King Ichan, Mark Stevens
King Ichan, Mark Stevens
List: $29.98 | Sale: $20.99
Club: $14.99

King Ichan
The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist

Author: Mark Stevens

Narrator: Mark Stevens

Unabridged: 10 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 11/08/2010


Synopsis

“I’m like the gunfighter you hire to save the town. That gunfighter is there to do good…but he’ll only do what he does if he knows he’ll get paid for it.” – Carl Icahn

In this dramatic, deal-by-deal portrait of legendary and, until now, secretive financier Carl Icahn, bestselling business writer Mark Stevens takes us behind the scenes of some of the biggest deals in U.S. corporate history: Icahn’s multibillion dollar raid on Phillips Petrolium; his bold move on Texaco’s hidebound management, which netted him $500 million in the largest single transaction ever recorded by the New York Stock Exchange; Icahn’s prolonged battle with CEO David Roderick to break apart the once mighty steel giant USX; and his stunning takeover of TWA.

To write this fascinating audio book, Mark Stevens has utilized to the ultimate his incisive investigative skills and his extraordinary access to Icahn himself as well as Icahn's friends, associates, adversaries, and critics—those who rode on his takeover bandwagon, and those who fell beneath its wheeling and dealing. The story he has to tell is that of a bookish boy from Bayswater who went to Princeton, studied philosophy, dropped out of medical school, landed as a minor player on Wall Street, and then had a billion-dollar epiphany—a means of “controlling the destiny of corporations” that would ultimately earn him his fortune.

Along with the inside details of the deals that defined the high-flying eighties, Stevens provides a vivid, totally unauthorized profile of Icahn himself. At times deceptively disorganized and absentminded but a ruthlessly brilliant tactician when the chips are down, Icahn won his place at the pinnacle of capitalism by realizing that America’s CEOs could be “persuaded” to spend millions in corporate funds or search for white knights to avert a takeover that might cost them their jobs. It was a plan of predatory genius; in the seventies and eighties Icahn garnered huge profits time after time—until he devoured TWA, and found that his ambitions were greater than his management talents. With his very fortune hanging in the balance, Icahn engaged in epic negotiations with the Pension Benefit Guarantee Board, engineering what may be the premiere victory of his career.

A fascinating tale with a cast of characters that includes Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, T. Boone Pickens, Dennis Levine, and most of the other key players of the takeover era. King Icahn is the first biography of the business buccaneer who changed the course of corporate America.


About Mark Stevens

Mark Stevens is CEO of MSCO, a marketing and strategy consulting firm. The author of the Business Week bestseller Your Marketing Sucks, Mark is totally unique in a plain-vanilla world of business experts. He has evolved from being an adviser to clients on specific issues such as marketing programs to being their "secretary of war," advising them on personal and professional strategies that will get them to the next level of success. Mark is also the author of such prominent books as The Big Eight, Sudden Death: The Rise and Fall of E.F. Hutton, and Extreme Management.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Alex on March 25, 2024

A surprisingly fun story of a controversial financier. Although you'd have to really enjoy finance to enjoy it, because the book is almost exclusively deal details.......more

Goodreads review by Luke on February 04, 2019

This was a most interesting listen, hearing the story of the beginnings of a fortune being built not through successful investing in the traditional sense, but through using the system of "corporate democracy" to take large positions in undervalued companies, hold their board's of director's hostage......more

Goodreads review by BuenoBomb on February 11, 2015

Carl Icahn's biography is very well written and interesting to say the least. The author portrayed Icahn as a master negotiator, financial engineer, and an all around street smart money manager. I definitely look forward to rereading this book in a few months!......more

Goodreads review by Tab on January 10, 2024

I decided to read after watching the excellent HBO documentary on Icahn. Unfortunately, I wish I stopped there. The documentary is engaging, informative, and highly enjoyable. King Icahn is none of those things. My main takeaway is that Icahn is even more of an a** than I initially believed. Part of......more

Goodreads review by Jasper on August 25, 2023

Most of the time, I enjoy reading books about titans of industry and how they built their fortunes. I have no problem with people owning large amounts of wealth and usually view their stories as inspirational, but Icahn’s story puts a bad taste in my mouth because it’s hard to say if he ever produce......more