Icahn made his bones as an ur-corporate raiders, systematically buying companies, stripping them of assets, and then using the proceeds to pay off his own debt.

Icahn made his bones as an ur-corporate raiders, systematically buying companies, stripping them of assets, and then using the proceeds to pay off his own debt. Ever see Wall Street? Icahn's Gordon Gekko on steroids. The thing is, he's not exactly wrong about CEOs, but in my experience the absolute worst ones come out of private equity -- in other words, from within Icahn's world. These are guys who generally became "turnaround CEOs" of large companies in their 30s (or even 20s), and never grasped the idea that there's a difference between the architect and the wrecking ball. They're absolute disasters when they try to actually run a company, because all they know how to do is kill dogs and milk cows. Icahn's "activism" is broadly similar, robbing from companies' long-term plans to boost short-term investor profits. He also likes to lay about with the axe handle; his accusations of eBay board malfeasance exist at the intersection of ignorance and ambition. Case in point: his Skype accusations. It's not like Skype was overperforming when eBay sold it off; eBay had failed to make use of the company's tech, and the sale let them keep about 35% of the value in the company while letting someone else run it. If I recall, they bought the company for about $3b, sold 65% off for a hair under $2b, and then got $2.5b from the MSFT purchase. Icahn seems to think that MSFT's valuation indicated that eBay could have sold that turkey for more, but that seems unlikely -- when MSFT bought it, Skype had put its IPO on indefinite hold, and no one else even put in a bid, which indicates that if anyone should be furious, it's Redmond's own shareholders.