Time Magazine this week has Carl Icahn on its cover, arguing that he has become the most important investor in America. Not only because he’s gently taking on the nation’s most iconic tech companies, Apple Inc. (AAPL), but because he’s got the best returns among a group of activist investors who are reshaping a stagnant corporate landscape (Fortune, which shares a publisher with Time, placed “the activist investor” as #2 on its 2013 Businessperson of the Year list, just behind Elon Musk).
Since Time is a general population pub, there isn’t too much in there that a business audience wouldn’t already know. Nor is there much more than a passing nod to activist critiques, or mention of his failed pursuit of Dell Inc. But here are a few nuggets of note.
1. Icahn has had a huge year
Icahn’s firm is up 201.5% on the year, compared to a 21% rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
2. He didn’t vote last year
“He thinks, for example, that the Tea Party obsession with the deficit is overblown. He thinks that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has done a great job and that President Obama is right to worry about inequality and stagnant wages for the lower and middle classes. (Icahn, historically a conservative, says he’s disenchanted with “dumb” Republican gaffes like Mitt Romney’s “47%” comment and didn’t vote in 2012.).
— Not mentioned is that Icahn did happen to donate $2,500 to Romney’s campaign.
3. He likes to cut deals in his dining room
“My dining room is the best place to have dinner in the city,” he says, recounting deals that were cut there, from the revamping of health-food firm Hain Celestial (whose stock price has quadrupled since Icahn took over) to the splitting of Motorola (which made him nearly $1 billion). “It’s quiet, and you can really talk.”
Read the full story over at Time.com.
