to buy shares in the companies that they wanted to take over, with a view to using the acquired companies’ assets to pay off their debts; and many targets of takeover attempts bought back their own shares from raiders at a premium. Junk bonds expanded from a mere 3.5 percent of the bond market in 1977 to a quarter of the market a decade later.

…

Many of the thrifts that bought junk bonds went bankrupt, as did Drexel Burnham itself in February 1990. Michael Milken was indicted on almost a hundred counts of racketeering, ending up in jail, and his company, Drexel Burnham, was forced into bankruptcy. Financial innovation continued regardless. In the 1990s, venture capital funds took over from corporate raiders as the pacesetters of capitalism, focusing on start-ups rather than mature firms, and making less use of leverage. America had far more venture capital available than the rest of the world combined: in the mid-1990s, Massachusetts had more venture capital than Britain, and California had more than the whole of Europe.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

Investors wanted the company to pay dividends. In August 2013, Carl Icahn trumpeted on Twitter that he had bought a large stake in Apple and spoken by phone with Cook. Icahn made his message clear: Apple needed to return capital to increase the price of its depressed shares. One of the original corporate raiders, Icahn had made a name for himself in the 1980s by amassing stakes in mismanaged companies such as TWA and pushing them to cut costs and sell assets. He had spurned analysis and followed his gut, turning to the press to make his case if management didn’t listen. He had built a personal fortune of $18 billion with smarts and bluster.

…

He suggested that the company borrow against it and use the borrowed money to return cash to investors. Then, when the U.S. tax laws changed, it could return the cash from overseas to the U.S. and pay off the debt. Cook didn’t say much, but he made sure that Icahn had the impression that he was open to the idea by giving the corporate raider ample room to lead the conversation. He listened intently as Icahn spoke and nodded in a way that gave Icahn assurance that he appreciated the campaign for buybacks. After the dinner, Icahn issued a letter calling on Apple to finance buybacks with debt. The company eventually increased its share repurchase plan from $60 billion to $90 billion.

…

The brand campaign: TouchGameplay, “Official Designed by Apple in California Trailer,” YouTube, June 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xD569Io7kE. Slate pilloried it: Seth Stevenson, “Designed by Doofuses in California,” Slate, August 26, 2013, https://slate.com/business/2013/08/designed-by-apple-in-california-ad-campaign-why-its-so-terrible.html. One of the original corporate raiders: Cara Lombardo, “Carl Icahn Is Nearing Another Landmark Deal. This Time It’s with His Son,” Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/carl-icahn-is-nearing-another-landmark-deal-this-time-its-with-his-son-11571457602; interview with Carl Icahn. Ahrendts had tripled: Jeff Chu, “Can Apple’s Angela Ahrendts Spark a Retail Revolution?

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs
by Gina Keating
Published 10 Oct 2012

Wattles, however, would not turn over the information to Antioco unless his rival agreed not to tender an offer directly to Hollywood Video’s shareholders. Wattles said publicly that he welcomed the offer, but he privately expressed doubts to the Blockbuster executives that U.S. antitrust regulators would approve the deal. The proposal had drawn the attention of billionaire investor Carl Icahn, a former corporate raider and self-styled shareholder activist, who then planned to profit on both ends of the Blockbuster–Hollywood Video merger. Icahn sank $150 million into Blockbuster shares and about $60 million into Hollywood Video. In a securities filing Icahn said he might seek to participate in, and influence the outcome of, any proxy solicitation and the bidding process involving the owner of the Hollywood Video stores.

…

He called for Blockbuster’s board to find a private equity buyer for the company; a move that Viacom had tried and failed at before splitting it off. Then Icahn demanded another special dividend for Blockbuster shareholders that would have totaled more than $300 million—again rejected by Antioco and the board. The tension between the two men rose, egged on by Stead, who vowed not to submit to the former corporate raider’s tactics. • • • AS THE CRISIS with Hollywood Video unfolded, attorneys general in several states started looking into the End of Late Fees promotion with great interest—especially the policies under which Blockbuster charged a $1.25 restocking fee if consumers returned a movie or game outside the seven-day rental window, or the full sale price of the item minus the rental fee if they kept DVDs beyond a seven-day grace period.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 6 Apr 2020

When John Carpenter filmed his 1981 postapocalyptic thriller Escape from New York—a commentary on Manhattan’s shattered state—he chose to do it in St. Louis because he did not need to build a set. St. Louis’s natural end-times look filled in just fine. New York and St. Louis were brothers in blight—until they weren’t. The rapacious greed of the Reagan 1980s marked the rise of New York corporate raiders like Carl Icahn, who bought out St. Louis companies like Trans World Airlines (TWA), draining St. Louis of its money and resources and pride. TWA was “a broken-winged bird helpless before the pounce of the ultimate corporate predator,” wrote St. Louis magazine, describing the shock of Missourians that an out-of-state tycoon had bought something as essential as an airline purely to destroy it and pocket the profits.8 By the late 1980s, New York and St.

…

We are living in Roy Cohn’s America, directed by his apt pupil, with the aid of a crime syndicate that does not recognize law, freedom, or the sanctity of human life. In the late 1970s, as Ford told New York to drop dead, Cohn and Trump picked at the city’s corpse like vultures. Manhattan was ready to be torn down and bludgeoned and remade with blood money in concrete: Trump Tower, the Plaza, the many, many casinos. Corporate raiders who would later aid the Trump administration—Carl Icahn, Wilbur Ross, Rupert Murdoch—commenced a national shakedown disguised as economic revival. Scams stretched from Atlantic City to Gary, Indiana, to St. Louis and beyond, to international waters where moguls parked their stolen assets.29 Critical regulations were tossed—the fairness doctrine that had protected media; the labor laws that had protected unions.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies
by Barry Meier
Published 17 May 2021

To gather material, Kroll investigators and researchers scoured lawsuits, property deeds, corporate filings, and other kinds of public records. They also collected trash outside a target’s home and shadowed people, all of which is legal. Fortune 500 companies facing hostile takeover bids also turned to Kroll Associates to unearth embarrassing information that would repel them. One well-known corporate raider of the 1980s, T. Boone Pickens, complained that Kroll Associates had a two-foot-thick dossier on him that it offered to sell for $500,000 to any company he tried to take over. Soon companies were paying anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 to Kroll Associates and other big corporate intelligence firms to do “due diligence” or background investigations of potential business partners, takeover targets, or investments.

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Mary Cuddehe, described how the Kroll official: Her article about Kroll’s efforts to recruit her appeared in The Atlantic magazine on August 2, 2010, “A Spy in the Jungle.” “Spider-Man, the Hulk—I really owe my business”: This anecdote comes from William Finnegan’s profile of Jules Kroll that appeared in The New Yorker on October 19, 2009, “The Secret Keeper.” T. Boone Pickens, complained that Kroll Associates: The corporate raider was quoted by Douglas Frantz in a Los Angeles Times article of October 9, 1988, “Kroll—Wall Street’s Super Sleuth.” “Wall Street’s private eye”: This description of Jules Kroll was contained in a March 4, 1985, article by Fred Blakeley in The New York Times, “Wall Street’s Private Eye.” “Many of us are corporate misfits”: That lawyer, Charles E.

Liar's Poker
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Jan 1989

A take-over of a large corporation could generate billions of dollars' worth of junk bonds, for not only would new junk be issued, but the increased leverage transformed the outstanding bonds of a former blue-chip corporation to junk. To raid corporations, however, Milken needed a few hit men. The new and exciting job of invading corporate boardrooms appealed mainly to men of modest experience in business and a great deal of interest in becoming rich. Milken funded the dreams of every corporate raider of note: Ronald Perelman, Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Mar-vin Davis, Irwin Jacobs, Sir James Goldsmith, Nelson Peltz, Samuel Heyman, Saul Steinberg, and Asher Edelman. "If you don't inherit it, you have to borrow it," says one. Most sold junk bonds through Drexel to raise money to storm such hitherto unassailable fortresses as Revlon, Phillips Petroleum, Unocal, TWA, Disney, AFC, Crown Zellerbach, National Can, and Union Carbide.

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For the good of Salomon Brothers, explained Gutfreund. "I was shocked," Gutfreund said of Perelman's bid. "Perelman was just a name to me, but I felt that the structure of Salomon Brothers, in terms of our relationships with clients, their trust and confidence, would not do well with someone deemed to be a corporate raider." Except for the first sentence, this statement rings false from the beginning to end. Let's take the last part first. Our relationship with clients hadn't suffered from having a South African as a shareholder; why should it suffer from an association with a hostile raider? I don't care to dwell on the morality of either apartheid or hostile take-overs.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

Well-functioning financial markets—accessible banks and a stock market—enable firms to invest and grow and then push them to perform well. A liquid stock market means owners can punish underperforming managers by selling their shares, driving down the firm’s stock market valuation. Corporate raiders add to this discipline. A firm performing badly enough to have a low stock market valuation may be bought out by a corporate raider, whose first action after taking over the firm often is to fire the managers. The threat of takeover serves to induce managers to run the firm efficiently. Product markets also provide discipline. Firms that face competition to sell their output must produce at high enough quality and low enough prices that consumers buy their products ahead of their competitors’.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

The whole night is divided into two types of performances from the stage. The young and the helped, mostly black and brown, repeatedly dance for their donors. Then, between performances, older white men are brought up to praise them and to talk about, and be applauded for, their generosity to the program. Most of the men work in finance. They include the corporate raiders who, seeking to raise profits by cutting costs, have helped to do away with stable employment. They are the gentrifiers who have pushed real estate prices through the roof and made it harder for families like those of the young dancers to maintain a livelihood in the city. They are the beneficiaries of tax laws that give carried interest a major break and help to keep the public coffers low and the schools attended by the city’s poor underfunded, thus driving them into the streets and occasionally, when they are lucky, into the charity’s arms.

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Was he going to say that their business practices were part of the problem, or that they needed to pay higher taxes? Would he “meet them where they were”? Was it possible to do all these things? On that day, at least, no. Walker, in his opening remarks, referred a few times to Henry Kravis, one of KKR’s founders, as “a philanthropist.” He was no longer a corporate raider, a pioneer of the kind of value extraction Walker deplored in the limo. Walker spoke highly of his own experience in the financial services industry. It had given him “skills”—some of which, presumably, were the protocols that he could now tell himself he had redeployed in service of the weak.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

The agencies complain they are being choked by low fees, but the CEO knows that agency holding company profit margins are still a relatively robust 15 or so percent. So the company CEO demands to know the return on investment of what is spent on marketing, and the honest answer is at best a guess. Corporate raiders are circling, pressing companies to manufacture short-term gains. The average CMO holds office for only about two years before being replaced by a new CMO. The new CMO is probably inclined to bring in a new agency and to insist that the agency reduce its costs. What does the CMO do about the digital fraud issue?

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With his friend Maurice Levy soon to step down as CEO of Publicis, and with the uncertainty as to who would succeed Sorrell, John Wren, and Michael Roth, all north of the customary retirement age, their stocks might be impacted. Viselike cost pressures on the holding companies were tightening, driven by C-suite demands to slash spending, by fears of corporate raiders mounting hostile takeovers, and by spiraling mistrust between clients and agencies. Procter & Gamble would announce that over the next five years it would slash its $10.5 billion marketing budget by $2 billion. Keith Weed’s Unilever, which fended off a Kraft Heinz takeover assault in February 2017, would cut its agency fees by nearly 20 percent and the number of ads it produces by 30 percent, especially impacting its foremost supplier, WPP.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future
by Alec Ross
Published 13 Sep 2021

The effect of shareholder primacy was to drive a stark line between a company’s shareholders and its stakeholders, defined as every other party affected by its business and including its employees, its community, its country, its customers, and the environment. Under the new model, shareholder profits came first and foremost, and any significant investment in other stakeholders became a liability. The mid-1980s saw the rise of hostile takeovers and corporate raiders, who were in many respects the vanguard of shareholder primacy. They would identify distressed or stagnant companies and buy up equity until they gained control. Then they would reorganize every division toward maximizing returns to shareholders, rooting out any inefficiencies they could find.

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See corporate power competition, capitalism and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) Corley, Andrea Corley, Gabriella Corley family corporate autocracy corporate farming corporate impact, measuring corporate power checks on diversity initiatives and government leadership and government policy and market consolidation and New Deal–era checks on rise in corporate raiders corporate socialism corporate tax, developing nations and corporations. See also corporate power; specific corporations anti-union behavior of cybersecurity and foreign policy and government bailouts for philanthropy and principles of regulations and social contract and social responsibility and tax havens and wartime and worker equity in COVID-19 Cowper-Coles, Sherard Cucinelli, Brunello cyber-military-industrial complex cybersecurity cyber war Daimler-Benz data Daws, Gavan Defense Digital Service De Grisogono Delaware Delmarva Peninsula Deloitte Delta Air Lines democracy vs. authoritarianism generational attitudes toward inefficiency of social contract and surveillance and Democrats De Niro, Robert Denmark developing nations.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis
by David Boyle
Published 15 Jan 2014

Two weeks later, Northern Rock said that it would merge with the Heart of England Building Society. Something was going on, and the Cheltenham & Gloucester announcement changed everything. Even the giant Halifax decided it would have to rethink its decision not to convert. What if there was a hostile bid? Could they ever withstand it? Were their own reserves too much of a temptation to corporate raiders? Could building societies survive at all? A year of agonizing and rethinking followed, and the Observer was reporting: ‘The great and good of the building-society industry will sit down together on Thursday to consider whether the organisations they lead are bound for extinction.’[12] In the months that followed the C&G announcement, as Coles took over the reins at the Building Societies Association, it began to look as though he would have no members left.

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We are incandescently awful.’ The short-termism of politicians lies behind the third element of Ellison’s perfect storm. It is the problem of pension surpluses. This hardly sounds like a problem, but it was. For one thing, having big pension reserves made companies afraid that they might be the target of corporate raiders, who wanted to get hold of their huge pension pots. For another thing, it was a temptation too far for hungry politicians. ‘For twenty years, pensions had surpluses,’ says Ellison now. ‘The word was a kind of incentive to governments to raid pension schemes. They shouldn’t have used the word “surplus”; they should have used a word like “actuarial reserves”.

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism
by Richard Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2018

One Price Waterhouse partner later recalled that the profession had become ‘so spoiled that we didn’t really have the muscles that we needed to cope with the 1970s’.15 GENTLEMEN ACCOUNTANTS Three and a half thousand miles away, Britain experienced its own 1960s mergers-and-acquisition boom, kicked off by a young chartered accountant named Jim Slater. His skills in reading companies’ books told him how much hidden value there was in stagnant companies often run but no longer owned by the old industrial families. They just needed to be broken up, stripped down and sold off. Where Slater led, a gang of infamous corporate raiders including the likes of James Goldsmith and Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland followed, egged on by a Labour government that saw takeovers as the way to shake up moribund industries. It was a cut-throat business, and one in which – just as in the US – company balance sheets, profit statements and earnings forecasts moved centre stage.

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A year later, after signing off the 1987 audit, Atchison took a top job with a Keating-owned construction firm on a salary of $930,000 – far higher than any bean counter could dream of at the time.1 Atchison’s successor, a woman named Janice Vincent, did speak out. The following year she disputed Lincoln’s treatment of a deal with British corporate raider James Goldsmith, refusing to admit that a swap of financial assets had immediately generated a $55m gain. ‘Lady, you’ve just lost a job,’ Keating told her. Arthur Young did now resign from the audit, but Vincent’s stand made a couple of important points. It showed that, however skewed the major accountancy firms’ priorities had become, there were still people of integrity and courage within them.

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
by Rachel Slade
Published 9 Jan 2024

“We will awake to find that we have socialism,” he cautioned television audiences in 1964. “One of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” Unions were depicted as a drag on the economy or outright criminal. In stark contrast, the media fawned over corporate raiders, stockbrokers, and deregulators. These were the people my classmates aspired to be when I first arrived at Columbia University in 1987. Remarkable to think that just a generation earlier, Columbia students were holding sit-ins in support of civil rights and protesting the Vietnam War. IT TAKES CHUTZPAH On January 3, 2020, Maine was hunkering down for another winter.

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But I spent two years with them, the best in the industrial apparel-manufacturing business, and within two years, I was opening a facility for Fruit of the Loom in Montreal, then North Carolina, then Mississippi. Over the next several years, I was opening facilities all over the country. We went from half a billion to $2.4 billion in seven years.” A year after Marty took the job at Fruit, the company was taken over in a leveraged buyout by serial corporate raider William Farley, a Dale Carnegie–esque figure—handsome, fit, charming—who was itching to try his hand at creating a 1980s-style monopoly through mergers and acquisitions. He began expanding Fruit. The Federal Trade Commission had just stopped enforcing antitrust laws, launching a thirty-five-year mergers and acquisitions frenzy.

Why Wall Street Matters
by William D. Cohan
Published 27 Feb 2017

Morgan once controlled, set out to create a new supply of these so-called junk bonds by persuading companies that never before had access to the capital markets—where companies go to get capital from public investors as opposed to trying to get it from banks—to issue bonds underwritten by Drexel Burnham. Not only did Drexel underwrite these bonds for corporations that could not get financing from more traditional sources—banks, insurance companies, and the public-equity markets—but it also pioneered the selling of junk bonds to help corporate raiders, like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens, get the capital they needed to take over companies such as TWA and Gulf Oil, which they would otherwise have been unable to do, and to help private-equity firms, such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the Texas Pacific Group, get the money they needed to buy companies with their investors’ money.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
by Tim Wu
Published 14 Jun 2018

To be sure, there are some private checks on bigness, or of the building of empire for empire’s sake. The firm’s owners or board of directors may order management to stop expanding for no good reason but their own welfare. Smaller, more efficient competitors do sometimes manage to kill a bloated dinosaur, or the firm may be taken over by a corporate raider who sees value in breaking the firm into smaller pieces. But unfortunately, these market-based checks on bigness can and do fail, and their mythology can outmatch their real effectiveness. For they are, at all times, counterbalanced by the advantages and attractions of power, and the allure of monopoly profit.

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
by Russell Gold
Published 7 Apr 2014

By this time, the earliest Barnett Shale wells had a couple years of production data and looked better than he expected. Moreover, the refracks of old wells looked quite promising. Mitchell wasn’t trying to put lipstick on a pig, Hall began to realize, he was selling a prizewinning hog. Hall, a geologist who had worked for wildcatter-turned-corporate raider T. Boone Pickens before ending up at Devon, got increasingly excited the longer he crunched numbers in the data room. He returned to Oklahoma and started working out some rough estimates. If these wells could be replicated across all of Mitchell’s acreage, what would that mean? “This was just a big gas factory,” he concluded.

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Its introduction was accidental. A week after Devon’s 2002 presentation to Wall Street analysts, Chesapeake acquired Canaan Energy. Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon had been pursuing Canaan for more than a year. When Canaan rebuffed McClendon’s initial offers, he used bare-knuckled tactics pioneered by corporate raiders in the 1980s. “We believe it is clear that management’s plan is not working,” McClendon wrote in an open letter to Wall Street after buying up 7.7 percent of the company’s stock. “If given the opportunity, most Canaan shareholders would prefer to sell their stock at a premium to us rather than waiting on management’s plan to work.”

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 19 Jun 2005

Individual investors grumble that they are the last to receive information about the stocks they own and the last to find buyers when security prices are dropping. Giant financial institutions complain that security prices are dangerously volatile. There is a widely held perception that overpaid MBAs, corporate raiders, and investment managers who talk like astrophysicists are living in a world of their own, detached from the realities of people who really work for a living. But that is only part of the story. The untold part, which is what this book is about, reveals that much of this fear and resentment is misplaced.

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That is a simplistic view. We learned during the 1980s that the price of a company’s stock exerts a powerful influence on the behavior of its managers. Managers who are asleep at the switch or who prefer their own perks to the stockholders’ interest soon find their companies on the bargain counter and a corporate raider shoving them out the door. The stock market is a huge voting booth in which the ballots are counted every minute of the business day. No officeholder in a publicly held corporation can afford to ignore it. But there is a more subtle force at work. Takeovers make big headlines, but most investors, even the biggest, are in the stock market to buy fragments of companies, not whole companies.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay
by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

Brierley started a share-market tip sheet and began investing in the share market when he was still a teenager, and in 1961, while still in his twenties, he registered his own investment company. He soon discovered the value of agitating boards to realise value by breaking up their companies. By the 1970s, he’d matured from a pesky corporate gadfly to a feared asset stripper and corporate raider, wrote Yvonne van Dongen in a May 2011 feature on Brierley. ‘In the “greed is good” 1980s, he was recast more favourably as an entrepreneur, made a knight of the realm and chairman of New Zealand’s largest bank, Bank of New Zealand,’ van Dongen noted.3 Brierley Investments had become the largest company in New Zealand, with investments in 300 companies including Galeries Lafayette in Paris and Air New Zealand.

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In the mid-1980s, brokers were caught in the middle of a David versus Goliath battle as Robert Holmes à Court tried to take control of mining giant BHP. Nicknamed ‘the Big Fella’, the Broken Hill Proprietary Company was Australia’s largest and oldest company. The prospect of it falling into the hands of Holmes à Court, a Rhodesian corporate raider armed with a loan from US investment bank Merrill Lynch, was too much for the mining establishment to bear. In 1986, in the middle of the battle, Robertson and other brokers were summoned for drinks at BHP by chief executive Brian Loton, and lectured about the company’s wisdom and why Holmes à Court was a ‘scheming satan’.

Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire
by Hans Gremeil and William Sposato
Published 15 Dec 2021

It is also a focal point for much of the criticism of Japanese companies from foreign investors, who contend that a company’s purpose is to make as much money as possible, with the government responsible for all the societal issues. But this “global” viewpoint is itself in transition today, in many respects moving closer to traditional Japanese concepts. Where hedge funds and corporate raiders have for decades pushed the concept of shareholder value (as seen in ever-rising stock prices), new voices have now emerged. Even the World Economic Forum (WEF), the quintessential talking shop for the rich and powerful, clearly noticed the winds changing in 2020, using its fiftieth anniversary to launch a new Davos Manifesto.

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Pickens charged that Koito was actually subservient to Toyota as its major customer and that the automaker used what are known as “monopsony” powers (the inverse of a monopoly) to force Koito to deliver its products at the lowest possible price. Koito charged that Pickens was after none of this. All he wanted, they said, was “greenmail,” in which a corporate raider would loudly demand change and then quietly sell back their shares at a profit in order to go away. The saga became a major element in the US-Japan trade dispute, with members of Congress all too happy to take Pickens’s side against a perceived Japanese monolith. This was when US politicians, business leaders, and labor unions all started to coalesce around the idea of a “Japan threat,” presaging the US-China trade conflict some thirty years later.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
by Robert Bryce
Published 26 Apr 2011

Later that day, he was scheduled to meet with CNN, Fox, and the BBC, followed by visits to the offices of the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal,” and other news outlets. About that same time, Slate named Pickens as number three in its ranking of the eighty most powerful octogenarians in America, behind only U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and billionaire corporate raider Kirk Kerkorian.2 Pickens testified on Capitol Hill, had private meetings with Al Gore and Barack Obama (then a senator), and was a near-constant presence on television—appearing on The Jay Leno Show, and CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, to name just a few.3 Reporters swarmed the Dallas-based billionaire.

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Not even during Enron’s heyday (and downfall) was Ken Lay as visible as Pickens has been over the past few years. Pickens loves the attention. He’s friendly and cordial with reporters. And make no mistake, he’s a savvy operator. Pickens is among a rare breed of entrepreneurs who just knows how to make money. And over the past few decades, he has applied that ability, as an oil man, corporate raider, dealmaker, and money manager, to amass a fortune that Forbes has estimated at $3.1 billion.8 And those billions further burnish his rock-star credentials. Unfortunately for Pickens, though, rock stars don’t have a very long shelf life. Just a few months after Pickens rolled out his grand plan, the Wall Street Journal reported that two investment funds managed by Pickens had lost about $1 billion of his investors’ money.9 And exactly one year after Pickens launched his much-ballyhooed plan, he was forced to admit that his vision for the wind business was in tatters.

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers
by Lawrence G. Mcdonald and Patrick Robinson
Published 21 Jul 2009

Unlike me, who had nothing and was officially associated with one of the least attractive bucket shop gangs on the East Coast. Whether or not that Series 7 was a top priority or just a distant mountain to be climbed made no difference. One by one my new Wharton buddies came and asked to see the study book, especially my pal and roommate Rick Schnall, a nephew of Carl Icahn, the most famous corporate raider on Wall Street, the Muhammad Ali of his trade. It was a big help being among guys like that, because when everyone is involved in the same subject, with similar insights and perceptions, the sheer velocity of the available information is ratcheted up a few notches. They were generous to me with their time and advice, and in turn I let them take a few peeps at the practice exams in the back of my book.

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There was perhaps a poetic edge to Lehman’s participation in this particular deal, since Bobbie Lehman had been such a close friend of his fellow racehorse owner John Hertz, who was also a partner in Lehman. But the two great financiers doubtless would have been astounded at the sheer sophistication of the deal as the Wall Street guys rustled up the cash for the world’s biggest car-rental corporation to essentially buy itself for the corporate raiders from New York: Clayton Dubilier & Rice, the Carlyle Group, and Merrill Lynch. This one set the standard, as they put the debt from buying the corporation onto the balance sheet of the Hertz Corporation, repaying it with the company’s own cash flow. John D. Hertz was once described by that bard of the casting couch, Louis B.

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Published 25 Feb 2021

He set about hunting for sources of funding to buy out Rich’s remaining stake. After a tough few years for the company, its traditional banks were unwilling to hand it more money. Strothotte and his traders discussed bringing in as an investor Martin Ebner, a bow-tie-wearing billionaire known as Switzerland’s leading corporate raider. But Ebner, who had made his name buying up stakes in Swiss companies and agitating for change, would have wanted a say in how the company was run, and Strothotte, still smarting from his run-in with Rich, didn’t like that idea. 25 What followed was an outlandish corporate coup, of the kind that could only have been executed in the clubby world of Swiss business in the 1990s.

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In a six-page memo to his closest lieutenants, he set out his plans for Xstrata, a small, struggling Switzerland-listed holding company. He instructed them to scour the globe for mining companies to buy. 1 At forty-three years old, with a stubbly beard and a paunch, Davis looked more like a teddy bear than an uncompromising corporate raider. But the South African’s cuddly-looking exterior belied his confidence and ambition. A few months earlier, he’d received a call from an old acquaintance, Ivan Glasenberg, the CEO-designate of Glencore, with an intriguing offer: would he like to run Xstrata, in which Glencore had a 39% stake, and try to turn it around?

The Little Book of Hedge Funds
by Anthony Scaramucci
Published 30 Apr 2012

At the time, I had no idea what a hedge fund was and if someone asked me I probably would have said it had to do with landscaping (as in hedges) and nothing to do with money management. When I graduated college and law school in the 1980s, the dream job was to work in investment banking. At the time, newspapers, magazines, and journalists glorified the lavish lifestyles of investment bankers and corporate raiders. As hedge fund managers weren’t yet on the media’s radar screen, it wasn’t in the consciousness of the undergraduate wannabe financier. So, the yuppie puppies at Harvard, including me, all signed up for the biggest, lowest-risk firms that we thought could offer the highest reward and paycheck.

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science
by Paul Krugman
Published 18 Feb 2010

For example, not many voters know or care whether the United States uses a substantial amount of its diplomatic capital to open European markets to Central American bananas. Why should they? (I only keep track of the dispute because I have to update my textbook, which includes the sentence: “Efforts to resolve Europe’s banana split have proved fruitless.”) But Carl Lindner, the corporate raider who now owns Chiquita Brands, has strong feelings about the issue; and thanks to his $500,000 in contributions, so does President Clinton. It’s not that Clinton believed that money alone could buy him the election. But money does help, and any practical politician comes to realize that betraying the public interest on small issues involves little political cost, because voters lack the individual incentive to notice.

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
by John Kay
Published 30 Apr 2010

Dunlap was spared possible civil and criminal suits only after he agreed to pay penalties and restitution of fifteen million dollars.10 The history of the last two decades is littered with fallen idols who, like Dunlap, stridently asserted the primacy of wealth. Gordon Gekko, the antihero of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, famously proclaimed: “Greed is good.” Gekko was partly based on Ivan Boesky, a notorious corporate raider of the 1980s, who was reported as telling a class at Columbia: “I want you to know that I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”11 Soon after, Boesky went to prison, convicted of insider trading. The businesses that epitomized the explosion of greed on Wall Street in the 1980s were Salomon Brothers (the firm mercilessly caricatured in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker)12 and Drexel Burnham Lambert (more gently pilloried in Connie Bruck’s The Predators’ Ball).13 Salomon turned bond trading from a backwater into the activity of choice for the financially ambitious, while Drexel Burnham Lambert pioneered the issue of junk bonds.

Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food
by Steve Striffler
Published 24 Jul 2007

The effect of Tyson’s takeover on administrative and managerial jobs may have been swift and not entirely unexpected, but its broader impact on workers and farmers has been more subtle and difficult to judge. Most agree that “it got worse” after Tyson took over, but people also admit that the situation was headed in the same direction under Holly. Indeed, Tyson inherited something of a mess in Wilkesboro. Holly’s attempt to cut costs may have made the company leaner and more attractive to corporate raiders, but it also had made life more difficult for workers and growers, who struggled even during the best of times. Further, during its battle with Tyson and ConAgra, Holly management had been engaged in two bitter disputes with workers and farmers. The first was a relatively straightforward union battle between the company and A New Bird 74 a group of truck drivers, a conflict that would become increasingly intense once Tyson took over and got into the mix.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

Spiteful—Cooperate until an opponent betrays and then always betray. Mistrust—Betray first, then copy opponent’s moves. In each of these strategies, you can see some very human responses or personas. They’re celebrated or vilified in our popular culture as well. On one side, we’ve got Gordon Gekko, the archetypical corporate raider in the 1987 film Wall Street, who famously said, “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the evolutionary spirit.” On the other side, we’ve got George Bailey, from the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life, who epitomizes selflessness throughout the movie and is rewarded through positive relationships and a life lived well.

The Fissured Workplace
by David Weil
Published 17 Feb 2014

Instead, unhappy shareholders of public companies and private equity investors began to question the results of broad acquisition strategies.30 Weakening macroeconomic conditions and declining stock prices created further pressure on conglomerate companies by the late 1960s to demonstrate to investors the value of the highly diversified enterprises. Corporate raiders attacked them as unwieldy and underperforming behemoths. By acquiring the companies through corporate takeover and selling off the loosely related (or unrelated) units, investors could extract value through the improved performance of units closer to the core business, and also benefit by selling the other units to external investors who could gain greater value from them.

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It purchased Beatrice for $8.7 billion in 1986 and began over the next four years to sell off the welter of brands and companies under its umbrella. The final units still operating under the Beatrice name were sold to ConAgra in 1990. By the late 1980s, the flagship conglomerate companies of the 1960s had been dismantled through the actions of private equity companies like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, corporate raiders like T. Boone Pickens, and leveraged buyout machers like Michael Milliken. But breaking apart conglomerated behemoths like Beatrice represented only the start of efforts to focus on core competencies. Along with and following divestment of peripheral business units, the insistent effort to shed turned inward.

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
by Peter Barnes
Published 29 Sep 2006

Sadly, however, Pacific Lumber’s responsible behavior made it easy prey for a takeover. Its concern for nature and its employees diminished its profits and hence its share price. Because of its cutting practices, it held tremendous stands of virgin redwoods that could be liquidated quickly. In addition, its pension plan was overfunded. Spotting all this, corporate raider Charles Hurwitz offered to buy the company in 1985 through a holding company called Maxxam. At first the directors refused, but when Hurwitz threatened to sue them for violating their fiduciary duty to shareholders, the directors succumbed. Hurwitz financed his purchase with junk bonds, the interest on which was more than the historical profits of the company.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

In Britain, which was post-war America’s closest ally, there was a saying that the aim was to keep the Germans down, the Americans in, and the Russians out. All three are now failing. Putin’s Russia has gained a toehold in many central European democracies, and increasingly in Western Europe. Some have likened him to a corporate raider, who buys a minority share of a company’s stock and uses his voting power to disrupt the company. His goal is European disunity. It is an aim he shares with Trump. America’s forty-fifth president has called for other members of the European Union to follow Britain’s lead. After taking office, Trump publicly enquired which European country would be the next to make an exit.

Global Financial Crisis
by Noah Berlatsky
Published 19 Feb 2010

The dramatic change in Iceland, from the poor relation of Europe to one of its wealthiest . . . and now back again, dates from the mid-1990s with the privatisation of the banks and the founding of the country’s Stock Exchange. They had learnt at school all about the last Cod War with Britain, in 1976, when Iceland unilaterally extended its territorial waters, desperate to increase the financial yield from its trawler fleet. So, in keeping with the traditions of their Viking ancestors, the new army of corporate raiders went overseas to seek their fortune. Kaupthing, one of the three banks at centre of the debt crisis, is not even in the top 100 of the world’s biggest banks. But its influence on the British economy is out of all proportion to its 124th ranking. In five years it has underwritten more than £3 billion in debt to help finance British deals. 104 Effects of the Global Financial Crisis on Wealthier Nations Instability and Violence in Iceland The tiny, North Atlantic island of Iceland, whose economy already lies in tatters, was plunged into further crisis on Monday [January 26, 2009] as the coalition government collapsed amid violent protests on the streets. . . .

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business
by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan
Published 28 Jan 2020

The business thrived. But Milken was not content to restrict himself to fallen angels. Soon he expanded and began to use junk bonds to finance leveraged buyouts of companies. ‘Leveraged buyouts’ (LBOs) is a polite term for corporate raiding. Junk bonds were used to finance the hugely ambitious corporate raiders and private equity firms.5 Through junk bond leverage buyouts, companies with poor ratings could acquire better-performing companies. In the deal the acquiring company would use the target companies’ funds to repay the debt it incurred to fund the takeover in the first place – ideally to Milken’s bank.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

A year later, he parlayed this into a $12 billion buyout of a stagnating (but by no means troubled) Sears. At first, the familiar strategy of merciless, life-destroying post-acquisition cost cutting and layoffs did manage to turn around the fortunes of the merged Kmart-Sears, now operating as Sears Holdings. But Lampert’s big wheeze went well beyond the usual corporate raider tales of asset stripping, consolidation and chopping-block use of operations as a vehicle to generate cash for investments elsewhere. Lampert intended to use Sears as a grand free market experiment to show that the invisible hand would outperform the central planning typical of any firm. He radically restructured operations, splitting the company into thirty, and later forty, different units that were to compete against each other.

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
by Leah McGrath Goodman
Published 15 Feb 2011

“Whoever these spies are, they’re getting in the way of trading in the oil ring. Nobody wants to stand near them. The whole floor is moving away, so you have these two guys standing there basically trying to do trades by themselves.” He asked around and found out both men worked for Texas oil man and corporate raider Oscar Wyatt Jr. Until being incarcerated in 2007 for sluicing kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime, Wyatt led a charmed life, running Coastal Corp., an oil company he sold to Texas competitor El Paso Corp. in 2001 for $24 billion, after repeatedly inflaming the U.S. Justice Department by inking foreign oil deals with countries like Libya.

…

The riches of the natural-gas and power markets and the ease with which they could be won and lost would inspire Kenneth Lay to partner up with Jeff Skilling at Enron, which proceeded to make a fortune before bankrupting itself in 2001, bringing the fragile U.S. energy market to the brink. It also made the second career of T. Boone Pickens, the Dallas corporate raider–turned–hedge fund manager, and his second round of billions. And it allowed Enron’s star gas trader, John Arnold, to become a self-made billionaire by the age of thirty-three, after founding a Houston hedge fund, Centaurus Energy Advisers, at just twenty-eight. Five years after starting his fund in 2002, Arnold became the youngest person on the Forbes Richest 400 Americans list, with an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

There is usually an understanding that the company will compensate the employee for these investments, even if there is no written contract to the effect, and thus no legal power for the employee to enforce compliance. When a corporate raider takes over a company where most employees have already made such investments, repudiates these implicit contracts, eliminates jobs and cuts wages, the raider benefits, as do shareholders. Workers take a large hit, though, and they, as well as future employees in the industry, may forever lose trust in management. Harvard economists Andrei Shleifer and Larry Summers emphasized this point in the context of airline takeovers in the 1980s, after the industry was deregulated. When corporate raider Carl Icahn took over Trans World Airlines (TWA) in 1985, they argue that much of the value he squeezed out for shareholders came from abrogating wage agreements and renegotiating worker wages down.42 To the extent that workers were overpaid because of lax prior management and strong union bargaining, this was beneficial for shareholders, but unless lower costs led to lower ticket prices and more travel, this was a wash for society since no additional value was created.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return
by Mihir Desai
Published 22 May 2017

It turns out that the story is richer and more complex than I’ve made out so far. The CEO who died, Melvin Gordon, had married into the Rubin family, that had historically controlled Tootsie Roll. He had been CEO for more than fifty years (he died at age ninety-five) and had repeatedly refused the overtures of Carl Icahn, a notorious corporate raider, who had wanted to sell the company to a larger candy company, like Mars or Hershey’s. The Gordon/Rubin family owned a fair chunk of Tootsie Roll, but the key is that they controlled the company with a separate class of shares that had extra voting rights, effectively meaning they would always call the shots.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
by Jon Ronson
Published 12 May 2011

I wondered if the screenwriters had taken the line from Al Dunlap, but later I discovered that he hadn’t been the only bigwig to say it. “You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog,” Harry Truman had apparently said during his presidency, according to the 1975 biographical play Give ’em Hell, Harry! “You learn in this business, if you want a friend, get a dog,” said the corporate raider and pharmaceutical chief Carl Icahn at some point during the mid-1980s. “If you want to be liked, get a dog,” said the host of CBS’s Inside Edition, Deborah Norville, in the early 1990s. “The people you work with are not your friends.” We gathered in the kitchen—Al, Judy, and Sean the bodyguard.

Swimming With Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers
by Joris Luyendijk
Published 14 Sep 2015

The question often came with a cynical laugh as if nothing genuinely serious was at stake; they seemed to anticipate my answer would be ‘greed’, ‘cocaine’ or ‘arrogance’. Many referred to the Gordon Gekko character from the iconic 1987 film Wall Street and his famous quote: ‘Greed, for want of a better word, is good.’ I would resist pointing out that Gordon Gekko was not a banker but a ‘corporate raider’ or ‘activist shareholder’ taking over companies against their will, and instead I’d tell them how some of the things I’d learnt about bankers had ‘lightning-bolted me off my horse’, as the Flemish expression goes. I had had no idea just how much damage the financial sector can do to society let alone how terrifyingly close to the brink we were in 2008.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen
Published 30 Dec 2014

But Boone Pickens found another way—he persuaded the board to let him offer Hugoton stockholders 1.8 shares of Mesa Petroleum stock for every one Hugoton Production Company share they were willing to sell. In this way, Mesa acquired 30 percent of Hugoton, and Boone Pickens began to earn a reputation as a corporate raider.32 The Hugoton acquisition paved the way for Mesa to become the oil-and-gas giant it remains today, but it was not without personal loss for T. Boone Pickens. The billionaire owned 23 percent of Mesa when he went after Hugoton. “If I’d been as smart as I am today I would’ve said to that board member, ‘If I’m able to pull it off, I take no dilution.’

Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein
by James Patterson , John Connolly and Tim Malloy
Published 10 Oct 2016

Then again, Greenberg had other things on his mind. The Reagan era, when deregulation kicked into high gear, was still on the horizon. But there was already a decreasing amount of government oversight on Wall Street, and a new breed of bare-knuckle traders had begun to push every available limit. It was the start of the age of corporate raiders, and with Ace Greenberg looking out for him, Epstein had no reservations when it came to throwing his weight around. The golden boy’s gift for working the numbers earned him a place in the special-products division, where he worked on extremely complex tax-related problems for a select group of Bear Stearns’s wealthiest clients—an elite within the elite—including Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman.

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon?
by Robert X. Cringely
Published 1 Jun 2014

And when the dividends were distributed to shareholders they’d pay income taxes on it again—double taxation. Shareholder buybacks, then, ought to allow shareholders to receive more money and pay less tax on that money because it is taxed only once at the lower capital gains rate, and shareholders who don’t want to sell shares back aren’t required to. This is the sort of gambit reformed corporate raider Carl Icahn loved to push on the companies in which he invested. IBM, unlike some of the Icahn target companies like Apple and eBay, isn’t at all resistant to buying back its own shares. In the last decade, in fact, IBM has spent $101 billion buying back shares, thereby reducing the number outstanding by about a third.

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 9 Jun 2010

The following week Salomon Brothers issued a research note promising that the bull market would continue into 1988, and the week after that, Byron Wien, a well-known Morgan Stanley strategist and Soros friend, predicted “a new high before this cycle is over.” It was the era of the leveraged buyout, and debt-fueled takeovers were driving stock prices steadily higher; the lives of corporate raiders were the stuff of drooling magazine features. The mood of the moment was captured by a hitherto unknown financier named P. David Herrlinger, who announced a $6.8 billion offer for Dayton Hudson Corporation. Herrlinger appeared on his front lawn to tell reporters that his offer might or might not be a hoax—“It’s no more of a hoax than anything else,” he said—and the news of the apparent takeover sent Dayton Hudson stock into the stratosphere.

…

Stewart and Daniel Hertzberg, “Before the Fall,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 1987, p. 1. 39. Druckenmiller interview. 40. The Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives was considering legislation to eliminate the tax deductions for some interest expenses and to tax “greenmail”—payments made by companies to corporate raiders to buy back their stock at above-market prices to prevent the raider from taking over the company. See Mark Carlson, “A Brief History of the 1987 Stock Market Crash with a Discussion of the Federal Reserve Response” (Federal Reserve discussion paper, November 2006). 41. Soros, Soros on Soros, p. 60.

The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It
by Craig Brandon
Published 17 Aug 2010

The regional accreditation organizations that are supposed to evaluate the quality of education at our colleges and universities seem to have been soundly sleeping as the colleges dumbed down their programs, inflated grades, and turned themselves into entertainment centers. They are like Securities and Exchange Commission watchdogs, fiddling with forms while corporate raiders fleeced millions of Americans and Bernie Madoff set up his Ponzi schemes. There are six regional accreditation groups in the United States, but they all work pretty much the same way. Colleges apply for membership and then become a part of the organization. The college and individual departments submit regular self-study reports about changes they have made and problems they are experiencing.

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 18 Jun 2012

Joining one of these battalions, or one of a handful of the established players, such as Goldman Sachs, that learned to play across almost all new products and markets, almost guaranteed vast rewards. Only at the turn of the 1990s did mainstream banks of the world begin to put serious resources into the new markets and instruments that had transformed finance from the outside in response to investors seeking higher returns, innovators seeking capital, and a new breed of corporate raiders seeking a killing. A seminal moment came in 1999 when the last vestiges of Glass-Steagall were swept away, largely after they had fallen into disuse. By then the game was already changed beyond recognition, and 1930s-style regulation had become a dead letter. What had once been private partnerships became public companies so they could raise the capital to invest in trading and, as important, the technology to support trading in competition with big global banks determined to build or buy their way into the new Golconda.

Shipping Greatness
by Chris Vander Mey
Published 23 Aug 2012

In many ways, this “deal sweetening” phase is time that each party spends trying to get comfortable with The Reality Of The Situation, which is that neither of you is going to make out like a bandit. It’s too bad, but we always feel disappointed at this point, even though bandits are the bad guys—except in movies, where “corporate raider” sounds glamorous (see stage 1). Stage 5: Walking Away and Thinking It’s possible that after throwing in a few pot sweeteners and a few months of negotiation, everyone is so tired that you’re ready to do a deal. So you just do it. If this is you, proceed to stage 6 and light a candle at the chapel on the way home.

The Secret World of Oil
by Ken Silverstein
Published 30 Apr 2014

Key brokers who emerged in the post-1973 OPEC world included: Marc Rich, who founded the giant commodities firm Glencore (see Chapter 3); Hany Salaam, a Lebanese middleman who made numerous deals for Occidental Petroleum Corporation during the days of Armand Hammer, its former chairman; and Oscar Wyatt, a Houston oilman and corporate raider who was sentenced to a year in prison in 2007 in connection with the UN oil-for-food scandal. One of the more colorful of that era’s fixers was John Deuss, who once owned his own tanker fleet, and who during the 1980s smuggled vast quantities of oil to South Africa’s apartheid regime, then under an international trade embargo imposed by the United Nations.

Money Mavericks: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager
by Lars Kroijer
Published 26 Jul 2010

A rights issue can take many forms, but often it involves a publicly listed company seeking to raise money from its shareholders by giving them the ‘right’ to invest more money in the company at a discount on the prevailing share price. So a company that trades at $10 may give a right to buy one more share at $7 for every five shares you own in the company. It is a tactic sometimes used by companies in trouble (and thus unable to get a loan) and Bure was certainly in trouble. Bure and the corporate raider Bure was still hung-over from the happy internet days of half a decade ago. The company had a large number of stakes in smaller technology-related businesses as well as more substantial stakes in a couple of quoted businesses, a healthcare company, a private equity fund, and a large Nordic infrastructure engineering business.

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank
by John Tamny
Published 30 Apr 2016

This included “breaking up” large-for-large’s-sake corporations by selling pieces to investors with a stated objective of running the business lines purchased more effectively. These “hostile” takeovers performed by Icahn, Pickens, and other outsiders were similarly shunned by establishment banks, mainly because the blue-chip firms these “corporate raiders” eyed for necessary restructuring were often the banks’ clients. Milken had created yet another market, and he was a magnet for credit. Milken was so successful at discovering companies worthy of both finance and take over that investors lined up to participate in his deals. Fischel writes: Drexel became known as a firm that could, if necessary, finance a takeover bid by raising billions of dollars within a matter of hours.

Dead Companies Walking
by Scott Fearon
Published 10 Nov 2014

His dark hair was parted neatly to one side and a bespoke Italian suit hung loosely on his wiry frame. There’s no other way to put it: the man was imposing. Leaning back in his leather chair with the skyline of Houston spread out behind him, he looked like the perfect embodiment of the 1980s corporate raider—which, in many ways, he was. A few years after our meeting, he waged a storied takeover battle for Eastern Airlines with none other than Carl Icahn. Several scale models of DC-10s were displayed around his office. One of these was painted in Continental’s colors, another had the now-defunct Texas International Air brand on the side of it, and a third had been decorated with the name and logo of Jet Capital, the holding company Lorenzo and a fellow Harvard MBA had started in the late 1960s.

Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street
by Kate Kelly
Published 14 Apr 2009

Ever since his troubled investment in Salomon Brothers, the trading unit that had eventually been absorbed by Citigroup, the Omaha investor had largely steered clear of trading shops and investment banks, sticking to other businesses, like newspapers, candy, and insurance, to fill out Berkshire Hathaway’s enormously successful portfolio of companies. 13 Buffett had taken a controlling stake in Salomon Brothers in 1987, at a time when it was fending off a hostile offer from the corporate raider Ronald Perelman. The company had proved, however, to be a huge headache—even for one of American’s savviest investors. A top player in the trading of mortgage-backed securities and other fixed-income products, Salomon was dominated by an unruly collection of well-compensated traders who engaged in high-stakes poker games, among other shenanigans, on the trading floor.

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building
by Michael Gross
Published 18 Dec 2007

Charles commuted to work on the subway wearing a backpack. In the 1980s, Stevenson teamed up briefly with Asher Edelman, an arbitrageur often described as a “feared corporate raider” in reports of his battles to wrest control of companies he’d invested in from entrenched management. But Edelman retired to run an art museum in Switzerland; newspapers speculated that one reason for his retreat was increasing government scrutiny of corporate raiders in the late 1980s. Stevenson lowered his profile, too, but continued working as a private investor and head of two hedge funds, Navigator Partners Fund and Navigator Diversified Strategies Fund.

Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit
by Loren C. Steffy
Published 5 Nov 2010

It had squandered $6 billion in profits from its Alaska assets on a disastrous copper-mining venture, and it was drilling one dry hole after another. As group 39 40 D R O W N I N G I N O I L treasurer in the early 1980s, Browne developed a plan for BP to buy Sohio outright, using its controlling stake to replace the Sohio board with directors who would support the acquisition by BP. It was the heyday of hostile takeovers, when corporate raiders like T. Boone Pickens were prowling the oil patch looking for undervalued and poorly managed companies, but BP’s chairman, reflecting the company’s timid heritage, decided that Browne’s plan was too heavy-handed.7 Instead, BP pressured Sohio to remove its three top officers and replace them with BP executives, including Browne.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
by Peter Pomerantsev
Published 11 Nov 2014

“We’re minority shareholders in globalization,” I hear from Russian corporate spooks and politicians. Which, remembering how the system tried to break Yana, might mean that the best way to imagine the Kremlin’s vision of itself in the world is as a “corporate reider”: the ultraviolent cousin of Western corporate raiders. For “reiding” is how most of the Russian elite made their first money, buying into a company and then using any means possible (arrests, guns, seizures, explosions, bribery, blackmail) to extract its advantages. The Kremlin is the great corporate reider inside globalization, convinced that it can see through all the old ways of the slow West to play at something more subversive.

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

In Oliver Stone’s acclaimed movie Wall Street, the economic transformation of the 1980s is portrayed as a fight between the honesty and purity of Main Street, embodied by a solid, contented blue-collar union representative played by Martin Sheen, and the corruption and moral recklessness of Wall Street, embodied by Martin Sheen’s son Charlie. Charlie Sheen plays a young stockbroker willing to do anything to get ahead in the ruthless world of corporate raiders and ends up almost destroying the company where his father works. Thirty years later, Hollywood’s view of America’s economic woes is unchanged. In the 2010 movie The Company Men, Ben Affleck portrays a white-collar employee who loses his job when a greedy CEO orders savage layoffs in an effort to appease Wall Street and boost the company’s stock price.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by Peter Temin
Published 17 Mar 2017

Its success shows that there are other ways to affect public policy than to elect favorable representatives and provides evidence in support of the Investment Theory of Politics. For example, private enterprise has entered parts of the judicial system we do not ordinarily think are open to the private public oxymoron. When you dial 911, you typically get an outsourced answering service. Private equity firms, the “corporate raiders” of an earlier era, increasingly have taken over a wide array of civic and financial services that are central to American life since the 2008 financial crisis. Like private prisons, their interests do not align with the public programs for safety. Their aims are to cut costs, increase prices, lobby, and litigate to expand their reach.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less
by Emrys Westacott
Published 14 Apr 2016

Even though Paul McCartney’s conventional platitude carried a whiff of irony, especially given his experience of sudden fame and fortune, while McCoy’s song goes on to imagine ways in which he will use his wealth to benefit others, the contrast here does seem to suggest a shift in cultural attitudes. Even so, when in the 1987 film Wall Street the real estate speculator and corporate raider Gordon Gecko declares that “greed is good,” we the audience understand by convention that the man who says this is bad; and we are duly satisfied when, at the end of the film, we see the bad man who says that greed is good carted off to prison. It seems that our culture is still torn between accepting acquisitiveness as a necessary condition of economic growth and denouncing it as an undesirable character trait that bespeaks false values and encourages unethical conduct.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder
by Sean McFate
Published 22 Jan 2019

The British East India Company may prove instructive. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations—whether ExxonMobil, Walmart, or Google—they are tame beasts compared with the British East India Company. Founded in 1600 as a joint stock company, it became the greatest corporation in history and the original corporate raider. One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: “loot.” In its 275-year run, the company conquered India for the British crown, although at times it was hard to distinguish who served whom. What made the British East India Company powerful was its private military.

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System
by Philip Augar
Published 20 Apr 2005

Even after the merger wave of the sixties, top advisers such as Morgan Stanley had only about four merger and acquisition specialist investment bankers.25 The senior partner of Goldman Sachs ‘would say that he was the original merger department, in the sense that the bottom left-hand drawer held the buyers and the bottom right-hand drawer the sellers’.26 There were only three hundred bulge bracket investment bankers in America in total in 1965 and only 1,500 in 1978.27 It was the leverage-based corporate raiders of the eighties such as Carl Icahn and Ronald Perelman and the mega-mergers of the nineties such as Travelers-Citicorp and Vodafone-Mannesmann that signified the arrival of mergers and acquisitions as a mainstream activity for the investment banks. In 1980 there were only 106 M&A deals announced in America and 97 in the rest of the world; in 1998, the peak year, there were nearly 12,000 in America and over 30,000 elsewhere.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything
by Jason Kelly
Published 10 Sep 2012

Blackstone’s initial approach was to team with a well-known corporation, tapping that Rolodex cultivated when Peterson was the chief executive of Bell & Howell, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and the head of Lehman Brothers. Going in with a company had a couple of benefits: Would-be sellers took the offer more seriously, and it also helped assuage worries that Blackstone was a corporate raider looking to dismantle what it bought for a quick buck. “By aligning yourself with blue-chip firms, you were instantly the white knight,” JPMorgan’s Jimmy Lee said. Blackstone also offered the chance at times to hang on to a slice of the unit being divested, helping the selling CEO avoid potential embarrassment of selling too cheap and watching Blackstone reap huge profits down the line.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

The upper echelons of both the financial and digital technology sectors are staffed by people who believe that their actions lead the world, but who come from contrasting cultures. While the image of the financial world is one of ruthless self-interest, as exemplified by the character of the corporate raider Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987), the image of tech has long been one of idealistic and geeky coders. Apple’s iconic 1984 Superbowl advert represented this spirit – featuring a colourfully dressed athlete smashing a grey and oppressive status quo with a sledgehammer, it promised freedom from traditional power structures.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

It’s still corporate capitalism, but corporate capitalism that ensures that the primary stockholders are also real-world stakeholders in multiple facets of the enterprise. So far, most companies that have sold themselves to employees have done so under duress. For instance, in 1985, Amsted Industries, a heavy industrial parts manufacturer with some thirty-five plants across the U.S. and Canada, learned that corporate raider Charles Hurwitz had targeted the company for hostile takeover. That same year, Hurwitz would become famous for purchasing the Pacific Lumber Company and attempting to clear-cut the old-growth redwoods of California for a fast, onetime profit. So rather than accept its business being dismantled and sold off for its assets, Amsted opted to distribute ownership to its employees through a stock ownership plan, for a price of $529 million.66 Thirty years later, the company is still here and still employee owned.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

This is related to a famous argument made by the economists Sanford Grossman and Oliver Hart (1980), who pointed out that small shareholders will not devote resources to getting rid of poorly performing managers, but rather they will just implicitly rely on the work of others (in particular, corporate raiders) via the share price. 11. See his profile in Forbes Magazine, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/10/26/250008/index.htm. Chapter 9: Competing, Managing, and Investing in the Intangible Economy 1. Sarah O’Connor, “Amazon Unpacked,” February 8, 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a. 2.

Concentrated Investing
by Allen C. Benello
Published 7 Dec 2016

Soon after, investor Laurence “Larry” Tisch—the self-made billionaire known for buying into failing companies when their share prices were at a low ebb and then turning them into profitable enterprises with much higher stock valuations—emerged with a large holding in the company.19 Tisch, who would later play the role of white knight for broadcaster CBS, Inc., sought the role of corporate raider and liquidator of the department store chain. He wanted to take over the company and liquidate it for its undervalued New York real estate. Greenberg says that Tisch’s approach put his family “in a dither.”20 They hired investment bankers to advise them on strategic options, and an improbable white knight was located in the form of Brown & Williamson Tobacco.

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare
by Ryan Dezember
Published 13 Jul 2020

They went looking for an investor to pair with, someone with deeper pockets than the doctors and dentists who had so far been funding their splurge. Treehouse had bought a few houses in Atlanta and California but needed many more properties in each market to make managing them cost-effective. Treehouse enlisted a young investment banker named Rich Ford to find a match on Wall Street. Ford approached Carl Icahn, the corporate raider and activist investor, and pitched the Carlyle Group, a $200 billion Washington, D.C., firm that had gained prominence privatizing government businesses and carving out unloved divisions from big corporations. Blackstone took a meeting. Jonathan Gray, the New York firm’s real estate chief, was mulling a move into single-family real estate, and his team was vetting rental operators for potential partnerships.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

‘In defence of intrinsic human rights: Edmund Burke’s controversial prosecution of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal.’ Law, Crime and History 1(2): 58–107. 8 Quoted in G. Trefgarne, 2006. ‘How the first multinational was hijacked by greed’ (The Spectator, October 25). 9 W. Dalrymple, 2015. ‘The East India Company: The original corporate raiders’ (The Guardian, March 4). 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Paine, Rights of Man, 191. 14 N. Robins, 2006. ‘East India Company: The first multinational corporation’ (Ecologist, November 1). 15 Quoted in ibid. 16 Paine, Rights of Man, 127–134. 17 Ibid., 134. 18 Ibid., 92. 19 Ibid., 92. 20 Paine, ‘Agrarian justice,’ 429. 21 Ibid., 429. 22 G.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
by Andrew Ross
Published 25 Oct 2021

Over the last decade, a different kind of asset stripper raided the nation’s housing inventory, but the outcome has been similar; local resources and income are being transferred offshore, and minority groups are disproportionately affected. For generations, national moralists preached the sanctity of the owner-occupied private home as an engine of economic prosperity, and then repackaged the promise for minorities who had long been shut out of the deal. But as it comes under renewed assault from corporate raiders, the formula for building family wealth from real estate is running out of steam, especially for working-class and middle-class households. Increasingly, no median-priced home is off-limits to becoming a rental property, every quarter-acre lot has a distant investor’s dollar value on it, and the proceeds are flowing out of host communities and into international finance markets.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom
by Tony Robbins
Published 18 Nov 2014

The secret to his success? Even his critics will tell you Carl Icahn doesn’t just look for opportunities in business—he makes them. But most outsiders still think of him as a Wall Street caricature, a ruthless vulture capitalist who pillages companies for personal gain. When you Google the term corporate raider, Icahn’s name autofills in the search bar. But Carl Icahn is challenging that creaky old stereotype. Icahn thinks of himself as a “shareholder activist.” What does that mean? “We go in and shine a light on public companies that are not giving shareholders the value they deserve,” he told me.

…

My work life and family life are all one thing, and I’m always determined to get the most out of both of them. CHAPTER 6.8 T. BOONE PICKENS: MADE TO BE RICH, MADE TO GIVE * * * Chairman and CEO of BP Capital Management T. Boone Pickens, dubbed the “Oil Oracle” by CNBC, has always been ahead of his time. In the early 1980s, he was the original corporate raider—although “shareholder activist” has always been the term he’s preferred. His early focus on maximizing shareholder value, virtually unheard of at the time, has long since become a standard of American corporate culture. As Fortune magazine declared, “Boone’s once revolutionary ideas [are] so completely taken for granted that they have become linchpins of the economy.”

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 1 Jan 2001

From a materialistic standpoint, they come at the low end of such a set, perhaps even at the exact bottom. They would be the poorest of these circles, as their co-op is inhabited by extremely successful corporate executives, Wall Street traders, and high-flying entrepreneurs. Their children’s private school harbors the second set of children of corporate raiders, from their trophy wives—perhaps even the third set, if one takes into account the age discrepancy and the model-like features of the other mothers. By comparison, Marc’s wife, Janet, like him, presents a homely country-home-with-a-rose-garden type of appearance. You’re a Failure Marc’s strategy of staying in Manhattan may be rational, as his demanding work hours would make it impossible for him to commute.

How to Form Your Own California Corporation
by Anthony Mancuso
Published 2 Jan 1977

You have no doubt heard about the possi­bility of incorporating in another state, most likely Delaware, where initial and ongoing fees are lower and regulations may be less restric­tive than in California. Does this make sense? For large, publicly held corporations looking for the most lenient statutes and courts to help them fend off corporate raiders, perhaps yes. But for a small, privately held corporation pursuing an active California business, our answer is generally no—it is usually a very poor idea to incorporate out of state. The big reason is that you probably will have to qualify to do business in California even if you don’t incorporate here, and this process takes about as much time and costs as much money as filing incorporation papers in California in the first place.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed – you mark my words – will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. The bond market boomed, and Wall Street provided financing to corporate raiders who bought companies. Speculating on deals promised vast riches, and merger arbitrage became one of the most profitable trading strategies on Wall Street. It spawned a cottage industry of insider trading on merger tips. Men like Ivan Boesky were kings of Wall Street, until the SEC arrested him and others in insider trading rings.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future
by Joseph C. Sternberg
Published 13 May 2019

Maybe people don’t notice how tough life was for Boomer adults because life for Boomer children was so great. The American notion of what a Baby Boomer is often looks like something out of Leave It to Beaver or The Brady Bunch—prosperous and secure and generally happy even if sometimes unconventional. But grownup Boomers are the generation of the movie Wall Street, with its greedy corporate raiders slashing jobs left and right—Baby Boomers’ jobs. The Boomers are the generation that started their careers in the middle of the oil crises and stagflation of the 1970s, and who lived through the deep recession of the early 1980s. The Boomers are the ones who had to pick up the pieces of their careers when the local steel mills or factories closed.

Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond
by Bruce C. N. Greenwald , Judd Kahn , Paul D. Sonkin and Michael van Biema
Published 26 Jan 2004

If so, then the PMV of the firm was considerably more than its market price. Here are the calculations, back-of-the-envelope style: This is an extraordinary cap rate, especially for a company selling nothing more exotic than kitchen tools. The story had a swift denouement. A catalyst for the sale of the entire company was already present in the form of a corporate raider who had gained a seat on the board of directors. All that was necessary was the industrial buyer, tempted by the low enterprise value and the high rate of return. In Spring 1999 a third party offered $11 per share to buy the entire company. General Housewares then hired an investment bank to find a better deal.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

On top of that, the small number of companies that master the AI flywheel will dominate globally, and their founders and shareholders will continue to rake in more than a fair share of global wealth. In the 1960s and 1970s, corporations tended toward a more balanced approach by taking into consideration the needs not only of their shareholders but also their employees and communities. The 1980s saw the advent of corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, and T. Boone Pickens, who put pressure on boards and management to run their corporations solely for shareholders. Since then, running a business to maximize returns for shareholders has become the modus operandi. Commonly, CEOs today will do whatever it takes—cutting R&D, firing employees, slicing benefits—to make the latest quarterly earnings, because if they don’t deliver, activist investors will find someone who will.

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
by Mckenzie Funk
Published 22 Jan 2014

Until the drought broke in late 2010—dramatic floods inundated 250 homes—the river did not readily reach the sea, and government warned that this would be the new normal unless there were fewer demands on the overstretched Murray-Darling basin: By 2030, climate change was expected to decrease local rainfall by 3 percent, decrease surface water flows by 9 percent, and increase evaporation by up to 15 percent. Lining up behind the government were Summit and a growing cast of other funds: Australia’s own Causeway Water Fund and Blue Sky Water Partners, Singapore’s Olam International, Britain’s Ecofin fund, and a company called Tandou Limited, which was owned by a New Zealand corporate raider, the American hedge fund Water Asset Management, and Ecofin. In Adelaide, a young PR manager led me past a row of brokers sitting in velvet chairs and staring at flat-screen Dell monitors, scanning satellite images on Google Maps: the headquarters of Waterfind, the country’s largest water brokerage, which had developed its own software platform for trades up and down the Murray-Darling and touted its plan to become a true stock market—the Nasdaq of water.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

What Friedman was saying was that it wasn’t American managers’ loss of focus, excessive hubris, or self-congratulation that had brought the country to the brink, but the fact that corporate executives had been trying to do too much for too many people. They’d let their good nature get in the way of getting the job done. And it was time to throw off such naive notions for the good of the country—nay, for capitalism itself. “Friedman’s maxim arrived just in time for the era of the hostile takeover and the leveraged buyout, when corporate raiders sold themselves as saviors liberating shareholders from misguided managers who paid too little attention to the stock price,” writes the New York Times’ Eduardo Porter. “Though legally dubious, the argument that it is an executive’s fiduciary duty to maximize the company’s share price became a mantra from the business school to the boardroom.

…

That excess capacity played a large part in what Jensen called the “capital market restructuring revolution of the 1980s.”2 Companies sitting on large piles of cash—and there were many, as before the 1980s, executives were loath to return money to shareholders—suddenly became the target of hostile acquirers. The age of investor capitalism had begun, and its heroes were not CEOs but corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens. A wave of deregulation then created the active market for corporate control that critics of managerialism were calling for, with the new logic of shareholder primacy absolving managers of responsibility to any “stakeholder”—employees, communities, society itself—except shareholders.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
by David Callahan
Published 1 Jan 2004

Those who didn't have money felt worse about themselves during this era, while those who were wealthy felt more pressures to sustain and improve their position. Such pressures can be lethal to people's integrity. The fall of Jeffrey Silverman is a case in point. Silverman was the prototypical child of privilege. His father was a multimillionaire corporate raider, and Silverman grew up in Forest Hills in the 1950s and '60s amid lavish surroundings. He was driven to private school every day in a limousine and groomed for success in business. Starting his career on home plate, he became at the age of twenty-one the youngest person with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown
by Simon Johnson and James Kwak
Published 29 Mar 2010

In 1987, Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities introduced the term “Master of the Universe” to American culture, in the form of multimillionaire investment banker Sherman McCoy, who lived in “the sort of apartment the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York and, for that matter, all over the world.”72 Although the term was used sarcastically, and McCoy turns out badly in both the human and financial senses, the image of the swashbuckling, super-rich banker engaged in transactions too complex to be understood by ordinary mortals was born. Also in 1987, Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street was released, with its memorable antihero, corporate raider Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas). Although the movie’s story shows the corruption and ultimate downfall of Gekko, it is remembered for his “Greed is good” speech, which justified the pursuit of money above all else. As screenwriter Stanley Weiser wrote recently, many people would later tell him the movie made them want to work on Wall Street: “A typical example would be a business executive or a younger studio development person spouting something that goes like this: ‘The movie changed my life.

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception
by George A. Akerlof , Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller
Published 21 Sep 2015

Soon-to-be-bankrupt S&Ls played a significant role in the expansion of the market for junk bonds, which underlay hostile takeovers of even the largest firms—previously deemed impossible. TEN Michael Milken Phishes with Junk Bonds as Bait The work of one man, Michael Milken, in the 1970s and 1980s changed the face of US finance forever. No longer could corporate executives of large US corporations be confident that their companies were too big to be challenged by corporate raiders threatening hostile takeovers because now the raiders could acquire even very large companies without putting up much capital. What enabled them to do this was the leveraged buyout, in which a raider’s company could amass cash by taking on enormous debt (through high-yield, or “junk,” bonds developed by Milken) to acquire, often, a much larger company.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

The industry is noted for its extravagant office complexes that resemble crosses between university campuses, cartoon sets and sweet shops, where employees can eat, sleep and play pool, golf and ping-pong as well as write code. Indeed, the excess apparent in some dotcom corporate headquarters is now on a par with that of auto manufacturers in the 1960s, when GM felt it ruled America. It’s an interesting parallel and, perhaps, a parable. Sir James Hanson, the notorious British corporate raider of the 1980s, used to consider over-palatial head offices to be a sign that a company was ripe for takeover and asset stripping. However, his favourite symbol of corporate decadence – a duck lake – seems limited and quaint beside, say, Google’s current headquarters, the Googleplex in Santa Clara County, California.

The Future of Money
by Bernard Lietaer
Published 28 Apr 2013

Here is the root cause of the proverbial 'short-sightedness' of the financial markets, which force corporations into making decisions which they know may hurt society and even business itself in the long run. If a CEO of a corporation were tempted to think in longer-term social or ecological ways, he would soon be removed either by his board, or - if needed - by a new board after raiders have taken over. 'A special breed of investors, the corporate raiders, specialises in preying on established corporations. The basic process is simple, though the details are complex and the power struggles often nasty. The raider identifies a company traded on a public stock exchange that has a "break-up" value in excess of the current market price of the shares.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

Financial deregulation in the US at this time laid the foundation for the financial system we have today. The rapid increase in hostile takeovers, in which a company is taken over against the will of the existing management, changed the whole corporate culture in the US. Many of those taking over were ‘corporate raiders’ only interested in asset stripping (namely, the sales of valuable assets, regardless of the impact on the long-term viability of the company), immortalized by Gordon ‘Greed-is-good’ Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street. To avoid such a fate, firms had to deliver profits faster than before. Otherwise impatient shareholders would sell up, reducing the share prices and thus exposing the firm to greater danger of hostile takeover.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 28 Jan 2020

Also, the voices of shareholders who have a greater interest in the long-run performance of the company deserve a better hearing. Loyalty share voting,6 which is rewarding those who have held on to their shares longer by giving them greater say in the affairs of the company, is one solution. It will, at the same time, weaken the voice of corporate raiders (sometimes from private equity firms) who often buy up companies only to strip away their assets or to load them up with debt that leads to an eventual bankruptcy and loss of jobs. Executive compensation schemes, too, have to be reformed in a way that provides incentives that promote long-term value, rather than a focus on short-term spikes in share prices.

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor
Published 1 Feb 2018

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison: Angus Maddison, The World Economy, Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006. ‘What honour is left to us?’: William Dalrymple, ‘The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders’, The Guardian, 4 March 2015. Bengal’s textiles were still being exported: Most of these details are from K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660–1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 and Sushil Chaudhury, The Prelude to Empire: Plassey Revolution of 1757, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2000.

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
by Robin Wigglesworth
Published 11 Oct 2021

“We’re now starting to see the fragility associated with these things.” * * * ♦ MANY OF THE SKEPTICS ARGUE that the biggest fault line lies not in the big, mainstream index funds that invest in stocks, but in ETFs that track less traded, more idiosyncratic markets—such as bonds. Carl Icahn, the famed corporate raider, once went as far as to call BlackRock “a very dangerous company” due to its being the world’s biggest provider of fixed-income ETFs, while sitting next to Larry Fink on an industry conference stage.9 With the mischievousness and nonchalance that comes with age and what Wall Street calls “fuck-you money,” he predicted how the bond market would eventually “hit a black rock.”

Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang

One of the requests employees had made to the original owners had been health benefits for part-time workers. They were turned down. The symbolism wasn’t lost on me. I decided to recommend to the board of directors that we expand our health-care coverage to include part-timers who worked as little as twenty hours a week. In the late 1980s, employer generosity was hopelessly out of fashion. Corporate raiders and soaring health-care costs had forced many American executives to reduce benefits. Under the prevailing mantra of “maximizing shareholder value,” CEOs were applauded by Wall Street if they cut costs and laid off thousands. Companies that did value their employees above shareholders were mocked as paternalistic and uncompetitive.

The Crux
by Richard Rumelt
Published 27 Apr 2022

This software handled to-do lists, message boards, schedules, real-time group chat, questions and answers, and more in a single application. The Basecamp client base grew from forty-five in 2004 to three million in 2019. • During the 1980s, the Walt Disney Company’s performance began to sag. Both feature films and cable TV operations were bringing in little profit. Corporate raiders began to circle, seeing an opportunity to split the company into its theme-park and movie components and make a quick gain. Michael Eisner was named chairman and CEO in 1984, backed by the oil-rich Bass group. He began to see the crux of the challenge at Disney in its much-admired classic animated films such as Cinderella.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Worse still is the fact that the bulk of investor activism has nothing to do with ESG targets. Most tend to focus on other self-interested objectives like replacing board members that do not align with investors’ desired strategy, or to force companies to pursue mergers or divest assets, (no surprise that many activist investors are hedge funds). While a far cry from the corporate raiders of liberal capitalism’s 1980s heyday as exemplified by films like Wall Street or books like Barbarians at the Gate that were illustrative of the earlier generation of investor activism, we are still far from the point in which capitalism will ethically police itself. In the end, it is far more likely that capitalism will not only refuse to police itself but will continue to behave in the most predatory, criminal manner possible.

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster
by Nick Timiraos
Published 1 Mar 2022

His colleagues at Dillon Read rolled their eyes: Time spent in Washington was time wasted; it didn’t generate new banking business. Powell didn’t care, and his connection to Brady paid off. A few months later, Dillon Read found itself defending the petroleum exporter Unocal Corporation in a takeover bid from T. Boone Pickens, the corporate raider. Brady called Powell down to Washington to accompany him on meetings with top officials at the Treasury, White House, and Congress. President Ronald Reagan tapped Brady to chair a task force that reviewed the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, then named him Treasury secretary a few months before Brady’s friend, George H.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

Thatcher, by then out of office, was the first honorary president. Opposition to Europe – and particularly the threat of federalism – was growing across the political right. Robertson convinced expatriate financier James Goldsmith to set up the Referendum Party, in 1994. Goldsmith had been a notorious corporate raider and bon vivant. During the 1970s, he often played poker with Lord Lucan, who would later vanish after killing his children’s nanny and trying to murder his wife, and spoke approvingly of a military coup to topple what he believed was a socialist conspiracy led by Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.8 Now the pugnacious tycoon put £20 million of his own fortune into Eurosceptic politics.

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff
by Christine S. Richard
Published 26 Apr 2010

IN EARLY 2003, in addition to preparing for upcoming testimony at the attorney general’s office and at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ackman was working to liquidate Gotham’s holdings. He negotiated the sale of Gotham’s stake in Hallwood Realty Partners to renowned shareholder activist and corporate raider Carl Icahn for $80 a share. As part of the agreement, Ackman and Icahn worked out a “schmuck insurance” arrangement under which Ackman would get half of the profits if Icahn sold his Hallwood stake within 18 months. When Icahn asked Ackman if he had any other interesting investment ideas, Ackman launched into his argument for shorting MBIA and gave Icahn a copy of the Gotham report Is MBIA Triple-A?

Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes)
by Andrew M. Lobaczewski
Published 1 Jan 2006

Yes, psychopaths love the business world. “Uninvolved with others, he coolly saw into their fears and desires, and maneuvered them as he wished. Such a man might not, after all, be doomed to a life of scrapes and escapades ending ignominiously in the jailhouse. Instead of murdering others, he might become a corporate raider and murder companies, firing people instead of killing them, and chopping up their functions rather than their bodies.” (Harrington) … … [T]he consequences to the average citizen from business crimes are staggering. As criminologist Georgette Bennett says, “They account for nearly 30% of case filings in U.S.

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth
by Fred Pearce
Published 28 May 2012

I was joined for lunch at Campo Aberto by a dapper British financier in a blazer and Panama hat. He used to be something big in Rolls Royce, and he had just flown in with his wife to consider investing in the farm—part of Agrifirma, a 100,000-acre agricultural empire assembled by Lord Rothschild, the head of the world-famous banking family, and the once-notorious 1970s corporate raider Jim Slater. The incorrigible pair, both past their seventy-fifth birthdays, were betting their profits from a successful speculation in gold and uranium on Brazilian agriculture. We were in the heart of the cerrado, the most biologically rich savannah grassland in the world, in what was once the outback of Brazil.

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America
by Danielle Dimartino Booth
Published 14 Feb 2017

He didn’t, believing that an unfettered free market is the best allocator of resources. A true optimist. I had less of his faith in mankind. In a few short months, I’d learned plenty about how the investment banking world really worked. While in training at DLJ, my class of newly minted MBAs had watched the 1987 movie Wall Street. The corporate raider Gordon Gecko, played by a sleek Michael Douglas, was our role model. We adopted his mantra: “Greed is good.” We believed it, having arrived on Wall Street at the height of the dot-com mania. Yahoo went public, making instant millionaires of those who held its stock. Clients begged to buy into the next big thing.

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth
by Dan McCrum
Published 15 Jun 2022

West, beyond an imposing but bland Hilton, was the direction of the sparse serviced apartment the FT had laid on, its sofa an impervious white plastic and its kitchen next to non-existent. Beyond that was Broadway and the lights of Times Square. East was the money, although I was to learn it was everywhere: a fifteen-minute stroll in any direction provided access to bankers, corporate raiders, lawyers, investors and assorted vultures in tailored suits with billions at their disposal. Craning my neck, I could see the illuminated FT sign atop the building, one of a handful allowed in a city where only newcomers ever stopped to look up. I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d been a practising journalist for a shade over eighteen months and it felt like a dream.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix
by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski
Published 18 Apr 2022

Its roaring studio mascot, Leo the Lion, reigned as king of the Hollywood jungle, and the company’s boast that it had “more stars than there are in heaven” was completely justified. In recent decades MGM had come to resemble a white elephant, a cast-off seemingly always on the block. Billionaire corporate raider Kirk Kerkorian first snagged a substantial stake in MGM in 1969 by outmaneuvering the Bronfman family, eventually merging it with another legendary studio, United Artists. He sold it all in 1986 to cable television magnate Ted Turner for $1.5 billion and bought back the company a year later, minus the library of 2,200 gems, including The Wizard of Oz, for $300 million.

Chokepoint Capitalism
by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
Published 26 Sep 2022

When newspapers went online, the fact that most outlets were running mostly the same articles became embarrassingly apparent, between national chains filing the same story for every paper and wire services serving all the chains and local papers alike. Perhaps newspapers could have adapted better if they had had a cushion to protect them from the shocks. But they didn’t: their war-chests had been converted to special dividends for their corporate raider overlords and debt service to the investment banks that financed their leveraged buyouts. Actually, it was worse than that, because these papers now had to worry that if they had a shortfall, they might not be able to make payments on the presses and plants and buildings they’d once owned and now leased.

In-N-Out Burger
by Stacy Perman
Published 11 May 2009

In an industry that has come to be seen as a scourge on modern society, responsible for everything from obesity to urban blight to cultural imperialism, this modest, low-slung eatery with the big yellow arrow is unique among fast-food breeds: a chain revered by hamburger aficionados and epicureans, anti-globalization fanatics and corporate raiders, meat-eaters and even vegetarians. Make mention of the three monosyllabic words and a kind of reverie takes hold. People’s eyes close and their lips begin to quiver with the pleasures of sense memory. “For years, In-N-Out was the other woman in my life,” my mother once told me. “I’d be cooking dinner and your father would go to an In-N-Out on his way home from the office.

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry
by Steven Rattner
Published 19 Sep 2010

Free of crippling costs and debts, this new business would go forth as a streamlined, revitalized competitor on the world automotive scene. We meant it to be not only viable but also highly profitable. The meeting ended at 6 P.M., having stretched nine hours. Even though it was Friday night, Harry didn't stop; he had booked a session with Carl Icahn, the legendary corporate raider and multibillionaire, who had lately expressed interest in acquiring a stake in Delphi. Icahn's offices were a couple of elevator rides away, on the forty-seventh floor. Matt dutifully accompanied Harry on the short journey, but was soon called back to Connecticut over a family matter. He was not sorry.

Shoe Dog
by Phil Knight
Published 25 Apr 2016

I moaned about fairness. I talked about holding out. I said maybe I didn’t want to go public—ever. Yet again I expressed my fear that going public would change Nike, ruin it, by turning over control to others. What would happen to the culture of Oregon Track, for instance, if it was subject to shareholder votes or corporate raider demands? We’d gotten a little taste of that scenario with the small group of debenture holders. Scaling up and letting in thousands of shareholders—it would be a thousand times worse. Above all, I couldn’t bear the thought of one titan buying up shares, becoming a behemoth on the board. “I don’t want to lose control,” I said to Chuck.

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences
by Steven G. Mandis
Published 9 Sep 2013

To the target’s board and management teams, the bankers who work against the takeover to protect them and shareholders are viewed very positively. A 1982 Wall Street Journal headline captured this positive image: “The Pacifist: Goldman Sachs Avoids Bitter Takeover Fights but Leads in Mergers.” The accompanying article praised Goldman’s policy of not representing corporate raiders in hostile deals, although it included the few obligatory criticisms from competitors.13 Goldman had made a strategic decision not to represent companies initiating hostile bids, the only large investment banking firm to do so.14 When questioned about the wisdom of this policy, Whitehead responded, “We have to dissuade them from going forward with this and explain to them why our experience showed that it would be unlikely that this unfriendly tender offer would turn out to be successful for them a few years later.”15 As a result, CEOs were more comfortable revealing confidential information to Goldman than to other firms, because they trusted Goldman not to use the information in representing hostile raiders against them.

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry
by William K. Black
Published 31 Mar 2005

There were rumors that Drexel had captives, but that fact had not yet been proven. 3. The White House director of personnel told the Senate Ethics Committee investigating the Keating Five that he learned this when he inquired about Keating’s reputation in Arizona (U.S. Senate Committee 1991, 3:705–707). 4. Greenmail is a form of extortion. The “corporate raider” buys a large stock position in the target firm and threatens a hostile takeover. The target firm’s executives, who fear losing their high-status, high-pay positions if the takeover succeeds, cause the firm to buy back the raider’s shares at a premium. Lincoln Savings bought a great deal of Gulf Broadcasting stock at above the market price.

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives
by Satyajit Das
Published 15 Nov 2006

In theory, in 1984 Disney had made around $98 million, compared to $93 million (1983) and $100 million (1982). Disney’s biggest profit centre was the accounting section. In 1984, they contributed $76 million – ‘cumulative effect of change in accounting for investment tax credits’. Actions of distressed fish generally attract predators. The predator in this case was a famed corporate raider – Sol Steinberg and Reliance Insurance Company. Reliance launched a hostile takeover bid for Disney and its management reacted in time-honoured fashion – they thought about the shareholders. Then, they thought about themselves. Disney bought back the Reliance shareholding, handing the raider a nice greenmail profit.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
Published 2 Nov 2010

The Disney Company that Eisner inherited had pioneered the branding of content by way of various forms of merchandising, from theme parks to sweatshirts. But by the time Eisner would take the helm in 1984, the company, whose bread and butter was still the theatrical film release, was faltering and had barely survived takeover by corporate raiders. Eisner would turn the company around, making it for a while the largest media conglomerate in the world, but in ways that would seem to some, the founder’s nephew among them, a betrayal of the company’s founding devotion to content values above all. It was a common complaint against the media conglomerates rising in those years, and it stemmed from the other strategies typical of that corporate structure.

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 5 Nov 2013

Thomas Langfitt, had indeed convinced Hauptfuhrer and Oryx executives that the trusts would sell their shares to a rival, threatening Oryx’s independence, unless the company bought the shares from the trusts, according to a lawsuit later filed against the trusts related to the deal. The genteel Pew Charitable Trusts, known for their support of civic journalism and other like-minded causes, had embraced a tactic that Jack Willoughby in Institutional Investor magazine later likened to “greenmail,” the hard-nosed tactic usually employed by corporate raiders. “They put a gun to our heads,” Hauptfuhrer recalled. “They said, ‘If you don’t buy us, we’ll shop the shares to another company.’ And I thought we were in the beginning of an important period for the company,” so it wasn’t the right time for a merger. It turned out to be a bluff by the Pew trusts, however.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
by John Cassidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

Galbraith’s analysis proved poorly timed. Subsequent decades saw the rise of globalization and the removal of import restrictions, which left much of American manufacturing—from autos to textiles to toys to furniture to steel to chemicals—struggling to fend off foreign competition. Meanwhile, the rise of corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens, and leveraged buyout conglomerates such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Texas Pacific, created an active market in the ownership of blue-chip companies. The cosseted top executives of Fortune 500 companies found their positions and perquisites of office under threat.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

Why do sweatshop factories push wages down to the bare minimum? Greed. Why do people buy gas-guzzling SUVs? Greed. Why do pharmaceutical companies suppress research and sell drugs that they know are dangerous? Greed. Why do tropical fish suppliers dynamite coral reefs? Why do factories pump toxic waste into the rivers? Why do corporate raiders loot employee pension funds? Greed, greed, greed. Eventually I became uncomfortable with that answer. For one thing, it plays into the same ideology of separation that lies at the root of our civilization’s ills. It is an ideology as old as agriculture’s division of the world into two separate realms: the wild and the domestic, the human and the natural, the wheat and the weed.

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town
by Beth Macy
Published 14 Jul 2014

But with foreigners crowding into an already shrinking number of retailer showrooms, American manufacturers had 40 percent less display space than they’d had a decade before. Mid- to higher-end furniture lines, including Kincaid, Stanley, and Lane Furniture, had cashed out or fallen prey to corporate raiders—Bonce Stanley’s descendants had sold out to the Mead Corporation in 1969, a move that resulted in a succession of five company presidents in the 1970s and four separate owners in the 1980s. It was a far cry from the 1950s, when three-quarters of the furniture industry had been controlled by a handful of families in Virginia and North Carolina.

Mastering Private Equity
by Zeisberger, Claudia,Prahl, Michael,White, Bowen , Michael Prahl and Bowen White
Published 15 Jun 2017

As PE explored elaborate capital structures, new sources of funding, larger pools of equity capital and did so through variable economic conditions, we did not properly explain these complexities—or our mission—to the public. As a result, PE deals became associated with hostile takeovers at the time. Referring to PE as “corporate raiders” or “barbarians,” the public's reaction to the very same question I asked you—what is private equity?—was simply: an investment vehicle to acquire, strip and sell an asset for profit. We never thought of it this way; we were always focused on the opportunity at hand to create value at the companies in which we invested.

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age
by James Crabtree
Published 2 Jul 2018

“Teary Eyed Narendra Modi Takes On Rivals, Reaches Out to People on Demonetisation,” Financial Express, November 14, 2016. 18. James Crabtree, “Modi Plunders India’s Cash. Indians Cheer,” Foreign Policy, November 28, 2016. 19. William Dalrymple, “The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders,” The Guardian, March 4, 2015. 20. Gill, The Pathology of Corruption, p. 44. 21. Oldenburg, “Middlemen in Third-World Corruption.” 22. Bhagwati and Panagariya, Why Growth Matters, p. 87. 23. Pei, China’s Crony Capitalism, p. 8. 24. Vaishnav, When Crime Pays, p. 31. 25.

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy
by James B Stewart and Rachel Abrams
Published 14 Feb 2023

After the fire his ambitions expanded. His little-known National Amusements chain began buying large stakes in major entertainment companies: Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Communications, MGM Films, Columbia Pictures, and Time, Inc. The 1980s saw the emergence of the Michael Milken–financed corporate raiders, and Sumner joined their ranks. His opponents consistently underestimated his business acumen and fierce determination. Viacom management, who bid against him in 1987, belittled him as a provincial Boston theater operator, an impression reinforced when Sumner showed up at Viacom’s New York headquarters wearing a sports jacket he’d just bought at the discount chain Filene’s Basement—with the tags still on it.

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream
by R. Christopher Whalen
Published 7 Dec 2010

Even after the gold market crisis, Gould continued to operate with impunity, manipulating stocks such as the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to great profit. Memorialized as “The Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” Gould reportedly took $5 million out of his speculations in Pacific Steamship in the early 1870s, a return that in modern terms ranks with that of corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and Kirk Kerkorian.33 Gould was hardly alone among the great investment operators of the age, including Jay Cooke and his Northern Pacific Railroad. Gould’s next operation, taking over the Union Pacific Railroad, allowed him to manipulate upward the prices on railroad freight rates in the West and begin a long period of accumulating equity positions in several major rail lines.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom
by Doug Henwood
Published 30 Aug 1998

Rather than take his own medicine, Pickens had the board adopt a poison pill. Mesa's arguments sound like Sigler's a decade earlier — the outside group was in it just for a quick buck. Pickens' defense: "his GOVERNANCE days of trying to take over other companies were long gone and that he hated to be called a corporate raider. 'The last time I was involved in a deal was almost 10 years ago,' he said. 'There's no way anybody could characterize me as anything other than a hard working oilman" (Myerson 1995b). Hard work needn't guarantee reward; between 1985 and 1995, Mesa's stock fell 63%, while the overall market rose 171%.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
by Robert Chesshyre
Published 15 Jan 2012

The victims included a twenty-three-year-old trainee accountant who lost £1 million gambling with other people’s money, and a schoolboy, whose £20,000 deficit on dealings put his family’s home in jeopardy. Despite its technology, ‘Big Bang’ failed to keep pace with itself, and a massive backlog of settlements accumulated. Few stockbrokers – even those who advertised their services to the small investor – could any longer be bothered with tiny deals; corporate raiders ignored the petty capitalist, who therefore could not take advantage when prices were momentarily forced up. Within a few weeks the prospects for a widely based share-owning democracy were set back years. The Thatcherite ideal – thrift, hard work, responsibility – had somehow been perverted by the mood music that played a tune of greed.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.’33 Extraordinarily, in this new regime, it made sense for firms to avoid building up accessible cash reserves. Whereas this had been seen as prudent in productionist capitalism, it came to be seen as an invitation for corporate raiders to wrest control of companies so as to plunder their reserves. So reserves had to be reduced or made to look less inviting. One way of doing this was for companies to use them to buy back their own shares. This not only enabled them to reward management with shares, but pushed up the price of the shares by making them scarcer and reduced the amount of tax to be paid on dividends.

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders
by Connie Bruck
Published 1 Jun 1989

“Bust-up” referred to the plan, in most of these deals, to pay down the debt by selling off pieces—if not the entirety—of the company. During the course of the Revlon battle, Lipton would be moved to new heights, firing off to his corporate clients a memo entitled “Rape and Pillage in the Corporate Takeover Jungle”: “This year has witnessed the demise of the few remaining restraints on corporate raiders. They have been let loose to take over and bust up American corporations at will. . . .” Lipton was drawing a line between the kinds of hostile takeovers he had helped to engineer in the seventies and the Drexel-type wave launched by what he called “takeover entrepreneurs.” He drew this distinction in testimony before Congress in the spring of 1985, when about thirty bills to curb hostile takeovers or junk bonds or both were being debated.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It
by Steven Brill
Published 28 May 2018

As The Washington Post put it, the company was “swept away by the wave of corporate takeovers and buyouts that have come to dominate American business in the 1980’s.” The raiders’ victory didn’t last. As of 2016, the larger textile maker that had purchased the bulk of the Stevens operations in 1988 had gone through a 2003 bankruptcy stemming from foreign competition. It was then bought by corporate raider Carl Icahn. Most of its manufacturing is now done overseas, and what remains has been highly automated. The industry as a whole shared the same fate. In 1973, there were 1,024,000 textile workers in the United States. In 2016, there were 112,000, and the average hourly wage for those left in American textile factories was 30 percent lower than it would have been if the low, non-union wages prevailing in 1975 (the year closest to 1973 for which there is wage data) had only kept up with inflation.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
by Joshua B. Freeman
Published 27 Feb 2018

The companies, their products, and the factories that produced them remained tightly bound to one another in reality and image.34 The severe global recession of the 1970s and a series of subsequent developments unraveled the ties. With profit rates declining as a result of increased international competition, rising energy and labor costs, tight credit, and inflation, many American corporations, under pressure from corporate raiders, sought to reduce costs and shed less profitable operations. To become leaner and more flexible and show a rapid drop in spending, they began outsourcing to other firms functions they had traditionally performed themselves. They tended to start with support services, such as data processing and communications.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

So he left Bear Stearns in 1976 and with Henry Kravis, and Kravis’s cousin George Roberts he set up a new company, Kolhberg Kravis Roberts, or KKR – the same company I mentioned in the Introduction, which now owns Trainline. This was the first proper private equity firm, though in those days they and the others that soon emerged were known as LBO firms. Yet these corporate raiders faced a problem: persuading bankers to lend them the funds they needed to make the game work. Fortunately for them, a new player had entered the scene, the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, under the buccaneering junk bond king, Michael Milken. Drexel played a different OPM game: lending the money for LBO deals, it then sold the loans (which became known as junk bonds because of their riskiness) to other less clued-up players like insurance companies or dowdy savings and loan organisations, tempting them with high interest rates and persuading them that the reward was worth the risk.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

The main plot points of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street were spot on: a superstar financial speculator engages in illegal inside trading, a predatory takeover strips a profitable company of its assets, and unionized workers are bamboozled into going along with a deal that will leave them without their good jobs and pensions. The corporate raider Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, does get his comeuppance in the end because his stockbroker, the Charlie Sheen character who provided him with the tradable inside information about his mechanic father’s airline company, flips on him. But Gekko is the star of the show, the exciting sexy late-model 1980s antihero.

All the Devils Are Here
by Bethany McLean
Published 19 Oct 2010

Most of all, Levy subscribed to Weinberg’s lifelong belief that acting ethically on behalf of its clients was the single most important thing Goldman Sachs did. Anything that created even the appearance of a conflict with its clients was not just discouraged, but forbidden. That’s why, for instance, when corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens began their takeover attempts in the late 1970s, Goldman refused to advise them, despite the substantial fees they were paying. The hostile takeover movement, the firm believed, was not in the best interest of its corporate clients. A few years after Levy died, in 1976, one of his successors, John Whitehead, set down a list of Goldman’s fourteen business principles.

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea
by Steve Levine
Published 23 Oct 2007

His company was already a partner in Azerbaijan’s Early Oil pipelines out of Baku, which would serve the western Caspian fields; here was a chance to control a substantial piece of the energy flow from the eastern Caspian as well. Russia might even use his line for exports from petroleum-rich western Siberia, he thought. Imle’s opportunistic scheme fit perfectly with his strategy to remake Unocal. Just a decade earlier, the company had barely won a debilitating battle against corporate raider T. Boone Pickens. It was still recovering from the costly buy-up of shares necessary to beat back Pickens’s attempted takeover; its shareholder dividends were among the lowest in the industry. The new Unocal did not aspire to be a fully integrated producer like the world’s biggest oil companies.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Published 19 Jan 2016

Adelson’s cash temporarily revived Gingrich, unleashing a chain of unintended consequences. The pro-Gingrich super PAC used the casino magnate’s money to purchase more than $3 million in advertising time in South Carolina. Then it aired a half-hour video called “King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town” that eviscerated Romney as a greedy, “predatory corporate raider.” After the video was attacked, Gingrich called on the super PAC to take it down but not before he amplified the message by denouncing Bain Capital, the private equity company that Romney had co-founded, as “rich people figuring out clever ways to loot a company.” No left-winger could have made the case against high finance more convincingly.

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 1995

The importance of foreign direct investment to exports has typically been insufficiently appreciated; it is often very difficult for a multinational corporation to market in a foreign country unless it also manufactures its products there.24 As Mark Mason has shown, the level of intra-keiretsu cross-shareholding increased dramatically in anticipation of capital market liberalization, so as to make it more difficult for foreigners to acquire majority ownership of Japanese corporations.25 This tactic proved quite successful: few American multinationals were able to purchase more than minority interests in Japanese companies, even after they were legally permitted to do so. The wellpublicized inability of American corporate raider T Boone Pickens to secure a seat on the board of the Japanese auto parts supplier he had bought a major interest in is testimony to the effectiveness with which keiretsu relationships can be used to limit foreign access to Japanese markets. As the last example indicates, some of the functions of the intermarket keiretsu may not be economic at all but political.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

But Van Jones was never going to recruit the farmers in Rockingham County to the cause of green energy. They weren’t going to listen to a radical black man from San Francisco, and they didn’t like Obama any better—after Dean’s trip to Washington, some men at the local diner said, “You went to see that nigger?” The one man they might listen to was T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire corporate raider, who was old and white and had been appearing in ads for natural gas and renewable energy. On his trip to Washington, Dean got nowhere near Obama, who was vacationing that week on Martha’s Vineyard. But a few months later, he actually met the president. In March 2010 an event was held at Andrews Air Force Base to announce the first biofuel fighter jet, and Dean was invited.

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century
by Alex Prud'Homme
Published 6 Jun 2011

Fueled with cheese, crackers, and six-packs of Big Orange soda, he’d spend hours with his dogs hunting quail on the property, before racing ninety miles back to Amarillo, where he was building Mesa Inc. into the largest independent oil firm in the world. In the 1980s, Pickens built a reputation as the country’s most fearsome corporate raider. He made hostile bids for companies many times larger than Mesa—including Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Unocal—which helped to reconfigure the resource business and made him a billionaire. His enemies referred to Pickens as a “greenmailer,” and in 1985 Time magazine depicted him on its cover as a cagey poker player.

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle
by Diana B. Henriques
Published 1 Aug 2011

The New York Times “[A] fascinating portrait… In this thoroughly researched and well-written account, Henriques skilfully manages to humanise Madoff without diminishing the monstrousness of his deeds.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram Also by Diana B. Henriques The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders Fidelity’s World: The Secret Life and Public Power of the Mutual Fund Giant The Machinery of Greed: Public Authority Abuse and What to Do About It BERNIE MADOFF, THE WIZARD OF LIES BERNIE MADOFF, THE WIZARD OF LIES INSIDE THE INFAMOUS $65 BILLION SWINDLE DIANA B.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber
Published 9 Aug 2011

Merrill Lynch – ubiquitous Merrill – began to broker deposits for thrifts; the thrifts in California and the Southwest began to offer much higher interest rates and Merrill’s army of thousands of brokers became the channel for moving money from around the country to the thrifts controlled by Milken’s friends. The deposits that the thrifts were selling were guaranteed by the US Treasury – which was all that the buyers of these deposits wanted to know. Few of the corporate raiders financed by Milken had much industrial experience. They used Uncle Sam’s money – money obtained from the sale of deposits guaranteed by the US government – to acquire more than fifty firms. They often ‘overpaid’ for these firms, but then they were paying with Sam’s money. Many of the firms were unable to earn enough to pay the interest on the outstanding junk bonds.

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
by Michael Shnayerson
Published 20 May 2019

“I want authentic structures of cultural distribution,” he would exclaim, “based on people collecting the work in different price points!” Often he referred to himself in the third person, as if plucked from a Saul Bellow novel. “There’s not a guy in the world who has helped more young artists than Stefan Simchowitz, who’s risked more,” he declared. “But people don’t see it.” The son of a South African corporate raider and art collector, Simchowitz had early success with a tech start-up—MediaVast, which he sold for a reported personal profit of $4 million—and embarked on a seven-year quest to build a collection of unknown but, so he felt, commercially promising artists.7 He claimed to buy works for as little as $500, and whenever he could, he bought in quantity.8 One of Simchowitz’s first finds was Joe Bradley, the young abstract artist who had spent his formative Lower East Side days partying with his pals in the windowless Canada gallery.

Buffett
by Roger Lowenstein
Published 24 Jul 2013

Linda Sandler, writing in the Wall Street Journal, charged that Buffett was pocketing rich coupons for Berkshire in return for safekeeping the other CEOs’ jobs: Many Wall Street investors say Mr. Buffett’s special deals amount to a kind of gentlemanly protection game. In the old days, these investors say, corporate raiders such as Saul Steinberg got paid “greenmail” to go away. But Mr. Buffett is getting “whitemail” to stick around and hold management’s hand.17 Such sweetheart deals with the CEOs, so the argument ran, were depriving the stockholders of the freedom to sell out in takeovers. According to Forbes, Buffett gets a special deal, but so does management.… Put differently, how much does Warren Buffett charge for takeover protection?

Flight of the WASP
by Michael Gross

His faith would prove to be livelier than his second marriage, which produced four children but lacked the passion and commitment of his brief first love. All along, the Morgan interests grew in size and influence. In 1869—the year George Peabody died—Pierpont helped the owner of a small railroad fight off corporate raider Jay Gould and his partner Jim Fisk. When the dust settled, Morgan was on the railroad’s board of directors, a pattern that would become his modus operandi. The next year, the Morgans elbowed into the ranks of Barings and Rothschild as European state financiers when their bank floated loans for France after Prussia brought down Napoleon III.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
by Iain Gately
Published 30 Jun 2008

The three-martini business lunch was consigned to history, as were many corporate cocktail cabinets. The new ethos was apparent in the 1985 movie Wall Street, a Faustian tale about Bud, a young stockbroker eager to share in the immense fortunes being made in the markets at that time. Bud solicits the attention of Gordon Gekko, a corporate raider, who epitomizes the new model capitalist. “Lunch is for wimps,” he declares at their first encounter, and Bud pointedly calls for Evian when he meets Gekko in a restaurant at night. The old order is represented by Bud’s father, a union leader at Bluestar Airlines, who does his business with the men he represents over a few beers in the local bar.

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials)
by Benjamin Graham and Jason Zweig
Published 1 Jan 1949

Cars were “lemons,” televisions and radios were constantly “on the fritz,” and the managers of many publicly-traded companies ignored both the present interests of their outside shareholders and the future prospects of their own businesses. All of this began to change in 1984, when independent oilman T. Boone Pickens launched a hostile takeover bid for Gulf Oil. Soon, fueled by junk-bond financing provided by Drexel Burnham Lambert, “corporate raiders” stalked the landscape of corporate America, scaring long-sclerotic companies into a new regimen of efficiency. While many of the companies involved in buy-outs and takeovers were ravaged, the rest of American business emerged both leaner (which was good) and meaner (which sometimes was not)

Practical Ext JS Projects With Gears
by Frank Zammetti
Published 7 Jul 2009

That product is developed by a team of dedicated engineers and has been developed over a very long period of time to be the polished, powerful solution it is today. At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to the relatively simple 1 Gordon Gekko is the main antagonist in the classic movie Wall Street. Gordon, a corporate raider played by Michael Douglas, embodies all that was wrong with those involved in the stock market in the 80s (and now too it seems!). 497 498 Ch apt er 9 n Ma Na G ING YOU r FINa NC eS : F I N a N C e M a S t e r concept of a diary2 for your money! That’s exactly what Finance Master is. It won’t tell you how to invest your money and it won’t balance your checkbook or simulate investment scenarios.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

Supervisory oversight of CEOs has historically been weak in America, where boards have traditionally been widely held to be ineffective.15 But the opportunity for windfalls during the Reagan era caused traditional supine board governance to deteriorate even further. Too many CEOs are able to pick their own boards: board elections feature a management-selected list of candidates, with critics facing daunting expense and administrative barriers to landing positions on the ballot. Only rich corporate raiders like William A. Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management can compete. Journalist Ian Austen explains: “We forget how unusual the corporate election system is in a democracy. Ninety-nine percent of the time, shareholders are not given a choice as to who they wish to represent them on the board of directors.”16 Firm performance would benefit from visionary and even contentious boards rather than incurious ones.

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
by William D. Cohan
Published 15 Nov 2009

Leslie Wayne cited a number of instances where the firm appeared to have a conflict of interest—“for instance, acting as a market maker in the shares of one company at the same time it was waging a proxy battle against that company's management”—but plowed ahead anyway. She noted that the firm happily represented corporate raiders, such as Irwin Jacobs in his successful effort to snatch control of the moving company Bekins from the Belzberg family of Canada, another set of well-known raiders. Wayne also let a competitor take a potshot at the firm. “Bear Stearns has done an intelligent job of seeking segments that most people found to be too small, specialized or even vaguely repellent,” said George L.

Jim Henson: The Biography
by Brian Jay Jones
Published 23 Sep 2013

Things were far less harmonious outside Abbey Road Studios, however. That January, Lord Grade had found himself suddenly, almost inexplicably, driven out as the head of his own organization, now broadly known as the Associated Communications Corporation, or ACC. The culprit was a soft-spoken but ruthless Australian entrepreneur named Robert Holmes à Court, a corporate raider who acquired real estate, oil and gas producers, and television and film studios as casually as other businessmen collected cuff links. Over the past eighteen months, Holmes à Court had vacuumed up non-voting shares in Grade’s ACC, then worked his way onto Grade’s board, where he stealthily acquired more stock.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE conclude, however reluctantly that if owners are no longer the managers, CEO control and the authoritarianism it breeds are probably the only way to run an enterprise successfully There do not appear to be credible alternatives to placing the power of governance in the hands of the CEO and trusting that even his handpicked directors will hold him to task, or, if they prove unable or unwilling, that corporate raiders will take over and revamp management. When the scandals broke, first at Enron, then at WorldCom, I was a little relieved that the authoritarian nature of modern corporate governance did not become an issue, although there was a great deal of justified concern about the corporate abuses that authoritarianism fostered.

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
by Max Blumenthal
Published 27 Nov 2012

Luntz earned acclaim—and notoriety—in 1994 when he crafted a memo for the new Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” The memo advised Gingrich to promote the Republican agenda with positive words like “moral,” “lead,” and “prosperity,” while hammering the Democratic opposition with terms like “abuse of power,” “corrupt,” and “intolerant.” Luntz went on to garner lucrative contracts for corporate raiders such as Enron, the anti-green energy oil company ExxonMobil, and most recently, the financial industry, which hired him to help undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement. Luntz’s best-selling vocabulary guide, Words That Work, was originally entitled Killer Words. Given his history of helping corporate crooks talk their way out of crises, perhaps it was appropriate that Luntz was contracted by The Israel Project, an international pro-Israel activism outfit with ties to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, to craft its official hasbara handbook.

Security Analysis
by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd
Published 1 Jan 1962

This might seem obvious, but it was in no way apparent to the creditors of Federated Department Stores (which operated Bloomingdale’s and other high-end retailers) during the junk bond mania of the late 1980s. Investment banks had discovered, without any sense of shame, that they could sell junk bonds to a credulous public irrespective of the issuers’ ability to repay them. In 1988, Federated agreed to a leveraged acquisition by the Canadian developer and corporate raider Robert Campeau, which committed the company to annual interest charges thereafter of $600 million. This was rather an interesting figure because Federated was earning only $400 million.3 The Federated bonds thus violated the rule that creditors can never extract more from a company than it actually has.

Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
by Kurt Eichenwald
Published 14 Mar 2005

Both had been snapping up smaller pipelines and were often competing bidders. Fighting over scraps made no sense when they both could achieve their shared goal through a single merger—with each other. Segnar had plenty of other justifications for pushing the deal, but many of those went unmentioned. Irwin Jacobs, the feared corporate raider, was loading up on InterNorth stock. If Segnar didn’t take control of his own destiny, Jacobs might do it for him. A major acquisition, like HNG, would load the company up with debt and make it far less attractive as a candidate for a hostile takeover. Intrigued, Lay asked some questions and said he would get his best people working on the idea.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

If equally matched, fight, and if not, split and re-evaluate.” Wall Street was a morality tale involving junior stockbroker Bud Fox caught between his blue-collar father, a foreman and trade unionist who represented the virtues of hard and honest labor, and the ruthless, cynical Gordon Gekko, a corporate raider whose motto was “greed is good.” Bud became wealthy by following Gekko’s methods until he realized that a plan to buy the airline where his father worked was all about asset-stripping. The movie appeared in 1987, the year of a Wall Street crash, and seemed to capture the financial mindset that had created both financial mayhem and a loss of moral bearings.

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
by Richard Kluger
Published 1 Jan 1996

What Maxwell had on his hands, if one did not dwell on the rosy view, was a badly unbalanced company; 92 percent of its profits came from tobacco, an industry facing an ever louder public clamor over the health toll it exacted. If the company’s cash was not put to creative use fast, it would soon likely attract corporate raiders, greenmailers, leveraged-buyout artists, and other predators enjoying their own heyday. The treasure trove from tobacco was also inviting lawsuits from aggrieved customers, further depressing Philip Morris stock, already selling at a price/earnings ratio comparable to that of companies with only half its per-share net.