THE RAIDER
“In this business, if you want a friend, get a dog.” — Carl Icahn
ONE
QUEENS TO WALL STREET
EXT. FAR ROCKAWAY, QUEENS — 1950 — DAY
The Rockaway peninsula. Salt air, boardwalks, working-class Jewish families crowded into bungalows. This is not the Hamptons. This is the other end of Long Island — the end that smells like fish and broken ambition.
YOUNG CARL ICAHN, fourteen, lean and sharp-eyed, sits on a stoop playing poker with three OLDER BOYS. He has a small pile of coins in front of him. Their piles are getting smaller.
Far Rockaway, Queens. 1950. Average household income: $3,100.
OLDER BOY
You’re cheating, Icahn.
YOUNG CARL
(not looking up from his cards)
I’m not cheating. You’re just bad at this. There’s a difference.
OLDER BOY
Nobody wins seven hands in a row.
YOUNG CARL
I just did. Want to make it eight?
He fans his cards on the table. Full house. The boys throw their cards down in disgust. Carl scoops his winnings with the efficiency of a bank teller.
CARL (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
I learned everything I needed to know about Wall Street on that stoop. Poker isn’t about your cards. It’s about making the other guy think you have better cards. And if he folds, you never have to show him anything.
CUT TO:
INT. ICAHN APARTMENT — FAR ROCKAWAY — NIGHT
A cramped apartment. ABE ICAHN, Carl’s father, sits in an armchair reading the newspaper. Abe was a cantor — a singer in the synagogue — and then a substitute teacher. He wanted to be an opera singer. He failed. He is bitter, quiet, and slowly disappearing into his own disappointment.
BELLA ICAHN, Carl’s mother, is the engine of the household. She teaches school, pushes Carl relentlessly, and has the survival instincts of someone who knows poverty is always one bad month away.
BELLA
Carl, you’re going to Princeton. I don’t care if we have to sell the furniture.
ABE
(from behind his newspaper)
Let the boy be, Bella.
BELLA
Be what? Be you? Sitting in that chair for the rest of his life?
Abe says nothing. Carl watches his father absorb the blow. He makes a silent vow in that moment.
CARL (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
My father was a brilliant man who never had the guts to fight for what he wanted. I decided right there that I would rather die fighting than live sitting in that chair.
CUT TO:
INT. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY — PHILOSOPHY SEMINAR — 1954
Carl sits in a wood-paneled seminar room surrounded by prep school kids in blazers. He is the only kid from Far Rockaway. He is studying philosophy. His senior thesis is on “The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Meaning Criterion.” The other students don’t know what to make of him.
PROFESSOR
Mr. Icahn, do you believe empirical verification is the only path to meaning?
CARL
I believe the only things that matter are the things you can prove. Everything else is just noise people use to justify doing nothing.
PROFESSOR
(intrigued)
That’s a rather aggressive positivism.
CARL
Where I come from, we call it common sense.
But the real education at Princeton happens at night. Carl plays poker in the eating clubs. He is devastating. He reads opponents the way he reads Wittgenstein — systematically, mercilessly, looking for the gap between what they say and what they mean.
Icahn earned enough from poker at Princeton to buy his first car — a used Ford convertible. He drove it back to Far Rockaway and parked it in front of his parents’ apartment building.
CUT TO:
INT. U.S. ARMY BARRACKS — FORT DIX, NEW JERSEY — 1957
Carl, now in an Army uniform, plays poker with fellow soldiers. He wins enough to have $4,000 saved by the time he’s discharged. He tells his bunkmate his plan.
CARL
I’m going to Wall Street. Options trading.
BUNKMATE
You got a connection?
CARL
I got four thousand dollars and a philosophy degree. That’s better than a connection. Connections run out. Philosophy teaches you how to think. And four thousand dollars is enough to get in the door.
BUNKMATE
What if you lose it?
CARL
(grinning)
Then I’ll come back here and take yours.
CUT TO:
INT. DREYFUS & COMPANY — WALL STREET — 1961
Carl starts as an options broker on Wall Street. He is immediately, terrifyingly good at it. He doesn’t just trade — he studies the mechanics of risk in a way no one else in the pit seems to bother with.
But the 1962 market crash wipes out his savings. He is back to zero. Standing on the trading floor, watching the ticker, broke.
CARL
(to himself, jaw set)
Okay. So that’s what losing feels like. Good. Now I know.
He borrows money. He starts again. By 1968, he has opened his own firm: Icahn & Co. He specializes in options arbitrage — finding mispricings and exploiting them before anyone else notices.
Icahn & Co. opened in 1968 with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Carl Icahn was 32 years old.
CUT TO:
INT. ICAHN & CO. OFFICE — WALL STREET — 1978
A small, unglamorous office. Carl sits with his feet on the desk, reading a proxy statement. He has discovered something that will define his entire career: most public companies are run by mediocre people who don’t own much stock, don’t care about shareholders, and are terrified of anyone who asks hard questions.
CARL
(to his analyst, ALFRED KINGSLEY)
Alfred, look at this. Tappan Company. The stove manufacturer. Stock is at eight dollars. Book value is twenty. The CEO owns less than one percent. The board meets four times a year at a country club. They’re paying themselves like kings and the shareholders are getting nothing.
KINGSLEY
What are you going to do?
CARL
(leaning forward, eyes bright)
I’m going to buy enough stock to get on that board. Then I’m going to ask them why a company worth twenty dollars is trading at eight. And if they can’t answer that question, I’m going to replace them with people who can.
He buys a controlling stake in Tappan. Forces a sale to Electrolux at a premium. Makes a fortune. The template is set. Carl Icahn has discovered his life’s work: he is going to terrorize lazy boards of directors until they unlock the value they’re sitting on.
CARL (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
I didn’t set out to be a raider. I set out to buy companies that were worth more than their stock price. If the board was the reason the stock was cheap, then the board was the problem. And I’m very good at solving problems that don’t want to be solved.
DISSOLVE TO:
TWO
THE CORPORATE RAIDER
INT. TWA BOARDROOM — NEW YORK — 1985
Trans World Airlines. Once the glamour carrier of Howard Hughes, now a bloated, money-losing disaster managed by career bureaucrats who fly first class while the airline hemorrhages cash. Carl sits at the end of a long mahogany table. The TWA BOARD stares at him like he’s a shark that wandered into a swimming pool.
Trans World Airlines. Founded 1930. Once America’s premier international carrier. By 1985: $2 billion in debt, aging fleet, hostile unions.
TWA CHAIRMAN
Mr. Icahn, this board does not welcome hostile bids. We have a plan.
CARL
You’ve had a plan for ten years. The stock was twenty-four dollars. Now it’s twelve. Your plan is to keep your jobs and your first-class tickets while the shareholders eat sawdust. That’s not a plan. That’s a heist.
TWA CHAIRMAN
(red-faced)
We will fight this.
CARL
(standing, buttoning his jacket)
I hope you do. I love a fight. It means you’re scared. And scared people make mistakes.
He takes over TWA. It is brutal. The unions despise him. The press calls him a vulture. He strips costs, renegotiates contracts, sells assets. The airline lurches from crisis to crisis. Carl eventually takes it private, extracts hundreds of millions, and TWA stumbles on.
Was it a success? For Carl: yes. For TWA: debatable. For the narrative of Carl Icahn as corporate America’s most dangerous man: absolutely.
CUT TO:
EXT. U.S. CAPITOL BUILDING — WASHINGTON, D.C. — 1987
Carl walks up the Capitol steps past protesters holding signs: “ICAHN = GREED.” “RAIDERS GO HOME.” “SAVE AMERICAN JOBS.”
INT. CONGRESSIONAL HEARING ROOM — DAY
A packed hearing on hostile takeovers. Senators in dark suits look down at Carl from the elevated dais. The mood is hostile. This is the 1980s. Ivan Boesky has been arrested. Michael Milken is under investigation. The word “raider” is synonymous with everything wrong with American capitalism.
SENATOR
Mr. Icahn, you have been called a corporate raider, a greenmailer, and a destroyer of American institutions. How do you respond?
CARL
(leaning into the microphone, calm)
Senator, I respond by asking you a question. If I buy stock in a public company — a company that belongs to its shareholders — and I notice that the management is incompetent, the board is asleep, and the stock is fifty percent below what the company is worth — am I the problem? Or are they the problem?
SENATOR
You’re destroying jobs.
CARL
No, Senator. Incompetent management destroys jobs. I’m the one who shows up after management has already destroyed the jobs and tries to save what’s left. The raider is the doctor. The disease was there before I arrived.
Murmurs in the gallery. Several senators shift uncomfortably. Carl has a gift for making the powerful feel like they’re the ones who should be embarrassed.
CUT TO:
INT. GREENMAIL ERA — MONTAGE — 1982-1989
A rapid-fire montage set to period music. We see Carl across a decade of raids:
MARSHALL FIELD’S: Carl buys a stake. The board panics. They sell the entire company to another buyer at a premium just to escape him. Carl makes $30 million without firing a shot.
PHILLIPS PETROLEUM: Carl threatens a takeover. Phillips offers to buy his shares back at a premium — “greenmail.” Carl walks away with $75 million.
ACF INDUSTRIES: Carl buys the railroad car company, restructures it, makes a fortune. Workers lose jobs. Carl gets richer.
USX (U.S. STEEL): Carl buys a massive stake, demands the company spin off its energy business. The stock soars. Carl profits. Management fumes.
Between 1979 and 1989, Carl Icahn amassed a personal fortune estimated at $4 billion through corporate activism, hostile takeovers, and greenmail.
CARL
(to a reporter, in the middle of the montage)
They call it greenmail like it’s a crime. I call it an incentive for boards to do their jobs. If they ran their companies properly, I wouldn’t be able to make a dime.
CUT TO:
INT. CARL’S MANHATTAN PENTHOUSE — NIGHT — 1989
Carl sits in his massive duplex apartment overlooking Central Park. GAIL GOLDEN, his second wife, enters with a glass of wine. She is beautiful, composed, and utterly unimpressed by his money.
GAIL
The Journal called you “the most hated man on Wall Street” again.
CARL
Again? That’s lazy journalism. They should at least rotate the superlative.
GAIL
Does it bother you?
CARL
(staring out at the park)
You know what bothers me? That these CEOs get paid fifty million a year to run a company into the ground, and when someone shows up and says “hey, you’re terrible at this,” that person is the villain.
GAIL
Maybe it’s the way you say it.
CARL
(a beat)
What’s wrong with the way I say it?
GAIL
You say it like you want to burn the building down.
CARL
I don’t want to burn the building down. I want to fire the arsonist.
Gail shakes her head, but she’s smiling. She married a force of nature. She knew what she was getting.
DISSOLVE TO:
THREE
THE LEGENDS
INT. TEXACO BOARDROOM — WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK — 1988
Texaco is reeling. A $10.5 billion judgment in the Pennzoil lawsuit has pushed the oil giant into bankruptcy. Carl smells blood. He buys a massive position in the bankrupt company’s stock.
TEXACO CEO
Icahn is circling. He wants a board seat.
TEXACO LAWYER
He can’t take over a company in bankruptcy.
TEXACO CEO
You don’t know Carl Icahn. He’d take over a company in a coma.
Carl wages a proxy fight. He doesn’t win the board seats, but Texaco is forced to restructure, settle the lawsuit, and emerge from bankruptcy with a plan that rewards shareholders. Carl makes hundreds of millions.
CARL
(to reporters outside the courthouse)
I didn’t need to win the vote. I needed to scare them enough to do the right thing. Fear is a wonderful motivator for mediocre people.
CUT TO:
INT. RJR NABISCO — CONFERENCE ROOM — 1988
The greatest leveraged buyout in history is unfolding. KKR, Shearson Lehman, and multiple bidders are fighting over RJR Nabisco. Carl watches from the sidelines, amused.
CARL
(on the phone with a reporter)
Barbarians at the gate? Please. I’ve been at the gate for a decade. These private equity boys just discovered there was a gate.
He considered bidding for RJR Nabisco himself but decided the ego-driven auction had pushed the price beyond reason.
CARL
The smartest thing I ever did was the deals I didn’t do. When the other guy is bidding with his ego instead of his calculator, you walk away.
CARL (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
Wall Street has a short memory. The guys who overpaid for RJR Nabisco spent the next decade trying to earn back what they spent in one night. I went home, played poker, and slept like a baby.
CUT TO:
INT. YAHOO! HEADQUARTERS — SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA — 2008
Carl has adapted. The corporate raider of the 1980s has reinvented himself as a “shareholder activist” for the digital age. Same tactics. Better branding. His target: Yahoo!, which is fumbling its way through the internet revolution while Microsoft offers to buy the company for $44.6 billion.
Yahoo CEO JERRY YANG has rejected the bid. Carl is incandescent.
CARL
(on a conference call, barely controlled fury)
Let me understand this. Microsoft offers forty-four point six billion dollars for a company whose stock has been dropping for three years, and the board says no? On whose authority? With whose money? This is shareholder value. It belongs to the shareholders. Not to you. Not to your board. Not to your ping-pong tables.
Carl launches a proxy fight. He forces board changes. Yang eventually resigns. Microsoft withdraws its offer. Yahoo continues its long decline. Carl was right about the management. The stock never sees those levels again.
Yahoo! rejected Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid in 2008. Eight years later, Verizon acquired Yahoo’s core business for $4.48 billion — a tenth of the Microsoft offer.
CUT TO:
INT. CARL’S HOME OFFICE — MANHATTAN — 2013
Carl, now seventy-seven, sits in front of an enormous Bloomberg terminal. His phone rings. It’s about Apple. Tim Cook has been sitting on $145 billion in cash. Carl has bought a billion dollars of Apple stock.
CARL
(dictating a letter)
“Dear Tim. I am writing to urge Apple to immediately commence a $150 billion share buyback. Apple’s stock is dramatically undervalued. The cash pile is earning nothing. Return it to shareholders. Respectfully, Carl C. Icahn.”
He posts the letter publicly. Apple’s stock jumps. Over the next two years, Apple initiates the largest share buyback program in corporate history. Carl makes approximately $2 billion on the trade.
CARL
(to Gail, grinning)
Two billion dollars from a letter. I should have been a poet.
CUT TO:
INT. CNBC STUDIOS — “HALF TIME REPORT” — JANUARY 25, 2013
This is the scene. The one everyone remembers. BILL ACKMAN sits in the studio, live on air, defending his massive short position in Herbalife. He has bet $1 billion that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. He has presented a 342-slide presentation. He is righteous. He is certain.
Then the phone rings. SCOTT WAPNER, the host, picks up. It’s Carl Icahn, calling in live.
WAPNER
Carl, you’re live on the air. Bill Ackman is here.
CARL
(on speakerphone, voice like gravel and danger)
Good. I’ve got a few things to say to Bill.
What follows is the most vicious, personal, public financial fight in television history. Twenty-five minutes of two billionaires trying to destroy each other on live TV.
CARL
Bill, you’re a crybaby in the schoolyard. I went to a tough school in Queens. They would have eaten you alive. You’re the quintessential example of what’s wrong with the hedge fund industry.
ACKMAN
(trying to stay calm)
Carl, I have never met a more irrational person in my life. This is a pyramid scheme. I have the data.
CARL
I wouldn’t invest with you if you were the last man on earth. I wouldn’t invest with you if you — let me be clear — I wouldn’t invest with you if you paid me to invest with you.
ACKMAN
Carl, the public is watching this —
CARL
GOOD! Let them watch! Let them see who you are!
WAPNER watches in disbelief. The control room is scrambling. The ratings are through the roof. America is watching two billionaires fight like alley cats over a nutritional shake company.
Carl buys a massive long position in Herbalife specifically to destroy Ackman’s short. It’s not about the company. It’s about the fight. It’s personal. Carl Icahn doesn’t just want to win. He wants his opponent to know he lost.
Bill Ackman’s Herbalife short ultimately cost Pershing Square approximately $1 billion. Icahn’s long position generated a profit estimated at nearly $1 billion.
CARL (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
People asked me why I did it. Why go after Ackman so personally? Because he was arrogant. He was certain. And in my experience, when a man on Wall Street tells you he’s a thousand percent sure about anything, that’s the man you bet against.
CUT TO:
INT. ICAHN ENTERPRISES OFFICE — CONFERENCE ROOM — 2014
Carl stands at the head of the table with his team. On the screen: a list of current positions. eBay, Family Dollar, Chesapeake Energy, Hertz. Billions deployed across a dozen fights.
CARL
People think activism is about writing letters and making threats. It’s not. It’s about homework. You do more homework than the board. You know the company better than the CEO. Then you walk in and you ask the one question they can’t answer. And when they can’t answer it, the other shareholders see who’s been paying attention and who hasn’t.
ANALYST
What’s the question?
CARL
It’s always the same question: Why is this company worth less than the sum of its parts? If management can’t answer that, they shouldn’t be management.
CUT TO:
INT. CARL’S OFFICE — EVENING — 2015
Carl is on the phone. He has just taken a position in Xerox. His voice is tired but animated.
CARL
(on phone)
They’ve got the copier business and the IT services business smashed together like a bad marriage. Split them up. The parts are worth twice the whole. This isn’t rocket science. This is arithmetic.
He hangs up. Looks out the window at Manhattan. The city he conquered from a stoop in Far Rockaway.
CARL
(to himself)
Forty years. Same playbook. They still don’t see it coming.
DISSOLVE TO:
FOUR
THE OLD LION
INT. ICAHN ENTERPRISES — BOARDROOM — 2016
Carl has been named a special advisor to President-elect Donald Trump on regulatory reform. He is eighty years old and has more influence than ever.
CARL
(to a room of aides)
The regulatory state is strangling small businesses. Not big businesses — big businesses hire lawyers to get around regulations. It’s the small guys who can’t afford the lawyers. Regulation is a moat for the incumbents. I should know. I’ve used it myself.
He serves briefly before stepping down amid conflict-of-interest concerns about his refinery investments. Carl is unbothered.
CARL
Washington moves too slowly for me. In the time it takes a senator to read a bill, I’ve already bought the company, fired the CEO, and sold the real estate.
CUT TO:
INT. CARL’S HOME OFFICE — INDIAN CREEK, FLORIDA — 2020
Carl has moved to Florida. Billionaire’s Row on Indian Creek Island. He sits in his office, multiple screens, the Bloomberg terminal still glowing. The pandemic has crashed markets. Carl sees opportunity.
CARL
(on the phone)
Occidental Petroleum. Hertz. HP. The market is in a panic. That’s when you buy. Not when things are calm. When things are calm, everything is overpriced. When everyone’s running for the exit, that’s when you walk in the front door.
A YOUNG ANALYST, one of the new generation he’s training, sits across from him.
YOUNG ANALYST
Mr. Icahn, how do you know when to stop? When do you say, I’ve done enough?
CARL
(a long pause)
I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I’ve been doing this for sixty years. Every morning I wake up and I look at the markets and I see something wrong. Some company being run badly. Some board asleep at the wheel. And I think: I can fix that. Maybe the day I wake up and I don’t see it — that’s the day I stop.
YOUNG ANALYST
Has that day come?
CARL
Kid, I’m eighty-four years old and I just put two billion dollars into a trade this morning. What do you think?
CUT TO:
INT. GALA DINNER — NEW YORK CITY — 2022
A charity event. Carl, in a tuxedo, receives an award for his philanthropic contributions. He has given hundreds of millions to Mount Sinai Medical Center, to educational causes, to charter schools. He approaches the podium.
CARL
People are always surprised when I give money away. They say, “Carl Icahn, the raider, is a philanthropist?” Let me explain something. I grew up in Far Rockaway. I know what it’s like to not have enough. I know what it’s like to go to a school where the ceiling leaks and the textbooks are ten years old. I didn’t fight my way out of that neighborhood just to keep score. I fought my way out so I could change the game for the kids who are still there.
Applause. Gail watches from the front table, dabbing her eyes. Even the waiters are listening.
Carl Icahn has donated over $600 million to charitable causes, including the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Icahn Charter Schools network serving children in the Bronx.
CUT TO:
INT. CARL’S OFFICE — INDIAN CREEK — MORNING — 2024
Carl, now eighty-eight, moves more slowly but the eyes are the same. The Bloomberg terminal is still on. Coffee, black. No sugar. He reads a proxy statement the way other men his age read the obituaries — looking for opportunities, not endings.
GAIL
(entering with coffee)
Carl, it’s seven in the morning. You’ve been in here since five.
CARL
There’s a company in Texas —
GAIL
There’s always a company in Texas.
CARL
(grinning)
This one’s special. The board is asleep. Management is overpaid. Activist potential —
GAIL
You’re eighty-eight.
CARL
And they’re still afraid of me. That’s the only metric that matters.
He turns back to his terminal. Gail watches him for a moment — this impossible, infuriating, magnificent man — then leaves the coffee and closes the door.
CARL (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
My father sat in a chair and let the world pass him by. I swore I’d never do that. Sixty years later, I’m still standing, still fighting, still making boards of directors lose sleep. And if that makes me a raider, fine. At least I’m not sitting in the chair.
CUT TO:
EXT. INDIAN CREEK ISLAND — DOCK — SUNSET
Carl sits on the dock behind his mansion. The Biscayne Bay stretches out before him, pink and gold. His phone buzzes on the bench beside him. He ignores it. For once.
A FISHING ROD rests in a holder next to him. The line sits slack in the water. Carl doesn’t fish. He just likes the idea of waiting for something to take the bait.
CARL
(to no one, to everyone)
Everybody wants to know the secret. There is no secret. Find something that’s broken. Figure out why it’s broken. Fix it or force someone else to fix it. Take your cut. Repeat. That’s it. That’s the whole playbook.
He looks at the phone. It buzzes again. Some CEO somewhere is probably having a panic attack.
Carl picks up the phone. Of course he does.
CARL
(into the phone, that dangerous Queens grin spreading)
Yeah. Talk to me.
SMASH CUT TO:
EXT. FAR ROCKAWAY — THE OLD STOOP — MAGIC HOUR
We return to where we began. The same stoop in Far Rockaway. The bungalows are older now, the boardwalk rebuilt, but the salt air is the same. A NEW GROUP OF KIDS sits playing cards. One of them — lean, sharp-eyed, counting faster than the others — rakes in a pile of coins.
The camera lifts, pulling away from the stoop, over the Rockaway peninsula, over Queens, over the bridges and towers of Manhattan, over the trading floors and boardrooms and penthouse offices where Carl Icahn’s name still makes grown men nervous.
Carl Icahn turned a $4,000 Army poker stake into a personal fortune exceeding $20 billion. He has waged over 50 proxy fights, taken over more than a dozen companies, and forced the restructuring of some of the largest corporations in American history.
He still picks up the phone on the first ring.
THE END
“Some people get rich studying artificial intelligence. Me, I make money studying natural stupidity.” — Carl Icahn