King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist

by Carol Bloom Stevens, Mark Stevens

Overview

King Icahn is an unparalleled human drama. It is the story of a man who rose from humble beginnings to emerge as the most powerful, eccentric, galling, pugnacious and successful force in the business world. The Icahn drama is rife with contradictions, juxtapositions, paradoxes and epic power plays. All have led to a reshuffling of the business\financial landscape, to the electric fear on the part of CEOs when they hear the terrorizing words "Carl Icahn is on the phone" and to one of the world's greatest fortunes. King Icahn is the only book written about Icahn, completely independent but with full access to the man himself. It reveals the back story of the greatest financier/pit bull of his generation, his multi-billion dollar epiphany, his real motive for taking on the CEO elite as well as his loves, feuds, idiosyncrasies and intellectual brilliance. Reading this book is the equivalent of earning an MBA squared!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781494348922
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	05/14/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Mark Stevens is a best-selling author, CEO of MSCO, a results-driven management and marketing firm and a popular media commentator on a host of business matters including marketing, branding, management and sales. He is known for delivering business insights with blunt truths and unconventional wisdom. Stevens' firm, MSCO, represents a stellar roster of clients including Nike, Starwood, GE, Guardian Life, Intrawest, Estee Lauder, The MONY Group, Environmental Systems Products, Virgin Air, and many others. Through integrated marketing campaigns, MSCO focuses on achieving real results for its clients, instead of awards that serve egos. Mark Stevens possesses an innovative and iconoclastic view of the business world, having served as a journalist and nationally syndicated columnist and in management positions at several global corporations. His incisive understanding of critical business issues is geared toward achieving extraordinary growth and success for his clients. Stevens is an in-demand speaker at organizations from Wharton, Nike, and Oracle. A frequent guest commentator, he lends his insights and opinions on a wide variety of marketing/branding topics on Fox Business Network, Associated Press, CNN International and Bloomberg TV to CNBC, MSNBC, NPR and Bloomberg Radio on the annual subject of Super Bowl Advertising to Before You Tie the Knot: Tips on Creating a Successful Business Partnership (Wall Street Journal), Why Successful Business People Don't Sleep (The New York Times) and Be A Better Boss (Forbes.com). Steven's wildly successful blog, "Unconventional Thinking" is ranked among the "Top 10 Marketing Blogs in the World" by blogged.com. Stevens shook the marketing establishment with his Business Week bestseller, Your Marketing Sucks (Random House/Crown Business, 2003), and redefined the rules of management with Your Management Sucks (Random House/Crown Business, 2006). His most recent book, Your Company Sucks focuses on the Four Reasons ALL Companies Fail. Stevens is the author of 25 business books including these bestsellers: The Big Eight; Your Marketing Sucks; Sudden Death: The Rise and Fall of EF Hutton (a Wall Street Journal bestseller and Library Journal "Business Book of the Year"). Books by Mark Stevens have been published in the USA, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, China, Germany, Spain, Japan, Russia, and Brazil.

Editorial Reviews

``One of the greatest things I did for the human race,'' Carl Icahn has said, ``was not to become a doctor.'' Instead, this Princeton graduate from Queens, N.Y., became a keen and stubborn corporate raider, who during the 1980s junk-bond delirium parlayed leveraged cash investments into partially controlling interests (and eventually very profitable sales of shares) in such companies as Phillips Petroleum, Dan River, Texaco and TWA. The other high-flyers--Ivan Boesky, T. Boone Pickens, Dennis Levine and Michael Milken--also appear here. In this unauthorized biography, based on research and on ``virtually unlimited access'' to the financier, Icahn emerges as a crafty but apparently straight player, to whom millions of dollars poured in yearly, until the U.S. Congress called a halt to junk-bond-financed leveraged buyouts in 1991. Like a taut novel, this page turner grips the reader as Stevens ( Sudden Death: E. F. Hutton ) dramatizes Icahn's financial gambles and acerbic treatment of top management figures, whom he often accuses of poor and despotic performance to the detriment of stockholders. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Carl Icahn was one of the most infamous American corporate raiders of the 1980s. Born in an obscure middle-class New York community, he quickly developed a scrappy, street-fighter attitude that helped him get into and through Princeton, land a job on Wall Street, and go on to become one of the most feared antagonists of corporate America. The book shows repeatedly how Icahn bought up stakes in undervalued companies and then threatened their management until they caved into his demands, eventually allowing him to cash out with enormous profits. Only later in his life did he falter with the buyout of TWA and its ensuing bankruptcy. While Icahn's days as financial engineer may be over, there is no denying his impact upon the American corporate landscape, especially in the areas of shareholder rights and more active boards of directors willing to challenge business executives. This book by business writer Stevens is suitable for large nonfiction/biography collections in public libraries.-- Richard Drezen, Merrill Lynch Lib., New York

Library Journal