Icahn on takeovers, as a way of understanding what Elon is doing at Twitter

From the famous 2009 edition of Robert Schiller’s class at Yale that they recorded and published, a guest appearance by Carl Icahn — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/financial-markets-audio/id341651121?i=1000063752219

Hear the corporate raider playbook – fire the “nice guy” CEO, slash headcount massively as most of it is asleep, and promote “smart” people who challenge the groupthink internally.

It’s interesting to hear from Icahn how much smarter he thinks he is than everyone else. You kind of have to take his word for it, since the talk he gives is pretty light.

I suppose he is smart, but he sounds like a an Ivy League-elitist of the Vanderbilt and Carnegie ilk (he went to Princeton and dropped out) more than a table-thumping barbarian (he did the RJR Nabisco takeover). Listening to him (it’s 2009) you’ll hear the words “make America great again” in a jumbled paraphrase, and quite a bit of Trump-like rhetoric.