by Nicolas Niarchos · 20 Jan 2026 · 654pp · 170,150 words
Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (Norton, 1978), 139. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a rebel named Jonas: This was the British tycoon and corporate raider Roland W. “Tiny” Rowland, who was for many years a go-between for Savimbi and Western governments. When Rowland called on Downing Street to advocate
by Tim Wu · 4 Nov 2025 · 246pp · 65,143 words
suffer from organizational problems, managers who feud or develop their own agendas, or just the sheer impossibility of coherently organizing so many functions. As the corporate raider T. Boone Pickens once put it, “It’s unusual to find a large corporation that’s efficient. I know about economies of scale and all
by Ernest Scheyder · 30 Jan 2024 · 355pp · 133,726 words
recalled. “It was a very scary time.”42 Freeport was, in the words of a business columnist, a desperate seller.43 * * * UNDER PRESSURE FROM the corporate raider Carl Icahn, Freeport sold parts of its oil business in September 2016 for $2 billion.44 Not long after, it sold more oil assets—this
by David Carey · 7 Feb 2012 · 421pp · 128,094 words
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
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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
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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
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Peltz were still plying their trade into the second decade of the twenty-first century.) While buyout firms typically enlisted management in their bids, the corporate raiders’ instrument of choice was the uninvited, or hostile, tender offer, a takeover bid that went over the heads of management and appealed directly to shareholders
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help craft a takeover offer for Sea-Land Corporation, a shipping company that was seeking a friendly buyer after receiving a hostile bid from a corporate raider. However, when it came time to order a fairness opinion—a paid, written declaration that a deal is fair that carries great weight with investors
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, a top official at USX Corporation, the parent of U.S. Steel. USX was battling for its corporate life with Carl Icahn, the much feared corporate raider. In 1986 Icahn had amassed a nearly 10 percent stake in USX and launched an $8 billion hostile takeover bid. U.S. Steel was three
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Kravis and Ted Forstmann. Just as Drexel Burnham’s Michael Milken had created the junk-bond market, tapping the public capital markets to finance the corporate raiders and buyout shops of the 1980s, Lee reinvented the bank lending market with his syndicates, which allowed risk to be shared and thereby allowed much
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in as a white knight—an ally of management—for a company facing a hostile takeover bid. In April 1989, Japonica Partners, a Drexel-backed corporate raider, launched a hostile offer for CNW Corporation, the railroad’s publicly traded parent, after buying up nearly 9 percent of CNW’s shares in the
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the table and on June 6, Japonica dropped out—collecting a nice profit as the shares rose during the bidding. (Illustrating again that in the corporate raider game you can win by losing.) Although the $1.6 billion price was rich—Blackstone was paying eight times cash flow, twice what it had
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the CEO and now promised to slash costs and carve up the company. To the man in the street, that was no different from what corporate raiders did. At $31.3 billion, the RJR buyout smashed all records. It was more than three times the size of the next biggest, KKR’s
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, it did not even have internal mechanisms to gauge the profitability of its divisions or its investments. In 1986, Herbert and Robert Haft, two sometime corporate raiders whose family had owned the Dart Drug chain, thought they could do a better job running Safeway and began buying up the stock as a
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had. Henry Silverman, who steered the HFS deal for Blackstone, was versed in the hotel franchise business from his years working for the financier and corporate raider Saul Steinberg, for whom he had led a successful LBO of the Days Inn of America chain. Steinberg was one of the early raiders, having
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banks and, for unsecured junior debt, insurers. Drexel displaced the insurers by acting as a conduit, funneling money from the bond market to growing companies, corporate raiders, and buyout firms. Even before Drexel’s collapse, Jimmy Lee at Chemical had begun to assemble networks of banks to buy parcels of bank loans
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Randall Smith, “Wasserstein Dies, Leaves Deal-Making Legacy,” WSJ, Oct. 16, 2009; Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de la Merced, “Obituary—Bruce Wasserstein, 61, Corporate Raider,” NYT, Oct. 16, 2009. 14 Wasserstein Perella soon won: Paltrow, “Nomura Buys Stake”; Michael Quint, “Yamaichi-Lodestar Deal Another Sign of the Trend,” NYT, July
by Mark Stevens · 31 May 1993 · 414pp · 108,413 words
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
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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
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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
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that was quoted to him. Internally, Icahn was regarded as a difficult client; at the same time he was respected as the smartest of the corporate raiders, virtually all of whom had links to Drexel. “I knew all the raiders of the era,” said a former senior Drexel executive. “Boone Pickens, Jimmy
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the real value in the mid-to low-$40s. Once again the management of a major American corporation had acted to protect itself from a corporate raider. As the price of his deal, Pickens signed a standstill agreeing to keep his distance from Phillips for fifteen years. But if the CEO and
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the other end of the spectrum. In a speech, “The Pirates of Profitability,” Phillips Executive Vice President C. M. Kittrell attacked Icahn and his fellow corporate raiders for raping the shareholders. “Mr. Pickens and Mr. Icahn claim they reaped a windfall for Phillips shareholders. And to some degree that’s true. In
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? “In Phillips’ case, we will not know the answer to these questions for many years, if ever. “But there’s one thing we know today; corporate raiders who say they represent shareholders . . . represent them, not by proxy but by piracy and they do so at great risk to everyone but themselves. “As
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“the traveling public and the U.S. international aviation interests. This concern is based at least in part on the reputation of the so-called corporate raiders such as Mr. Icahn. They have the reputation for buying up the shares of an undervalued company and then milking or selling off the assets
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was in their best interests was never mentioned. Instead, Meyer shifted attention from management’s intransigence by citing the popular notions about the evils of corporate raiders. “... Last month’s American Lawyer published an Icahn memo on his tactics, none of which concerned management of a target and quoted ‘his enemies and
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this came as a rude awakening to a man who had run off a string of successes in the options business and subsequently as a corporate raider. When he acquired TWA, he assumed that those successes would continue. “When Carl took over, he was very cocky,” said Edward Gehrlein, TWA’s former
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opportunity to lambast Icahn, expressing the pent-up hostility millions were experiencing as the biggest names in American industry were being ransacked by greenmailers and corporate raiders. This was the flip side of the Roaring Eighties—the wide gulf between the elite who were accumulating wealth and the majority who were losing
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over U.S. Air, Icahn might be able to prevent or delay government approval of the Piedmont/U.S. Air merger. And as an experienced corporate raider, Icahn knew full well the devastating effect that a failed takeover attempt would have on a company. On the other hand, if Icahn is successful
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an act of desperation by the defendant Icahn to ‘extricate’ himself from his TWA investment and to permit him to reemerge as American’s preeminent ‘corporate raider.’” In another suit, the IAM went to the crux of the issue, charging that “TWA is already highly-leveraged as a result of its takeover
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was “beneath” the CEO to do so and in part because it would be viewed as a sign of weakness by Icahn and his fellow corporate raiders. By the time Corry came to power, Icahn’s plan for restructuring USX had evolved as a proposal to divide the company in two by
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route to a Manhattan theater, Icahn was stricken with fear. Could everything he had worked for be taken from him? Could the widespread resentment of corporate raiders finally be coming home to roost? It seemed as if the establishment he had thumbed his nose at for so long had risen up to
by Jeff Gramm · 23 Feb 2016 · 384pp · 103,658 words
Vanderbilt Line 3. Warren Buffett and American Express: The Great Salad Oil Swindle 4. Carl Icahn versus Phillips Petroleum: The Rise and Fall of the Corporate Raiders 5. Ross Perot versus General Motors: The Unmaking of the Modern Corporation 6. Karla Scherer versus R. P. Scherer: A Kingdom in a Capsule 7
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General Motors in the 1980s to the well-publicized exploits of today’s fresh-faced hedge fund rabble-rousers. We’ll meet “Proxyteers,” conglomerators, and corporate raiders, and we’ll see how large public companies dealt with them. I’ve chosen eight important interventions from history, featuring original shareholder letters: BENJAMIN GRAHAM
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letter to Chairman and CEO William Douce, February 4, 1985 After a brief interlude covering Jim Ling, Harold Simmons, and Saul Steinberg, we enter the corporate raider era to watch Carl Icahn’s Milken-funded frontal assault on hapless Phillips Petroleum. ROSS PEROT AND GENERAL MOTORS Ross Perot letter to Chairman and
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investors ruled the markets, in the ’70s they were at its mercy, and in the ’80s they were “shorn like sheep” in the battles between corporate raiders and entrenched managers. But in time, institutional investors would begin to exert themselves. Today they are quietly teaming up with hedge fund activists to keep
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you philosophically agree with, but it is the practical result of a corporate governance system based on shareholder-elected boards of directors. Thus, when a corporate raider wins control of Pacific Lumber and clear-cuts thousands of acres of old-growth redwoods, I view this as a regrettable result of unchecked capitalism
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come to dominate it. And while most of the Proxyteers faded into obscurity, their tactics would be sharpened and used by later generations of conglomerators, corporate raiders, and hedge fund activists. A CONSTANT DOWNWARD SLOPE Robert Young’s first year as chairman of the New York Central lived up to his hype
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open-market share purchases was the hostile tender offer. When the proxy fight gave way to the hostile tender, the Proxyteer was replaced by the corporate raider. 3 Warren Buffett and American Express: The Great Salad Oil Swindle “Let me assure you that the great majority of stockholders (although perhaps not the
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growth, which was richly rewarded by Wall Street no matter how it was obtained. The go-go era collapsed quickly, but a new generation of corporate raiders emerged from the ruins. Jim Ling’s 1978 battle with Harold Simmons highlights the hostile raider’s ascendance. “Jimmy Ling the Merger King,” who ran
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was brewing in academia based on the curious notion that financial markets are near perfect. It altered the debate on hostile takeovers and helped bring corporate raiders out of the shadows and into the boardrooms of America’s largest companies. The efficient market hypothesis came out of the University of Chicago in
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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
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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.” —CARL ICAHN, 1985 ON
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offer for control. Phillips was Icahn’s fifteenth target in his seven-year career as a raider, and his note to Douce was a classic corporate raider’s “bear hug letter”—an offer to purchase the company, followed by threats should he be ignored. While Icahn had used the same playbook for
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everyone else, these clashes at the top of our largest companies were Hollywood material. 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
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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
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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
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times over.10 But even in the mid-2000s, when the entire world binged on cheap capital, nobody lined up to buy bonds from unproven corporate raiders angling for a buying spree.11 That’s quite a testament to Milken’s immense power in the 1980s. Whether Milken’s machine at Drexel
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good song. 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
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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
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&A, with a very early version of Martin Lipton’s poison pill and the first “highly confident” letter. The drama began when Boone Pickens, a corporate raider who started his career at Phillips Petroleum, made a run at his former employer in late 1984. SURVIVAL OF THE UNFITTEST One of Carl Icahn
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the company at $60 per share. Bartlesville was even less welcoming to Pickens the second time around. The town became a symbol of the threat corporate raiders held for small-town America. It was abuzz with residents in “Boone Buster” T-shirts at twenty-four-hour prayer vigils, who believed Pickens would
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were rightfully indignant at the wave of greenmail buyouts in the early 1980s. They were proof that all the talk from CEOs, as well as corporate raiders, about working on behalf of shareholders was mere posturing. Self-interest reigns supreme, and CEOs jumped at the opportunity to use company funds to free
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liquidating assets and building the company’s cash reserves. He would later invest Bayswater’s cash in his takeover attempts. ICAHN’S CAREER AS a corporate raider was off and running. He viewed his new investment strategy as “a kind of arbitrage.”29 In 1980, he wrote a memo for prospective investors
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empire, rattled the junk bond market. Beneath the headline failures, junk default rates were creeping up and would blow open in the 1990–91 recession. Corporate raiders were having a harder time finding compelling bargains, it was more difficult to raise capital to pursue them, and, when they did, the target company
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, fewer good targets, sophisticated corporate defenses, regulatory pressure, and slowing economic growth. What was different in the ’80s—what ushered in the era of superstar corporate raiders and then made it disappear forever—were the rise and fall of Michael Milken, and the hard-knocks education of large institutional investors. CORNERS CUT
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-a-lifetime opportunity to raid America’s largest corporations. They wisely took advantage of it and never looked back. WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT Corporate raiders in the 1980s were not only blessed with Michael Milken bearing wads of money; they were aided by passive institutional investors who struggled with their
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shorn like sheep.”76 He meant it. After Perot, you could no longer count on large institutional shareholders to be pushovers. This helped end the corporate raider era, while encouraging the kind of shareholder activism that dominates markets today. 6 Karla Scherer versus R. P. Scherer: A Kingdom in a Capsule “In
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methods turned out to be powerful, driving business headlines and shaking up the executive suites of some of America’s most iconic companies. Even superstar corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Nelson Peltz would soon join their ranks. Hedge fund is a vestigial term that Fortune magazine’s Carol Loomis used in
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as a letter from Drexel Burnham, but it sounded impressive. Chapman attached his bear hug as an exhibit to a 13D filing, much as a corporate raider would have done in the 1980s. The gambit worked. After announcing that the value of its assets had increased to more than $12 per share
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up its stock. It used a seemingly rock-solid dividend to seduce income-seeking retail investors into levitating its shares. Taking a page from the corporate raiders’ playbook, Star Gas was also not afraid to leverage itself to the hilt. From its very inception, Star Gas promised investors a healthy dividend of
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, and Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital took on the multilevel-marketing great white whale, Herbalife, in a fight-to-the-death cage match. WHEREAS CORPORATE RAIDERS busted through gates with hostile tender offers for control and a supporting army of arbitragers, early hedge fund activism was an exercise in persuasion. The
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great return by owning less than 1% of Microsoft, for example, all Microsoft shareholders need to benefit. But just as with the Proxyteers and the corporate raiders, we shouldn’t get suckered into believing everyone who spouts pro-shareholder populism. A good window into activists’ real intentions with regard to other shareholders
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wiser voting stockholder. As shareholder activism has become ubiquitous, it looks less and less like a defined movement, as it was in the Proxyteer or corporate raider eras. Instead, it is a fixture in the stock market—it is the reality that when enough shareholders are upset at a board or management
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. Young, 146. 26. Brooks, 7 Fat Years, 12. Also see Diana B. Henriques, The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders (New York: Scribner, 2000), 133. 27. Karr, Fight for Control, 15. 28. Ibid., 32. 29. Borkin, Robert R. Young, 151, citing New York Times, February
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Bullish 60s (New York: Wiley, 1999), 238. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 258–59. 4: CARL ICAHN VERSUS PHILLIPS PETROLEUM: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CORPORATE RAIDERS 1. Mark Stevens, King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist (New York: Dutton, 1993), 133. 2. Ibid., 134. 3. Ibid., 150. 4. Ibid., 150
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of, 72–73 Apple and, xvi, 72, 164 arbitrage and, 77–78, 93, 123, 192 childhood and youth of, 76–77 corporate governance philosophy, 79 corporate raider career beginnings, 78 on director independence, 142 greenmail and, 72, 74, 79, 92, 93–94 hedge fund activism and, 148, 168 investment strategy of, 78
by Steve Coll · 12 Jun 2017 · 645pp · 190,680 words
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
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. 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
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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
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not an open-ended meeting, they said, with a vague agenda. It was a confrontation with Gordon Getty, an attempt to end his dalliances with corporate raiders and royalty trust analysts, all those outside encounters that Winokur described facetiously to Getty Oil executives as “Gordon Getty’s Odyssey of Discovery.” They gathered
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career was ending for reasons beyond one’s control: the power of Wall Street, the value gap in the oil industry, the greed of a corporate raider. But it was another thing to feel that everything one cherished—career, power, position, community, the lifelong realization of work and ambition—was slipping away
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secret effort by Petersen, Winokur, and Copley to instigate a family lawsuit against Gordon; the negotiations with Pickens; lingering concerns about the Cullens and other corporate raiders; the million-dollar restructuring study undertaken by Goldman, Sachs, now nearing completion; and the continued thinking and tinkering by Gordon at his Broadway mansion, from
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for the stock price study. Neither had the board been fully informed about the overtures by Pickens and the contacts by Gordon with other potential corporate raiders. For his part, Gordon continued to act in similar isolation as sole trustee, receiving phone calls and reviewing documents in his basement study, never consulting
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despite the personal fortune he had made during its halcyon days. He even drafted legislation and testified before Congress, urging that restrictions be imposed on corporate raiders such as Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, and Irwin “The Liquidator” Jacobs. Lipton’s critics, and there were plenty of them, decried the hypocrisy of his
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so modestly averted, its jaw slack and withdrawn—the face of a small-town high school principal—and suspect its owner was a ruthless, indefatigable corporate raider, a man intensely driven to acquire not only wealth, but to achieve recognition, political power, and sweeping reform of American industry? And yet it was
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forward with his plans. Speed was critical; if Getty Oil’s vulnerability was now apparent to Liedtke, then it must also be apparent to other corporate raiders as well. Liedtke’s investment bankers at Lazard Frères advised that a good time to make a surprise hostile takeover announcement was over the Christmas
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, Pennzoil v. Texaco had again come to life, and once more the puckish Jamail was at the center of things. Carl Icahn, an enormously successful corporate raider who had gained control of TWA Inc. in a hostile takeover, had decided there was potential for profit in Texaco’s travails. After the stock
by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar · 1 Jan 1990 · 713pp · 203,688 words
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
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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
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and Roberts had sought and received permission from their investors to secretly accumulate stock in their targets. These so-called toehold investments, a mainstay of corporate raiders like Boone Pickens, would give Kravis negotiating advantage with chief executives and allow the firm to profit from the inevitable run-up in a target
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, hired in June 1986, was a controversial figure named Daniel Good, who as merger chief at E. F. Hutton had built a thriving business backing corporate raiders. Good, so boundlessly optimistic he was sometimes called “Dan Quixote,” didn’t back four-star investors like Carl Icahn or Boone Pickens. His clients were
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head, in Wall Street parlance, is intended to leave directors with few options. Disclosing the overture prematurely tends to put the company “in play” for corporate raiders and risks frightening off a certain offer from management. For years boards capitulated and signed merger agreements with the “ambushing” management. Many still did. Wall
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control of the company, the firm would almost certainly realize a massive gain on its stock holdings. What Strong described was exactly the strategy that corporate raiders such as Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn had been using for years. For a major investment bank to try the same approach was unheard of
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than an affront to Forstmann’s morals, of course. It was laying waste to his business as well. Because the use of junk bonds allowed corporate raiders to raise money cheaply and easily, it tended to drive up the prices of takeover targets. Forstmann found himself being outbid for companies where once
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share, or nearly $2.5 billion, of his $90 bid, was a masterstroke Shearson couldn’t easily equal. Two years of backing Dan Good’s corporate raiders had left Cohen’s junk-bond department sadly lacking in the expertise it now needed. The worldwide market for PIK stock, which is convertible into
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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
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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
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pizza and soft drinks. As we worked on the book, we worried that RJR would be eclipsed by some even bigger and wilder deal. Between corporate raiders, LBO artists, and junk-bond financiers, the whole 1980s business world had gone mad. The barbarians’ next assault could reduce RJR from epic to footnote
by Steven Brill · 28 May 2018 · 519pp · 155,332 words
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
by William D. Cohan · 25 Dec 2015 · 1,009pp · 329,520 words
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
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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
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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
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that, within four years, added yet another dimension to his growing legend. In this regard, he was taking after Sir James Goldsmith, the famed British corporate raider, who was Stern's distant cousin. In partnership with Goldsmith, Stern bought a number of hotel properties in Vietnam. Accounts vary as to just how
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as "rather like the Rome city council slapping a demolition order on the Vatican." Bollore was--and remains--the French equivalent of a 1980s-style corporate raider, but unlike most raiders, he also controls his own corporate empire. The indirect investment in Lazard was but one of several Bernheim had recommended Bollore
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sources--banks, insurance companies, and the public-equity markets--but also Milken pioneered the use of these securities to finance the huge financial ambitions of corporate raiders, like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens, and of LBO firms, such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Before long, the unknown firm of Drexel Lambert was
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brought him plenty of notoriety and, not for the first time, a seat at the table opposite Felix. Bruce agreed to advise Ron Perelman, the corporate raider, on his attempt in 1987 to buy Salomon Inc., the parent company of Salomon Brothers, the large Wall Street investment bank focused primarily on bond
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BEGRUDGING ACCOLADES for Bruce keep coming despite the valid criticism he received in some circles for agreeing to represent, in late November 2005, the billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn and a group of dissident Time Warner shareholders--who together owned some 3.3 percent of the company--in their very public battle
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the same form in Felix G. Rohatyn, Twenty-Year Century (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 36. "For the handful of men": Leslie Wayne, "The Corporate Raiders," NYT, July 18, 1982. "These fees don't come from widows and orphans": Ibid. "The level of fees is so different": Ibid. "There's a
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by Doug Henwood · 9 May 2005 · 306pp · 78,893 words
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by Malcolm Gladwell · 29 May 2017 · 230pp · 71,320 words
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by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber · 9 Aug 2011
by Scott Fearon · 10 Nov 2014 · 232pp · 71,965 words
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by Jonathan Tepper · 20 Nov 2018 · 417pp · 97,577 words
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by Robert X. Cringely · 1 Jun 2014 · 232pp · 71,024 words
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by R. Christopher Whalen · 7 Dec 2010 · 488pp · 144,145 words
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by James B Stewart and Rachel Abrams · 14 Feb 2023 · 521pp · 136,802 words
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by Ryan Dezember · 13 Jul 2020 · 279pp · 87,875 words
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by Enrico Moretti · 21 May 2012 · 403pp · 87,035 words
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by James Patterson, John Connolly and Tim Malloy · 10 Oct 2016 · 234pp · 63,844 words
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