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(car door closes)
(engine starts)
(intense digital music playing)
Scott Wapner: He started from nothing and built a fortune
worth upwards of $20 billion.
♪ ♪
reporter: It is not often that a Wall Street titan
shows up on the cover of "Time" magazine.
reporter 2: The most feared corporate raider in the world.
reporter 3: One of the shrewdest investors on the planet.
reporter 4: He moves markets
by the mere mention of his name.
reporter 5: "Fortune" magazine says
he may be making more money for shareholders
than anyone else on the planet.
(applause)
Gail Golden-Icahn: He's tenacious.
-man 1: Enigma. -man 2: The smartest guy I've ever met.
woman: He's the great white shark
in the sea of capitalism.
Carl Icahn: My mother said I have some kind of warrior gene in me or something.
interviewer: A warrior gene?
various voices: Marvel Comics, Time Warner, Texaco, US Steel,
Dell Computers, Apple, PayPal, Caesars.
reporter: Motorola. Yahoo... all have felt
the pointed sting of Carl Icahn.
I do it because in a free enterprise system, I do it for profit,
but what I do should be done.
-Totally terrifying. -Bully.
Great guy, but he's about as smooth as a stucco bathtub.
I own it, it's my money.
If I lose, I'm answerable to my bank account.
♪ ♪
I'm 85, you say, this guy's 85. Pretty good, right?
I can get some real heat on 'em.
I don't like to start wars,
but if somebody wants to start it with me,
there's something in me that likes that
'cause I'm really looking forward to going at 'em.
♪ ♪
Wall Street, they look at Carl Icahn and they say
legend, they say genius.
There's an admiration
for what he's been able to accomplish
and the wealth that he's created.
The public, I think, has a much more mixed view
about the impact he's had on companies,
on labor, on society.
♪ ♪
Then the question is
whether he is a activist investor,
an advocate for the shareholder,
representing the little guy,
or corporate raider who goes in,
extracts value out of that company
to the detriment of the long-term company
but to the immediate benefit of Carl Icahn.
Let me do it. No, I wouldn't say it that way.
It's sort of a colorful term, "corporate raider,"
but it's far from the truth.
Absolutely is ridiculous related to what we do.
It's the opposite of what we do.
We bring things to the party.
We don't raid 'em and take 'em out.
That's why I think eventually it was changed to "activist."
But activist or raider,
I haven't changed what I do one iota.
Call me whatever you want. (chuckles)
♪ ♪
So, how are my boys?
Ah, what good boys.
Susan Gordon: He gets up about nine o'clock
and he's already, he's eating his breakfast
and reading the newspaper while he's talking,
and, you know, writing notes and all that.
He immediately starts his day,
catches up with what the news is, how the market's doing.
Uber's got one thing after another.
We work together in his home office,
and then, about four o'clock in the afternoon,
he starts heading over to his "office office"
on Fifth Avenue,
for meetings, or what current crisis is going on.
Crisis manager. I'm like Ray Donovan.
I try to... I try to... I try to get it done
and then I go into another crisis.
There's always a few of 'em.
You don't have to manufacture 'em.
Wapner: I think the way Carl looks at business
and the way he does things is he tries to identify companies
that he thinks are undervalued,
and he'll secretly build a position
until it gets large enough that he has to reveal the size.
And he'll try and put pressure on the CEO to do what he wants,
whether that's doing a merger or a share buyback.
And in more cases than not, over the years,
the CEO will end up doing something that he wants
and the stock price will go up and Carl will make a lot of money.
Meissonier's, it's "Napoleon at the Battle of Friedland."
Before hubris took over
and took it all away from him.
He was one of... Well, he was a great strategist, no question.
But then he lost it all because of his arrogance.
And that's one thing you have to remember.
It doesn't stay forever if you're not careful.
(discordant percussive music playing)
(intense digital music playing)
reporter: Carl Icahn, I guess, doing what Carl Icahn does,
and he is on the attack.
reporter 2: Carl, what do you object to most strongly?
Carl: I object to the fact
that they did a acquisition
that puts the company at risk
and didn't go to the board members for a vote.
Andrew Langham: Somebody from Reuters just called.
-What did they say? -They want to understand what we're doing.
You know, we want to remove some of the directors and put us in.
They know I'm not going away, so we just,
we just keep, we keep going.
The idea of an activist investor
is they buy a stake in a company
with the plan and ambition
to go to the company's management and board and say,
"You're doing it wrong. Here's how to do it."
Carl: Yeah, how you doing?
I don't have to tell you anything you don't know.
I mean, I think it was reprehensible what went on.
I think they got no right to do that without talking to the shareholders.
You know, they're betting the company, it's not their money.
He looks at boards and he looks at CEOs
as country club boards.
They spend no time thinking about the company.
They're collecting their fee and they're playing golf all day.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: The board of directors of a company
are supposed to represent
the interests of the shareholders.
They are supposed to hold
the CEO and management to account.
That is their job.
Whether they do it is Carl Icahn's biggest question.
(percussive music playing)
Hey, who the hell put this out?
Who got this out, that we're replacing four directors?
-Yeah. -We just told them that.
You told them 'cause I told you. We filed it, and so...
(laughs) Oh, yes, we filed. This is what he just filed.
That's just what we was talking, and they already put this out.
Huh.
Hey, we said a lot worse than this. We didn't say anything bad.
Langham: We said a lot worse a month ago.
Here it is, it just happened while you were here.
It was a very... you guys were here
at the making of a lot of history today, guys.
It's not a sure thing that when you take a big decision
and tell a CEO what to do, they're going to listen.
It's also not a sure thing that your advice is the right thing to do.
You need chutzpah.
You're taking on big-deal CEOs.
You're taking on their lawyers.
It's a very high-stakes game.
You can make billions, but you can also lose it.
That is stressful.
-Hey, Gail, -Gail: Yes?
Come in here for a minute.
Oh, I'm his consigliere.
At night time, we join up and then go home together.
Bruce David Klein: What do you think drives him?
Oh! (sighs)
It isn't money, strangely enough.
You would think it would be money.
I mean, it's nice that he can do it, but it's not money.
He just becomes obsessed on something
and he just keeps like a bulldog,
he just keeps going and going until he gets what he wants.
So... that's what drives him.
I told him it's winning, I think, competitive, just winning.
Coming up with a new idea to beat the competitors.
You know, we're gonna be able to be
the biggest and the best.
That gets me excited.
♪ ♪
The money is just sort of a goal.
It's like, the explorers, why do they keep doing it?
They believed in going for the gold, like Cortés and these guys.
But I think the actual finding and doing
is much more exciting than having it.
♪ ♪
And I think that's why you find
a lot of rich people get very neurotic.
'Cause they're disappointed when they have it.
It's not what it's drummed up to be.
♪ ♪
reporter: He's been successful, say Wall Streeters,
because he's intimidating and relentless.
He was an only child growing up during the Depression
in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York.
And even as a kid, his mother said he was like Genghis Khan.
He loves a good fight, no doubt about it.
(percussive music playing)
announcer: Tappan. Tappan.
The name is Tappan. Tappan... Tappan...
Mark Stevens: So in the late '70s, Carl turned his attention
to a company called Tappan.
Tappan made ranges,
and it was a good brand-name range.
Bob Barker: Showcase number 2.
-announcer: A new kitchen! -(audience gasps)
An electric range from the famous Tappan.
Quality appliances since 1881.
Tappan has its first loss in nearly half a century.
Because of the loss, and loss of faith in the company,
the stock plummeted
to I think about seven or eight bucks.
So Carl does his calculations,
assesses the valuation of the company
between the stock price
and the ultimate value of the company.
And there's a gap of about $15 that Carl feels is there.
Carl: Well, we believed the company was very undervalued.
And Tappan fit the program for me
where I was embarking on activism,
where I thought it was a great company, a great name,
that could be a takeover candidate
being blocked by, you know, the CEO
and a board.
The CEO was a very strong personality,
but I don't think he knew much about the business.
And Dick Tappan was the founder's grandson.
I think he was intimidated by this guy Blasius.
And I thought there was a chance here to break through.
So we went and bought a lot of stock in it.
And, uh, we would then make a little noise.
(intense digital music playing)
Carl: "I'm writing this letter to ask you to elect me
to the board of directors."
♪ ♪
"During the past five years,
"Tappan, under its current management,
has lost $3.3 million."
The company is owned by the shareholders
and these managements felt like,
"We don't wanna deal with these shareholders."
"They thought they'd get under our skin? No."
We ran a proxy fight and they fought us like hell.
♪ ♪
It's just amazing. Carl got a seat on the board.
I think we were the wave.
There was not anybody really doing what we were doing.
(relaxing music playing)
Stevens: When Carl goes to Ohio
to visit with Tappan management,
it's an orderly life there,
and everything is in the right place.
The CEO called me up.
He said, "I wanna have dinner with you before the meeting."
So I thought he'd want to have a sort of nice chat with me.
And he looked at me and he was sort of fierce-looking.
He said, "Look, at my board meeting, you're an interloper.
"I don't want you to say anything at the meetings.
I don't want you to disturb the rest of the board and we can get along better."
And I was just beginning this stuff.
Today, I would have told him to go to hell.
Alfred Kingsley: The next day, Carl came
and we went into the meeting,
which was pretty contentious.
Carl: And the CEO decided to buy another company.
And he brought it to the board.
He was gonna make the company less valuable
in a strange way but him more powerful.
And the CEO is showing everybody with his books and his investment bankers
why this was a great acquisition.
The CEO, he said, "Look, I've done a lot of work on this.
I just want a vote that agrees with me."
And this one guy on the board who never really spoke either
but who owned a lot of stock, he said, "Just a minute."
He says, "I'm looking at this.
I just don't understand why we're buying it with these numbers."
The CEO, he says, "Are you questioning my judgment?"
He's glaring at the guy.
He says, "Sit down and vote with all of us."
He really was an imperious guy.
And I'm watching to see what to do.
And, you know, at that time, I didn't think anybody would support me
if I said anything, but I said, "The hell with this guy Blasius."
By that time, I didn't give a damn if he liked me, didn't like me.
(intense digital music playing)
So I go, "Screw this guy."
Stevens: In this Tappan time, one could think
that Carl didn't have the...
kahunas that he would have later in big deals.
He had more then.
He had to do it with nothing.
He didn't have billions in the bank.
Carl: I said, "You know something, guys, I'll tell you what I think."
"This is probably one of the worst deals
"in, I'll say, economic history.
"It's insane. We're buying this company at ten times what it's worth,
only," I say, "to save Don Blasius' job.
That's why we're doing it." I really let him have it.
And the guy was going nuts. He was turning red in the face.
He says, "What are you saying? Are you questioning my ability?" I said, "Yes, I am.
I don't think you're a good CEO, you're just gonna kill this company."
All of the sudden, Carl, he's not talking,
he's yelling, he's demanding.
"I, for one, will do everything I can to stop this deal,
"and now I'm saying it to this board,
so now let's have the vote."
And Blasius is looking at me, red in the face and all.
And he says, "We'll put off the vote till the next meeting."
And then he just glowered at me, and I just looked at him,
and that was it.
People are scratching their heads saying, how the--
"What the hell just happened? Who is this guy?"
"How did he foil the plans of the CEO of a public company?"
And then, only seven or eight months later,
Electrolux agreed to buy Tappan
for a little over $18 a share...
♪ ♪
...proving in absolute terms,
Carl was right from the beginning.
Tappan was worth a lot more than the $7 the stock was trading at
before Carl got involved.
And all the shareholders got richer.
Carl: At the end,
Dick Tappan comes over to me
and he says, "Carl, Carl, I wanna ask you a question.
Would you manage my money?"
And he wanted me to manage money for him.
And I did for a little bit.
(contemplative piano music playing)
This is Carl, Carl Icahn on.
If I could interrupt for a minute.
The CEO was just nefarious.
He, his job in his mind was to make himself a lot of money
at the expense of shareholders, he didn't care.
And at the expense of the company enriched himself.
The idea that some management teams
were kind of not being very smart
and taking advantage of their position as managers
to the detriment of the shareholders,
you know, he got that in his head early on,
when the rest of the world wasn't quite sure, you know,
was this greenmail, what, what was this?
This is one of-- the most reprehensible thing
I think I've ever seen...
But to some degree he's been vindicated that,
yes, management often needs to be shaken up.
He's helped stockholders an awful lot,
including plumbers and teachers whose pension funds
fund their retirement.
So this is not just hoity-toity big-time investors.
The downside of that is to say, yeah, but what about
all the people who lost jobs because of what Carl did at all these companies?
(somber digital music playing)
Carl and guys like him, I think the core criticism would be that
they're not out to make these companies better,
they're out to make a lot of money.
Part of my values is to make money and I can't change my values.
A great painter loves to paint.
What do you do, criticize him because he likes to paint?
But what makes me fulfilled about it is
that I also believe I'm making money by doing the right thing.
Sorkin: We've been having a debate, it's an open debate,
'cause I've done it in the columns,
about his role as a vulture
or a shareholder advocate, and which is it?
And on certain days, I've come out on the side
of shareholder advocate, and he, you know, loves it.
And on certain days, I have called him a vulture,
and he'll call up screaming.
What I like about Carl is he's game for the debate,
he wants that debate.
Carl: Companies are the backbone of our society,
and many are terribly managed and there's no accountability.
When you can change that,
you will have some collateral damage,
there's no question, it's creative destruction.
But we bring in the innovation,
so we have companies that are more productive,
create more jobs, in a macro picture.
At the end of the day,
Carl wants to make as much money as possible,
despite what he may come out and say publicly
or write in one of his letters.
I mean, that's the criticism you hear.
Carl: So everybody says, "Well, that's great,
Carl Icahn made money for himself."
But the real proof of the pudding is in the eating.
If you had invested in Icahn Enterprises in 2000,
when we really started getting into the activism,
the value of your investment has increased
1,931%.
During that same period, your investment in the S&P
went up only 324%.
We have made for shareholders,
forgetting us,
literally a trillion dollars
for all investors.
I think I proved it by making all this money.
This system should be changed
and that we should have true corporate democracy
and accountability.
Frankly, I made this money because the system is so bad,
not 'cause I'm a genius.
(marching band plays)
announcer: This is New York.
A miracle city.
A monument to our nation's
restless energy.
Across the river from Manhattan
lies the borough of Queens.
(jazz band playing)
Carl: I grew up in the streets of Queens.
It was sort of divided.
In public school, you had some of these middle-class,
mostly Jewish kids.
From the other side of the tracks,
a lot of the reform school kids,
and those were the kids I liked, really.
Used to play basketball with the Gotti brothers.
But the more my mother said, "Don't do it," the more I wanted to do it.
Stevens: Bella Icahn was the school teacher
who was always teaching school.
Carl's father was a cantor,
the guy who sings in a synagogue,
who pressed Carl
on philosophers and philosophies and was unrelenting,
and his mother, who was unrelenting another way.
She wanted him to go to medical school,
but they were both very intense people.
He had a tough childhood.
I mean, you know, his parents would brag about him in public
but kind of berate him, privately.
(contemplative music playing)
I was never really happy in that whole environment.
So I really wanted to get out of there.
I was real smart in school, and I had good marks.
I took the college boards,
and I think I did the best in Queens or something on 'em.
And my father did say to me,
"If you get into Yale, Harvard or Princeton,
we'll pay the tuition."
'Cause they figured nobody ever got in
from Far Rockaway High School.
And so I got into all of 'em.
And everybody was really surprised, including my parents.
I wanted Princeton.
But then when it came to thinking about paying the tuition,
it was only $750 in those days, and the room and board was $750.
My father said, "Son, we're not gonna go back on our word.
We're gonna pay your tuition."
I said, "Thanks, Dad, that's great.
I appreciate it greatly."
And then it hit me, I said,
"What about room and board, Dad?"
And then he said, "You're a smart kid.
You gotta worry about the room and board yourself."
(doo-wop music playing)
So, somehow I wheedled myself a job
on Atlantic Beach,
the sort of, in quotes, "wealthy people" came.
So I'm a cabana boy, figure I'll work for tips.
And you could make close to $100 a week.
And these salesmen, for the most part from Brooklyn,
were playing poker.
And once they said, "Kid, how much you make?"
I said, "Hey, I made a hundred bucks."
"Okay, you got a hundred bucks, you wanna lose it,
come here, do a game, we'll show you what life's about."
So I said, "Yeah, I think I could play."
And they wiped me out in about a half an hour.
I lost the $100.
I said, "Hey, I'm smarter than these guys."
So during the week, I went out, I got three books on poker.
And it's really a mathematical game.
It's luck, too, but these guys were not that good.
To begin with, they were drinking vodka,
and they were just having fun.
The next week,
I went in and I said, "I'll play it again."
They said, "Okay, kid, you haven't learned your lesson yet."
And then I killed 'em.
I got inordinately lucky.
And literally that weekend, I won $800.
♪ ♪
And that's how I paid my room and board
throughout Princeton.
(playful digital music playing)
Gail: I can tell you the first moment I fell in love with Carl,
and that was when I started working for him
and heard him on the phone speaking to his uncle,
who had offended him in some way.
And he was so frank in that exchange.
Coming from an Irish background
where everything is sort of hidden,
I was not accustomed to
that kind of depth of feeling and that honesty of feeling,
and I think that was the first moment that I thought,
"This guy has a little bit more substance than I thought he did," so...
Oh, God, this elbow's killing me.
Well, you played pretty well with the elbow killing you.
Well, imagine the trouble you're going to be in.
Carl: Yeah, imagine if you didn't have a bad elbow.
You know, you hit those goddamn little poopy shots at me,
which, you know, it throws me off my game.
You know, that's, you know, in some cases that's by design.
I know you don't think that, but it's by design.
-Sometimes I just... -Baloney, it's by design.
There are times I play with you when I deliberately hit it soft.
You're not good enough to deliberately hit it soft.
You don't have a slice. You don't, yeah.
I don't have to have a slice.
Yeah, I mean, you played well, you played well.
You actually, you actually really did okay yesterday,
got to admit, with a bad elbow.
Gail: We started living together in '92,
and didn't get married until '99.
This is another horror story
from a client from TWA.
Gail: But I have known him since '78.
I started working for him in '78.
The first time I met Carl, this employment agency said,
"Can you please come in?" and she said,
"I have this guy, I've had a hard time keeping people with him."
-That's not true. -Gail: Oh!
I've had people with me 20 years.
I'm not gonna lie on camera, so you can just go ahead
-and say what you wanna say. -Eh...
But anyways, the pile of stuff on his desk was incredible.
So he says, "Do you think you could help me with this?"
This chaos, and in the first two weeks, I was ready to quit.
But he was fun.
He was just very fun.
And so, you know, it started there.
And it was, it was good.
Tony Bennett: ♪ I'm steppin' out with my baby ♪
♪ Can't go wrong 'cause I'm in right ♪
♪ It's for sure, not for maybe ♪
♪ That I'm all dressed up tonight ♪
-♪ Steppin' out with my honey ♪ -You're gettin' too good...
♪ Can't be bad, feels so good ♪
♪ Never felt quite so sunny ♪
♪ And I keep on knockin' wood... ♪
I think what keeps it going is respect for each other.
Um, and we laugh a lot.
I mean, there's a lot of banter, you know, sarcasm, back and forth.
-Doesn't matter what you think. -Gail: It doesn't matter what you think.
-Who cares what you think? -Who cares what you think?
We can banter with each other,
but she's one of the few people whose opinion I really value.
Some nights I fall asleep in the bath.
And Gail turns a movie on
and doesn't bother to tell me she leaves.
And I wake up and say, "Holy, where am I?"
I say, "Gail, maybe you could have waked me up, check in.
I could have been dead in there."
-Gail: Seriously. -What?
I could be on fire sitting next to him
and he wouldn't spit on me.
What is this nonsense?
She wouldn't know if she left me in the bathtub drowning.
It's a nice way to spend a life.
(phone ringing)
Oh, you should stop.
Because you have to answer the phone because...
-Well, somebody's gotta answer it. -...I just can't.
-It might be important. -Let somebody else answer the phone.
What if it was for me?
Carl: Eh, now I lost it.
(percussive music playing)
So, Carl goes to Princeton and he's kind of an outsider.
♪ ♪
Peter Liebert: We started at Princeton in 1953,
but there was clearly a social pecking order at Princeton.
The nature of the social situation was
that Jews didn't even apply to certain clubs.
I never resented it.
But I think, in many ways, Carl did.
Rana Foroohar: That's the thing about Carl,
is he has kept that feeling of being an outsider,
because I think that, at seminal moments in his life,
he very much was an outsider.
Liebert: And I think Carl felt
a desire to prove to himself and to others
that he's smarter than most of these people.
Stevens: He majored in philosophy.
And the best way Carl could exercise
his lifelong need to show superiority
to the Brahmin culture
that dominated Princeton in those days
was to win the senior thesis,
which is the equivalent of being valedictorian.
Carl: The thing I enjoy by far the most,
and maybe in my life, that I'm the proudest of,
was my thesis.
And I just wanted to prove
that I could accomplish something.
Stevens: It's almost unreadable, it's so complex.
But he got his revenge,
and he won that senior thesis.
I'm telling you, this is very arcane stuff.
I won an award for it, but when I read it again,
I honestly can't understand what I wrote.
It was just an exercise,
I won't say in futility, but an exercise in logic,
which is... really fulfilling,
but it wasn't for me.
♪ ♪
I got accepted to medical school,
and I really didn't wanna go.
I didn't wanna be a doctor, but my mother was so adamant.
She said, "It's an anti-Semitic world,
therefore be a doctor."
And then she used to scare me and say,
"If you don't, you get out of Princeton,
they're gonna take you in the army and they're gonna kill ya."
So I quit a couple of times.
My mother always talked me into going back.
And one time we go into this tuberculosis ward,
and I'm a slight hypochondriac, but not terrible.
This resident picks me from the back, he says,
"Icahn, give me a differential diagnosis."
I tried to be funny, so I look at him and say, "Hey, Doctor,
we know what he got, it says 'tuberculosis' up there."
He says, "Don't be funny, this is medicine."
So I lean over the guy and I tap his chest.
Coughs all over me, I say, "Bullshit, that's it."
"I quit."
He says, "You don't leave here.
You leave here, you're never coming back."
I said, "It's okay with me if I never come back.
You talk to my mother."
So I remember to this day, I walked from 34th Street
all the way up 42nd Street, where you could join the army.
♪ ♪
The army, to Carl, was the witness protection program.
And he would tell me this, "My mom couldn't get me."
There were two choices: jail or the army.
Carl: I never liked the discipline of anything.
I hated the army.
But I made money in the army, I played poker in it, but I hated it.
So I left the army with maybe 20, 25 grand.
By his poker playing, you start to see his ability
with numbers and strategy.
And he started thinking about finance in a serious way.
So we're finally, we're going to be doing the test run
-of the podcast today. -Good idea.
My roots come from more, um, storytelling,
and so I started doing different projects
for my father, like PR and his social media.
What I wanna do in this podcast is
-call it "Outrage," you know... -Yeah.
...and call it "Outrage of the Week,"
AKA "How shareholders are getting screwed."
And just tell it as it is.
And then we'll see how it works, but we'll play with it.
All right, so this is what we're gonna do, we're gonna put our headphones on.
You're gonna take them, you just open them up.
-You talk to me like I'm a moron. I can-- Okay. -I know. (laughs)
-Michelle, I'll show you how to do it. -(laughing)
Michelle: As a child,
I didn't know how monumental the deals were
that my dad was involved in.
I just knew he was really, really busy.
But PayPal is an exciting company,
but it should have been spun off, but the board didn't wanna lose it.
After we were fighting to spin it off for three years,
and the CEO suddenly had an epiphany.
"Wow, great idea I just had. Let's spin off PayPal."
And the stock went way up.
He works all the time.
I think that was, that's his mission.
What's surprising is
that I think Bernie Sanders
and even Elizabeth Warren have a point.
And I don't like them, I mean, because I don't like socialism.
I don't think it could work, but what they are saying,
this wealth gap, the tremendous wealth gap,
-should not exist. -Yeah.
People on Wall Street are tremendously overpaid.
The investment bankers make ridiculous incomes,
relative to what they contribute.
You know, I think my father is an activist.
I think by nature he wants to create change.
When I came into Wall Street,
I realized playing the market is extremely risky,
extremely dangerous, so...
Michelle: He talks a lot about the market in 1962.
You know, for him that was...
I think that was one of the most impactful moments.
(intense digital music playing)
Carl: When I got out of the army, basically,
I went to Wall Street because I was into stocks,
I was into making money.
I got in the training program at Dreyfus
and started investing,
and it fit perfectly for me.
And I'm making a fortune.
I'm making all this money.
I bought a Galaxy convertible.
I had a beautiful girlfriend.
And life was good, and I figured,
"This is the easiest damn thing I ever did."
And Jack Dreyfus came to me, said, "You know,
"Carl, you're a smart guy.
"You're gonna lose every penny you got there.
Learn to be an investor, not what you do."
He says, "You're just one of the fools."
I said, "Come on, Jack, move over," you know, we're laughing.
And I learned a great lesson. You always pay for hubris.
In '62, the market broke.
Terrible.
Jack was right.
I was wiped out.
I don't know which went first,
the Galaxy or the girlfriend I had.
After that, I never played the market again.
Really, literally, I went to work.
♪ ♪
I had to learn one area and be an expert in it.
I looked at the option world.
I realized there was something awry, that there was a problem.
Options were mysterious.
What should they sell for, what should you buy them for?
You had no place to really know and look
about what was a good deal.
(percussive music playing)
Carl: The option brokers were all...
I wouldn't say thieves,
but you would say they didn't give a damn.
So they would go buy these options
and make a huge markup on them.
So I came up with something called
"The Midweek Option Report,"
that would tell people,
"This is what you should have been getting for your option
and this is what you got, and you got screwed."
And I'm an obsessive worker.
I would stay down on Wall Street working till midnight,
calling people up because in California it was only nine o'clock.
I didn't know about mugging or anything.
I'd go back, I'd be the only guy
on the subway going uptown.
And I was looked on as an honest broker, and the business boomed.
And I became one of the biggest brokers on Wall Street doing that.
Stevens: But in the evolution of Carl,
to be a real player, he had to have a seat
on the New York Stock Exchange.
Carl: I had saved a few hundred grand,
and my uncle had some money,
and I decided to buy the seat on the Exchange.
Elliot Schnall: Tell me when you're on.
(clapper claps)
I was...
17 when Carl was born.
He was like a kid brother.
Elliot was a man about town.
He was distinguished
and polished.
Carl learned a lot from Elliot.
He wanted to start his own firm,
and in order to do that, you had to buy a seat.
reporter: Uncle Elliot loaned Icahn $400,000
so he could buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
No, I knew he would be a success at it.
Then he started his own firm.
reporter: Icahn began with options and arbitrage.
Then in 1979, he had a new idea: takeovers.
He told Uncle Elliot
he was going to start going after undervalued companies.
I said, "Well, what do you know about undervalued companies?"
He says, "Look, I'm going to do it."
I said, "Carl, forget it." I thought he was crazy.
I'll give you some scotch here.
He just bought it today.
It's good for ya. Here, let me give it to ya.
No, I don't want any more.
Hey, you look good, Elliot, you look good.
-Elliot: I look good? -You look okay.
You look fine.
Elliot: She's gonna give me a haircut.
(crowd cheering)
Bryan Burrough: In the early '80s, there were an awful lot
of young, white American men in search of fortunes
who were flooding into Wall Street
and wanted to know
that what they were doing was okay,
because everybody would go home on Sunday
and your mom would say, "Jimmy, what do you actually do?"
In the last five years,
we've moved from malaise
to hope, confidence, and opportunity.
Burrough: But Reagan comes and there is a feeling
of a laying on of hands,
that this is okay,
that pursuing money, it's not only okay,
but it's somehow good for the country.
It was like Reagan telling everybody that it was okay to party.
We're going to turn the bull loose.
(bell clanging, traders cheering)
("Blue Monday" by New Order playing)
Burrough: If you didn't live through the '80s on Wall Street,
it's almost impossible to understand.
-Zurich 23 Citibank. -350, Nelson.
The chaos... it was like a financial disco.
interviewer: What do you get out of this?
The old guard, it took 'em years and years,
and new people on Wall Street, they wanna do it in two days.
The 1980s was the reimagining of Wall Street.
It was when there was these swashbuckling
financial pioneers who were changing the game.
♪ How does it feel ♪
♪ To treat me like you do? ♪
A new breed of businessman, the corporate raider.
Carl is the original.
He was the guy that reflected the '80s
and taught everybody else
how to do those corporate raider takeover deals.
reporter 1: It all starts when a raider finds a company
whose stock is selling below its true value.
reporter 2: The raider moves in and the battle begins.
To either sell the company, sell some parts of the company,
reimagine the company.
And their goal is to raise the stock price
and make money.
♪ ♪
Icahn is the man who's been changing the face
of American business.
reporter: Icahn raids on some big names,
like Marshall Field, Hammermill Paper, Dan River,
Phillips Petroleum,
Uniroyal and ACF.
Burrough: Corporate raiders
were very controversial.
A lot of people essentially thought
they were glorified shakedown artists.
Carl: Again, I'm not doing it because I'm Robin Hood.
I'm doing it because of the financial--
absolutely because I want the financial gain,
but I think it's a very good thing that I do, and more people should do it.
Raider? What in the hell am I raiding?
I'll go in here and take a big position in the company,
I take the risk.
I make something happen.
How do you identify me as a raider?
Oliver Stone: When we started to do "Wall Street" in 1987,
we went to Icahn's office, Stanley Weiser and I,
who co-wrote the script with me.
He gave us about an hour, and it was quite interesting
because... he was arrogant,
in the sense that he was telling us
about the new way of doing things
and how it was necessary to attack these companies
because these are outdated companies.
They take profit for the executives
and they don't care about the shareholders.
You own the company.
That's right, you the stockholder,
and you are all being royally screwed over
by these... these bureaucrats
with their, their steak lunches,
their hunting and fishing trips, their...
their corporate jets and golden parachutes.
man: This is an outrage! You're out of line, Gekko!
Burrough: You know, there's a purity to that speech
in what's wrong with the corporate America.
It doesn't surprise me that part of that famous speech
is informed by talks that Stone had with Carl.
We almost have what I consider to be a corporate welfare state.
You have levels and levels of vice presidents in corporations
that really actually produce nothing.
Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents,
each earning over $200,000 a year.
(audience members whistle)
Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing
what all these guys do,
and I still can't figure it out.
I couldn't figure it out, what these people,
taking up five floors in New York City, did.
-(laughter) -That's a true story, true story.
The new law of evolution in corporate America
seems to be survival of the unfittest.
I believe it's anti-Darwinian, survival of the unfittest.
Well, in my book, you either do it right
or you get eliminated.
Stone: Of course, there is some truth to that,
but nonetheless, Gordon Gekko is out for himself.
He's for personal profit over public profit.
So Gekko is half right and he's half wrong.
Burrough: As time went on
with the insider trading scandals,
the feeling was, "Oh, you know, right.
These guys really are just shakedown artists."
But Carl Icahn was not known as an insider trader,
and suddenly he emerged from this pack
of patrolling sharks
and began to be capital-C Carl capital-I Icahn.
♪ ♪
Carl was possessing an intellect,
a focus, and a sustained drive
that was unusual.
And one of the signature deals,
one of the most involved, was Texaco,
in which Carl, uh, played a starring role.
emcee: A household name, please welcome Carl Icahn.
Thank you, thank you.
I'm telling you, these stories are funnier
than the jokes you could tell, 'cause this really,
I'll give you another one that really happened.
And I talked to this guy today, he said I could tell it.
We were taking over Texaco.
(percussive music playing)
(acoustic guitar playing)
♪ Ooh, there's gold ♪
♪ Coming out of the ground ♪
♪ There's gold there ♪
♪ To be found ♪
♪ The oil train... ♪
Burrough: Texaco was, you know,
one of the fabled Seven Sisters.
It began as the Texas Company outside Beaumont, Texas,
and it was the fifth largest company in America when this all started.
♪ There's money coming out of the ground ♪
♪ There's tons of money running 'round ♪
This all began as a fairly plain vanilla takeover.
One medium-size oil company, Pennzoil in Houston,
goes after another one, Getty in Los Angeles.
So the deal is done,
when out of nowhere,
Texaco swoops in
and snatches Getty away from Pennzoil.
reporter: The amount boggles the mind.
$10 billion offered by Texaco
and accepted by Getty Oil in principle
to accomplish the largest merger in corporate history.
♪ ♪
Burrough: Pennzoil CEO Hugh Liedtke
was fit to be tied. He was gonna get Getty.
He was gonna go to war, and it became a war
really unlike anything else in, on Wall Street in the '80s.
There just had never been anything like it.
♪ There's blood coming ♪
♪ Out of the ground ♪
♪ There's blood... ♪
analyst: You know, it is a soap opera.
You have the classic ingredients.
You have greed on one side and fear and loathing on the other.
♪ There's blood... ♪
Burrough: Pennzoil's CEO went and hired a lawyer
named Joe Jamail in Houston,
who is a very different type of fella.
(upbeat music playing)
Wilbur Ross: Jamail was famous.
He wore snakeskin boots,
big pointy toes, flew in his own private jet.
He was a larger-than-life character.
Burrough: Joe came from the world of personal injury lawyers,
and the only way he gets paid back is if he wins.
So no one had more at stake in this than Joe Jamail.
This is a totally irresponsible act,
and, uh, one more sleaze move that they're gonna slide in.
Texaco, they go down there and they say,
"We're not going to dignify this case."
And Jamail loves that
'cause his jury are all his cousins and stuff up there...
And so Jamail loves that stuff.
And Joe Jamail was as good at orchestrating
the goings on in a Texas courtroom
as anybody that's ever walked the Earth.
reporter: Here in Texas, they're calling it the showdown in the courtroom.
(gavel banging)
And Wall Street traders have observers in the courtroom
with cellular phones talking to New York.
reporter 2: When the jury returned its unanimous verdict,
Pennzoil and Jamail emerged victorious,
the winner of the largest jury verdict in history.
A Texas jury has ordered the Texaco corporation
to pay more than $10.5 billion to Pennzoil.
reporter: And would have to start paying interest on that amount immediately.
Peter Jennings: The biggest bankruptcy in American history.
Texaco Inc. filed for protection...
reporter: It was a decision of last resort,
said Texaco president James Kinnear,
to file for court bankruptcy protection
in order to prevent Texaco from collapsing entirely.
The CEO of Texaco, Jim Kinnear,
went absolutely berserk
and in my view
was recklessly willing
to gamble the whole company.
reporter: The value of Texaco stock has taken a nosedive.
Most of us thought, you know, it actually did look like
Texaco could go under.
And I think the only person who thought it might not
was Carl Icahn.
Carl: You have to buy things
where the rest of the world are looking at you
and thinking you're a little bit crazy.
You're going against the trend.
A lot of times, events are overblown.
Overblown on the good side, overblown on the bad side.
My instincts looked Texaco
as a really good fundamental company.
This thing is dirt cheap.
I took a shot and bought all that stock
'cause I knew they had to get rational,
and I was going to get instrumental in it.
(phone ringing)
Jamail calls me up and he says, you know,
(southern accent): "You're a sensible man.
I wanna come talk to you. You own a lot of stock."
(normal voice): And he calls me "boy."
"You got a lot riding on this, boy."
But before he came, I called Kinnear.
(line ringing)
I get Jim on the phone.
You know, he says, "I'm not talking to anybody,
and I'm not making any settlement offer, and that's it."
I said, "Okay, I want you to do this, so just listen to me.
"I'm gonna start with numbers from 12 down.
"12, 11, 10, Jim?
"And when you get to the number that you will settle for
"and accept to get this fuckin' thing over with,
all you gotta do is say 'okay' and hang up."
So I started, "12, 11, 10, 9..."
I get to 3, he says "okay" and hangs up.
So now I know he would do it for 3.
So now Jamail walks in with Liedtke,
and Jamail says...
I said, "Come on, this is the biggest bullshit case
I've ever seen, so stop the bullshit."
So he goes, "We would settle this case for $10 billion."
So I say, "You know, Joe,
you ain't never gonna get $10 billion so forget it."
And Liedtke gets up, irate, you know.
It's a little bit of an act, and he says, "I'm leavin',"
and the two of them start walking out.
Jamail turns around as he gets to the door.
He says, "You know..."
"Let's you and I go have a drink."
I said, "It's 10:30 in the morning.
I'm here on Sixth Avenue. Where the hell am I going to have a drink?"
♪ ♪
So now we go out, walking on Sixth Avenue.
And the Parker Meridian, we walk in there,
and it was like, you know, they weren't ready for lunch yet
and they had all the chairs on the tables and all.
But I know the maître d' a little.
I said, "I wanna have a drink." He said, "We're not open."
I said, "Just take those two chairs off the table
and bring me a bottle of vodka."
And that's it.
And Jamail sits down, he's taking the vodka. So he goes...
I said, "Don't even negotiate." He said,
"Well, you know we ain't takin' less than nine billion."
He's now down to nine or something.
I said, "Do you want the number,
or you wanna just bullshit?"
He looks at me and he goes...
I said, "Yeah, I think I know."
I said, "There's no negotiating.
The number is $3 billion."
He looks at me and he goes, takes his hand...
♪ ♪
And I said, "Okay."
And now he's sitting there and he's drinking the vodka,
and he's laughing, he's got the Stetson hat.
And all these people are coming in now.
I say, "So, let me ask you a question, Joe."
I say, "The way I figure it, you just made yourself
$600 million for three weeks' work."
"Yes, I did, yes, I did.
"You're right, you're good at math.
"$600 million," he smiled. People are listening now.
You know, all well-dressed people looking at this guy
with his feet up on the table.
I said, "Well, what good works are you gonna do?"
"What you mean 'good works'?"
I said, "Soup kitchen, you know, medical research."
"I'll tell you what I'm gonna do with the money.
"I'll tell you what..." and he did it.
"I'm gonna buy pussy!"
-(crowd laughing) -"I'm gonna buy pussy!"
The headwaiter comes running over,
headwater comes running over and says,
"You know, Mr. Icahn, I think you better leave."
-I say, "Yeah." -(laughter)
That's it, and I left. That was it.
(applause)
A multibillion-dollar settlement early today,
the largest legal settlement in this country's history.
reporter: Texaco has agreed to pay Pennzoil
a staggering $3 billion to settle a court case.
Stephen Labaton: Carl walked into this situation
and basically forced a settlement down Texaco.
Carl was not done after the settlement.
He saw continued potential value
and made a pretty hefty profit.
I think it was around $600 million
that he made on that transaction.
Jennings: On Wall Street today, the trading was heavy.
One reason: the sale of a huge block of Texaco,
42 million shares worth $2 billion.
That is the biggest single trade ever on Wall Street.
The seller is believed to be the takeover specialist Carl Icahn.
Let me show you something.
You can use this. This is sort of something for ya.
So... (laughs)
This is sort of one of my favorite pictures.
Look. This was sent to me by Joe Jamail.
And, you see, this is the way he was in the restaurant,
when we talked about it.
You see the shoes.
And he was a real character.
And he writes, "Friend Carl,
shit happens."
"Joe Jamail."
So I keep this around.
(tranquil music playing)
When I started out,
I learned the hard way,
playing the market, it's a competitive area, it's gambling.
Too many variables, too many people competing with you.
You can't believe that the gambling will carry you.
♪ ♪
So, you look for something I call a "no-brainer."
Very little risk, but a lot of reward.
After a while, it becomes somewhat instinctive,
that you see something that's not really apparent to everyone.
♪ ♪
But there's tough times when you're not gonna enjoy it.
You know, you're gonna lose and you gotta be willing to say,
"Hey, if I lose, so what?"
It's like that great Rudyard Kipling poem.
"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
and treat those two impostors just the same..."
That's important.
♪ ♪
But you have to have a passion for it.
You get a great feeling when you find a company,
when you find something you can do.
You get excited by it.
And by instinct now, something goes "click,"
and you know it's good.
It all sums up in that movie "The Hustler,"
where, when he shoots the ball, he says...
You know, I got a hunch, fat man.
I got a hunch it's me from here on in.
One ball, corner pocket.
I mean, that ever happen to you,
where all of a sudden, you feel like you can't miss?
When I hear the click, I know I won.
(rhythmic percussion music playing)
♪ Leading the way ♪
announcer: TWA presents the difference
between getting you where you're going
and leading the way.
(upbeat music playing)
What's that?
-(reporters laughing) -What was that?
man: Waiting for the equipment to warm up.
I see you have problems with equipment as we do.
Uh...
I thank you all for coming.
I'd just like to say that, uh,
we're doing quite well with our scheduling.
TWA, I can tell you now for sure, is here to stay.
(somber music playing)
Burrough: This was an awful time in the airline business.
And a lot of these companies were under fire,
were the focus of corporate raiders.
And when this fella, Frank Lorenzo,
goes after TWA...
he was deeply, deeply unpopular in the business.
Show me a business person that doesn't like a monopoly
and I'll show you a big liar.
-(audience laughing) -Okay?
reporter: Lorenzo was known for being tough on unions.
Burrough: So, at TWA,
the unions actually went to Carl.
Carl: So they all met with me.
They really wanted me to come in
because they needed somebody to fight off Lorenzo.
announcer: Today's TWA is the new spirit
and vitality of our people.
So they said, "We'll give you huge concessions if you do it."
So I looked at the numbers and said, "Yeah,
"if you guys give these concessions,
you could just save a lot of capital here."
(music box playing)
The staff gave me this toy plane
to commemorate the TWA deal.
(music box playing)
Carl Icahn takes control and is now running TWA.
Carl Icahn, the controversial financier
known for his attacks on corporate management.
Now they will be watching to see how he himself
handles the management of a major corporation.
♪ ♪
Wapner: Carl had never run anything before.
Certainly nothing like an airline.
You're dealing with the economy,
you're dealing with unions,
and that was his biggest fight right off the bat.
We want a TWA that can exist and it will exist
because all the employees have come behind us.
The employees have given.
When it came time to give the concessions,
the pilots lived up to their bargain and so did the machinists,
and then the flight attendants, Vicki Frankovich,
comes in and says, "We can't do it."
Carl Icahn came in and demanded changes in everything.
She said, "You got enough, it's too bad."
I said, "Bullshit. You made a deal, you got to stick to it."
striker: Carl Icahn not fair to flight attendants!
Fifteen days into the strike by TWA flight attendants,
there is no sign of conciliation by either side.
At issue, company-proposed wage rollbacks.
TWA employees confronting a bottom-line businessman.
The work rules we must have to survive.
We are not asking for very much.
The changes he's asking are drastic.
Carl: This company would have been bankrupt
if I hadn't come along and saved the damn thing.
Carl Icahn is a corporate raider.
♪ TWA ♪
You know, literally they'd say, "We got you by the balls,
the great Mr. Icahn, because you need us to fly."
♪ ♪
So, what I thought of is this, I said, "Wait a minute,
why can't we just bring in new flight attendants?"
"Oh, because they gotta be licensed."
-(alert chimes) -(air hisses)
I said, "Set up a school for flight attendants."
"Eh, I don't know.
We can't do that." I said, "Well, why not?"
"Nobody ever did that."
I said, "Set up the goddamn school,"
and from all over the country, I couldn't believe it,
all these people want to be flight attendants.
And then Frankovich now goes crazy.
She sees all this happening.
striker: The flight attendants are out here today because they want to show Carl Icahn
that we are still united and we're still determined to win this battle.
We're holding together better than any other union I know that has struck in the past.
Some woman down the road calls me up, panicked.
"There are a thousand people walking up the road,
chanting and screaming."
"What's going on, Carl?" you know.
She says, "I'm calling the police. I'm calling the police."
(siren wails)
(intense music playing)
(strikers chanting)
reporter: These flight attendants took the unusual step
of taking their case right to the home
of TWA chairman Carl Icahn.
I said, "Bullshit," and I went out there with the kids.
"You're not taking the kids." I said, "I'm taking the kids."
striker: Here's the lies right here,
our new work rules.
(strikers complaining)
Well, that's what... this is, this is...
You know, I can't... You're being a little...
-woman: Quiet, let him talk. -Carl: You've got an airline
that's losing 200 million bucks in '85
and it's losing a lot in this quarter...
(strikers drowning out Icahn)
'Cause we can't compete.
-Can I finish? -(strikers clamoring)
You wanna listen? You come to my home on a Saturday,
I've still come out here to talk to you,
and I want-- and I think you should give me the courtesy
to listen as long as I'm talking to you.
-man: That's fair. -Miss Frankovich
should have come to that meeting in August,
you don't like to hear it,
because at that time I could have got financing.
I told her I need three people there,
she says, "I'm going to a party,"
-and that's the truth of it. -(crowd clamoring)
-I'm telling you what happened. You don't wanna hear it. -man: Cheap shot.
-That's a cheap shot. -Carl: Now, let me finish up.
Could I? Then you can talk. Instead of yelling.
-You're brainwashed. -man: No, we are reasonable.
I mean this. I am not here to hurt you.
I think a lot of people are getting wrong information from her.
I'm getting a lot of calls from a lot of flight attendants,
say they'd love to come back, they're being intimidated by her...
-that they're being scared by her. -strikers: No!
-man: That's not true. -(strikers clamoring)
(chuckles) That is good.
Yeah, I remember that.
I wanna keep that, that's a good clip.
Show that to my grandchildren.
I have a whole group that's willing to meet. She says she wants me there.
You can't force me to like somebody, okay? I don't like dealing with her.
Okay? Because she lies. But that doesn't mean I don't have a whole group of people
that are there qualified to talk to her.
We're willing to talk. I don't wanna be there with her.
It was sort of exciting.
(strikers jeering)
Carl: The strikers didn't understand.
Frankovich told them a lot of bullshit.
And a lot of them agreed with me.
After a week, she pulled them off,
she wouldn't let them come to my house anymore
'cause they were all now complaining to her.
Wapner: I don't know if Carl expected
that he was gonna have this kind of turbulence
right off the bat.
I think he would tell you he thought he was
fighting the good fight, and yet what he was doing
played into every stereotype
of the evil Wall Street financier.
The companies that he leaves behind
incur a tremendous amount of debt
and then they start laying off,
and that's more and more Americans
falling below the poverty line.
I've been seeing a counselor since the strike
because it is emotionally devastating to have lost...
I mean, I've been a flight attendant my entire adult life.
Every one of those flight attendants
could have walked across the picket line, which many did.
Many of them said, "Hey, Vicki Frankovich, the heck with it."
They could have kept their jobs.
I didn't tell you not to cross, we begged you to cross.
We came out, we told you over and over.
They had work rules that we couldn't afford.
If I hadn't come along and borrowed $700 million
on my name, you'd be chapter 11.
If you're chapter 11, it wouldn't do you any damn good
'cause you wouldn't be working, you'd be like Eastern.
Pan Am, Eastern, and Braniff,
there was a whole bunch of them that went under.
And during that period,
we turned TWA around, for a couple of years.
announcer: The U.S. is a bargain
if you know where to shop.
And the best place is today's TWA.
We've got low air fares to terrific cities...
We brought innovation with a business saver fare.
announcer: Bargains on the ground, too,
like our travel value pack.
Carl: We created the flight attendants school.
♪ You're gonna like us ♪
♪ TWA ♪
I made mistakes with it, though, I mean, I made a lot of mistakes with it.
And then it, then it got from bad to worse.
(ominous music playing)
♪ Happy birthday, Dear Carl ♪
♪ Happy birthday to you... ♪
The problems were endemic.
People weren't traveling to Europe for a while,
you had that Desert Storm that came.
There were a lot of other things, too,
with the terrorism.
He was perplexed.
"Why can't I figure this out?"
He's always had a magic wand. Didn't work here.
Carl eventually took the company private,
but it was loaded with debt.
And TWA ended up filing for bankruptcy.
I really believe that, you know, you look at the results,
and if it doesn't work, you blame yourself, I guess.
(upbeat music playing)
I'm taking you back to where I grew up.
You've always asked me as a little girl,
and I'm gonna show you, before I moved to Florida.
-So little... -I've heard so many stories.
So little, but I grew up there.
♪ ♪
I think it wasn't... it wasn't until I was older
that I really, I think, got a better understanding
of where my father grew up
and the different challenges that he probably was facing
that were maybe responsible
for making him so tenacious.
♪ ♪
Carl: My parents, they only made around 5,000 a year,
but that's all they would talk about.
Maybe that's why I was so interested in money.
They hated the rich people, but they were so into it.
-Okay, we're here. -(engine stops)
Carl: You're coming up to my house.
Michelle: I remember it from photos, but this is...
-Carl: Yeah, I remember it well. -...it's so cool seeing it.
Carl: Yep.
Oh, Mr. Icahn, how are you?
-Carl: Okay. -Moishe Russell.
Good to meet you, and thanks very much for having us.
(laughs) Jeez.
Brings back memories, that's for sure.
My father had all this musical stuff,
because he loved to sing.
And he had a Presto record recording.
Your mom had a wall right here.
No, they took the wall out. This was the dining room.
They kept telling her, the house would fall down if you took the thing down.
But she found a builder that said, "Bullshit,
I'll put a beam up there, the house is fine."
'Cause she was tenacious, my mother. Boy, she was tough.
♪ ♪
But you know, when you needed her, she was there, I'll say that.
You know, like sometimes if I feel down or have problems,
she was always a real good problem solver.
But... egomaniac.
She was a complete egomaniac.
I mean, everything she did was right, you know.
She, she had the answer to, to everything,
and she was really... you know.
But people liked her.
She was funny, you know, she had a good sense of humor,
except with me.
I had to be perfect to her because I was her kid.
So anything she did was perfect, right?
So, I was supposed to be perfect.
♪ ♪
She was so strong-willed and I was strong-willed,
so... we always had a stormy relationship.
(man singing in Hebrew on phonograph)
Ah, look at this. Wow.
Michelle: Where are we right now?
Temple Beth El.
I was bar-mitzvahed here.
Oh, yeah.
(song ends triumphantly)
Michelle: It's beautiful.
Carl: My father used to sing here and he was the cantor,
and I was bar-mitzvahed here.
-Wow. -But he wasn't religious at all.
They would sit here, the trustee, maybe,
and my father would sing, I don't know which one, maybe over there.
Yeah.
I haven't been back, I think, for close to 70 years.
Bruce: You feel the ghost of your father in here?
Nah. Nah.
My father was a very strange guy.
Even though he was the cantor at the temple,
he was a dyed-in-the-wool dogmatic atheist.
And he was, in my opinion, a communist.
My father was also the Irish tenor on Sundays.
-And so... -(Michelle laughs)
He was. He just had a great voice, you know.
It was, Michael O'Cahn was coming and he would sing "Danny Boy,"
and he just wanted to sing, you know?
I never inherited his love for real music.
I mean, I never had any talent.
He's the guy that said to me,
"Your mother has great talent in art.
"I have a great voice. We're both talented people.
"Now you, on the other hand, have absolutely no talent.
"Go be a doctor.
The doctors, look what they charge you."
He had no filter for what he said.
My father was an interesting character
'cause he didn't, he didn't really give a damn
pretty much about...
Well, he did, he got outraged at people.
He really, I think I got this sense of outrage from him.
Michelle: Yeah.
Carl: I was never close to him.
I never respected him or admired him.
My father, he never asked me what I did.
Even when I went on Wall Street and I was making the money,
he never tried to have me explain it.
He never asked, he never got into it.
And finally, in Florida,
I went down there once and he had a pad and pencil.
"Come here, come here. Explain to me what you do."
And I said, "You finally admit it."
And then we hugged.
I still, I still cry about that.
Bruce: Why do you cry?
I don't know.
I don't know why I do.
I felt...
a certain warmth.
A certain warmth.
That was, that was my father.
They, they say, "Thou shall not kill,"
and later on you go, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," right?
So they're all sort of contradictory.
(both laugh softly)
reporter 1: Some say Carl Icahn was 20 years ahead of his time,
battling the corporate world
in the name of shareholder value.
Aw, come on!
reporter 2: When TWA filed for bankruptcy,
it hurt his reputation, but he pressed on,
returning to the scene with years of proxy fights,
all the while demonstrating his knack
for corporate combat.
(percussive music playing)
(trance music playing)
Herbalife is a global nutrition company
that sells our products exclusively
through a network of people just like you.
Herbalife is a nutrition company based in California
that Carl Icahn probably had never heard of.
I mean, nothing.
Until Bill Ackman showed up.
Throughout my career, the vast majority,
particularly our most successful investments,
have been ones that have been controversial in one way or another.
Bill Ackman is another one of the major activist investors out there.
He's a fellow billionaire.
One of these masters of the universe in New York.
Harvard educated versus Carl's Princeton.
reporter: Although unlike Carl, he was born into privilege.
He also likes to publicly spar with companies the way Icahn does,
but he goes about it in a slightly different manner.
And please welcome Bill Ackman.
(crowd applauding)
Okay, so we've got a lot to cover today,
so we're going to move pretty quickly.
Why don't we start...
Sorkin: So Bill Ackman decides
that Herbalife effectively is a fraud, it's a scam.
Herbalife is a pyramid scheme.
It's caused enormous harm
to millions around the world.
Our goal is for the facts
about Herbalife to be made public.
And he believes that if he's able to expose
what he believes are the company's frauds to the public,
that regulators are gonna jump in
and the stock is gonna tank.
I don't want to make any money from this, okay?
I view this as blood money, but let me be clear.
We'll short the stock.
Herbalife stock goes down, we make money.
Herbalife stock goes up, we lose money.
He's gonna short the company,
so he's gonna bet that the stock is gonna fall
all the way to zero.
Ackman: A pyramid scheme is actually a modern-day version of a Ponzi scheme.
Carl, meanwhile, is watching this all play out.
Ackman: ...the version is called 3.0.
It's 1.0 is the Ponzi scheme.
And he's thinking to himself that Bill is gonna lose,
that he's never gonna get the stock to go even further down
and effectively bets against him.
(discordant music plays)
Carl: Ackman is a real,
I think, a smart guy and a good investor.
He might have talked himself into believing
that he was going to be a savior,
but I felt that Ackman had an agenda.
♪ ♪
Icahn and Ackman had done a deal together some years earlier
where the contract was somewhat ambiguous.
And the court eventually said that Icahn had to pay.
After Carl paid Bill,
the unwritten rule on Wall Street,
"Don't gloat about your victories."
Bill went to the newspaper and he gloated about the victory
and that pissed Icahn off like you don't know.
I think Herbalife was personal.
Carl: Ackman's whole thesis is completely wrong.
I mean, I can't even understand his argument.
I was walking through the CNBC newsroom,
and I saw Carl on TV on another network
absolutely annihilating Ackman.
Carl: He may believe what he's saying, I don't know.
Herbalife gives jobs to people.
I mean, it's absurd what Ackman is saying.
And I stopped in my tracks and I said,
"This is unbelievable."
And I was kind of mad that it was happening somewhere else.
But I went and I called Bill.
And I said, "Do you want to respond to this?"
And he's like, "You know what?
"Carl's an asshole.
"I'm sick and tired of this bullshit.
"He tried to take advantage of me.
I'll come on, I'll do it" So I said, "Great."
(intense music playing)
Ackman: Carl has been maligning my reputation,
so it's very important that we get to the facts.
Ackman comes on, we're talking about Herbalife.
Ackman: Carl, he can try to scare my investors from investing with me,
which it sounds like he's attempting.
And then Carl calls in to the control room.
I look down at my computer and there's a tweet
from a CNBC colleague of mine,
and it says, "This is gonna be good."
-(dramatic flourish plays) -All right, welcome back
to the "Halftime Report," live today from the New York Stock Exchange.
We've been speaking with hedge fund investor Bill Ackman.
Now it's time to hear what Carl Icahn thinks of our conversation.
He joins us live on the phone. Carl, are you there, Bill, there?
-Carl: Okay, good to talk to you. -Ackman: I am here as well.
Wapner: You know, Carl, you have an issue with the way
that Bill went about the Herbalife short
as aggressive and as publicly as he did,
and he's essentially saying that you're a hypocrite.
How do you respond?
Carl: Let's start with what I want to say.
I've really sort of had it with this guy Ackman,
'cause Herbalife is a classic example of what he does.
You scare the hell out of people,
get the stock down
and make 600 million bucks on paper
and tells the world how great he is.
I had dinner with him.
I couldn't figure out if he was
the most sanctimonious guy I ever met in my life
or the most arrogant.
And I'd like to give Bill a chance to respond to you as well.
Ackman: Carl has been-- is gonna try to attack my integrity.
And Herbalife, we're not scaring people
but going through the facts about the company--
Carl: If that wasn't scaring people, you could have fooled me.
Ackman: And we will either be proven right,
or we'll be proven wrong.
There had never been quite a showdown
between two people of such high stature
as Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman on live TV.
Carl: Then he talks about charity, that's complete (bleep).
He's not giving it to charity,
assuming they don't need charity themselves.
-Let me do this, I mean... Carl.
Carl: Now, that's what I'll say about Ackman, okay?
Let me remind you that we are on live television.
We're doing the show that day at the stock exchange,
and it's on a delay.
So each time Carl would say something nasty about Bill,
two seconds later you would hear all the traders on the trading floor...
Carl: He's the quintessential example on Wall Street,
if you want a friend, get a dog.
-traders: Ohh! -Carl: And he does a pump-and-dump...
Wapner: Uh, the guys on the trading floor
down here at the New York stock exchange...
Same thing when Bill would, you know, insult Carl,
the floor would erupt.
Ackman: This is not an honest guy. He's a bully, okay?
Says he doesn't like behaviors that are bad...
It quickly devolved into a battle, a war.
-Carl: Ackman is a liar, okay? -(traders clamoring)
He's got one of the worst reputations on Wall Street. The guy is a major loser.
Ackman: The big issue about Carl Icahn is he's not used to someone standing up to him.
Carl, you wanna bid for the company, go ahead and bid for the company.
Carl: Hey, you don't have to tell me what I'm free to do.
I'm reporting from Davos, Switzerland,
at the World Economic Forum,
where all the CEOs from around the globe come.
And I remember being at a cocktail party,
trying to get Wi-Fi on my phone so I could watch it,
and literally a swarm of CEOs
standing around, we were all watching...
Carl: I appreciate, Bill, that you called me a great investor.
Unfortunately I can't say the same for you.
It was like must-see TV.
Ackman: Simply said to him, I said, "Look, Carl, you are no friend of mine."
You couldn't take your eyes off of the thing.
Ackman: Do you think I wanna invest with you?
Carl: I wouldn't invest with you if you were the last man on Earth.
Volume of trading at the New York Stock Exchange
went down 20%,
as everybody was just sort of standing there watching TV.
Carl: I'm telling you, he's like the crybaby in the schoolyard.
You know, I went to a tough school in Queens
and they used to beat up the little Jewish boys
and he was like one of these little Jewish boys,
crying that the world was taking advantage of him.
Wapner: Let me, guys, we're gonna... we're gonna end it there.
Bill Ackman, Carl Icahn, we'll go to break.
Herbalife played out for a number of years,
but it was really a foregone conclusion from that moment,
because once Carl emerged,
Bill didn't really have a chance.
Just as the markets are falling,
Herbalife is hitting an all-time high today.
Carl wasn't going to go anywhere.
And Wall Street was betting with Carl.
(trance music playing)
Herbalife is officially
the worst investment ever made by Pershing Square.
Bill lost the majority of his investment in Herbalife.
It was a billion-dollar short.
And eventually Bill just threw in the towel,
and Icahn, he won.
It obviously felt good.
It felt good that I beat him.
We did have a vendetta, and I felt he had screwed me once,
so it felt good to do it.
But I certainly have no grudge,
and at the end of this whole thing,
he called me up and congratulated me on the victory.
And I think it was a classy thing to do.
But the winning, that's not the motivation for me.
The motivation is just, find the good one.
Find something you know is gonna be good,
and the odds are greatly in your favor.
Winning, it's almost...
a bit of a letdown, actually.
You know, you did it all. Now it worked.
On to the next one.
Pretty good. I made a good one. Fairly good. Fairly good.
(percussive music playing)
Sorkin: Carl wasn't typically interested in tech companies
'cause they weren't his kind of companies.
analyst: Why is Carl Icahn, first of all, investing
in a private tech company?
Wapner: How did he end up in the tech game?
♪ ♪
Brett Icahn: I started working for my father as an analyst
back in 2002.
There were several of us at the time.
I was definitely the youngest of the group.
I sort of had a privileged "in,"
you could, you could say.
But I had, you know, I had learned quite a bit
about accounting
and I took economics in school,
so it's not like I was completely a fish out of water.
Carl: I'll say this about Brett,
he's much more low-key than I am.
But he's one of the most obsessive characters,
and he'll work very hard at something,
extremely hard,
especially if it means beating me at something.
♪ ♪
Cara Lombardo: He's not quite as pushy as Carl.
He's more analytical.
He is definitely more risk averse.
But they have a lot of similarities too.
They both love history.
They're war buffs.
For a while, they played a Sunday night game of chess
every week.
But they had to stop that because Brett,
he got too good and kept winning.
Foroohar: Carl, I think, is very proud of Brett.
He wanted to praise Brett to me on a couple of occasions,
but he would sort of pull himself back
because he didn't want to make it too easy for him.
Carl: So he worked for me ten years.
Another guy in the firm, a very smart guy,
named David Schecter, they came to me, said, "Look,
we're not gonna stay here unless we get some money to manage."
You know, "We're not gonna just do research."
So I figure, well, I'll teach them a lesson.
I'll give them some money. I made it a tough deal.
It was actually like a very difficult deal.
You know, I said, "Okay, you can have like
"7.5 percent profits, each one of you,
"but you are gonna have to meet this hurdle rate
"of 7% before you make a penny.
No salary, no income, no nothing."
And they both agreed to it.
♪ ♪
Lombardo: And I think Brett really expanded Carl's mind
in terms of what makes a good investment.
It was Brett who called Carl's attention to Netflix.
reporter: Mr. Icahn owns 2.2 million shares.
That makes him one of the largest shareholders in Netflix.
reporter 2: Netflix, Netflix the big winner in today's trade.
Carl: Netflix was a no-brainer when we first went into it.
Everybody didn't like it when we bought it.
So Netflix went on to be one of their most lucrative investments ever.
I think they made around $2 billion when all was said and done.
Foroohar: As I remember the Netflix success,
and it was a huge success for Carl,
was, whoa.
I mean, we knew this guy was back,
but he's now back and he gets tech.
(laughing) You know.
If I were the CEO of a tech company at that stage,
I would have been a little worried
that I might be the next person he was looking at.
(trance music playing)
Brett: Apple was an example of a company
that was just really cheap
on a fundamental basis of cash flow.
Brett noticed that Apple had immense amounts of cash
sitting on its books,
and the stock price wasn't reflecting that.
reporter: Apple is now sitting on almost $150 billion in cash.
It was about the finances of Apple.
It was about, could Apple buy back their own shares,
and if they were able to do that,
how much more of a higher valuation
should be ascribed in the marketplace to Apple?
(percussive music playing)
When we pitched my father Apple,
it was just so easy for him to see this cash problem.
For a guy like that, to show him just those basic fundamentals
about a company, he just started salivating right away.
Carl: When Twitter came out,
I, I didn't even know what it was, frankly.
And Michelle, she comes up with great ideas.
She said, "You ought to have a Twitter account."
I said, "Come on, I'm not gonna do that."
She says, "No, no, you have to have a Twitter account."
And then, when we bought Apple,
she said, "Well, let me tweet that,
that you own Apple."
So I said, "Okay, do it."
Foroohar: I remember the tweet distinctly.
And, you know, the markets kind of went nuts immediately.
reporter: Apple shares in focus
after Carl Icahn disclosed in a tweet
that he purchased $500 million of Apple stock.
reporter 2: ...trying to get a piece of Apple stock...
reporter 3: Announced he had taken this stake on Twitter, and Apple shares shot up.
Lombardo: Just from that tweet,
Apple's market value jumped $17 billion.
Sorkin: The view on Wall Street is,
what is Tim Cook gonna do about this?
People wanna appease Carl Icahn.
(trance music playing)
I think people couldn't fathom
that Carl Icahn was having dinner with Tim Cook.
Tim Cook's visit to our home for dinner
was a very exciting time.
We very carefully went over the menu,
but I sort of like to add my contribution.
For dessert, we had cookies shaped in an apple shape
with another bite taken out of it,
to symbolize (laughs) the shareholders' investment.
(intense music playing)
Brett: So on the night of the dinner with Tim Cook,
normally my father would get there late, actually, but I think he got there on time,
which is a huge compliment to Tim Cook.
♪ ♪
We talked to Tim
about all the different stuff going on within Apple.
You know, anything that he could tell us publicly, anyway.
And then eventually the small talk evolved
into, "Hey, you should buy back more stock."
Sorkin: Carl clearly wanted to get Tim
to pursue a massive buyback program.
And I think Tim wanted to quiet the rhetoric.
♪ ♪
Carl: Now, I don't say every company should do buybacks
for the purpose of financial engineering.
In fact, it's overdone.
But in this case, it was crazy for them to have all of this cash around
and doing nothing with it.
Lombardo: I think Carl expected to find
the typical resistant CEO
who he'd have to a little bit strong-arm,
and Tim Cook sounds to have been much more Zen about it.
reporter: Apple said it had returned
74 billion to shareholders.
It plans to return 103 billion.
When I got the feeling as an old poker player
that he wasn't really displeased with the fact
that I was making a ruckus about wanting to do a buyback.
I think he wanted to do it himself,
but he had a board that was rather reluctant to do it.
That's what I believe, but he never said that.
I think the board came around to doing it.
And that's how those buybacks started.
Apple expanding its capital return program
to $200 billion.
That was another billion five right there.
Between Apple and Netflix,
we made for the company about $3 billion,
and overall, across all the investments,
over six years, it was about 5 billion.
I'm really happy to make my father that much money.
But I think I was worthy of the Icahn name before that.
He made his father billions of dollars.
He got his own hundreds of millions of dollars payday at the end,
and he even flirted with the idea
of setting up his own firm.
Brett: Wait, wait, we start it together.
Lombardo: There were rumblings on Wall Street
for years that,
what would come of Carl Icahn and Icahn Enterprises?
Would his son Brett take over? Would he not?
Was there someone else in the picture?
(engine puttering)
Brett: I think it was always a complicated issue for me
because he has some big shoes that I would have to walk in.
It's like, do you want to spend your whole life
being compared to this larger-than-life, you know,
greatest financier of all time?
Um...
It's an issue.
Have you read the contract?
I mean, with you and Jesse, what Jesse sent you?
-I've been reading it, yeah. -Are you gonna get it finished up?
-We got a lot to talk about. -I know.
I asked Carl, "Is it true that Brett will be coming back?"
And Carl said, "You know, we've been trying to negotiate a deal."
It's been over a year now, though,
and the contract has already stretched to 90 pages.
It sounds like he was approaching this negotiation with his son
the way he would approach a business deal.
You should see what Jesse did to the previous version.
I mean, it's like, uh... a totally rewritten document.
Eh, he does that.
Jesse. Oh, Jesse, poor Jesse.
(chuckles)
I think Carl and Brett have a very similar style of negotiation,
which makes it very tough to mediate between them.
I think, you know, Carl would readily admit,
I think he, uh, he trained Brett a little too well.
You're cheating. If you go through the trees, it doesn't count.
Well, he's afraid. I beat him.
I'm afraid? I won four races and you only won one.
Big shot, listen, big shot. I won one, you won two.
Am I Carl Icahn's official successor?
I just don't know if I can say the word officially.
(contemplative music playing)
-Carl: Oh, yeah, yeah. -Gail: You're sittin' in the egg.
Gail: We had this house in Miami for a long time
and didn't use it very much.
But as time went on, we decided that it was a very nice lifestyle
to be able to live here on this island.
It became clear that we enjoyed it so much
that perhaps we should think about
moving our offices down here as well.
♪ ♪
(upbeat music playing)
That's down 160,
no, 160-- 100? That's further down...
Gail: Thirty minutes that it takes to get to the office,
it's a great time for him to just collect his thoughts
when he's starting his day.
♪ ♪
And he loves being on the water.
♪ ♪
Carl: "I began my career on Wall Street
"nearly 50 years ago.
"From a modest upbringing in Queens, New York,
I have been fortunate enough to accumulate..."
Bill Gates: I first met Carl Icahn at a Giving Pledge dinner,
where we were bringing together people who had large wealth.
♪ ♪
And Carl did agree to join the pledge,
which means the majority of his wealth
will go to philanthropic causes.
You know, he helped me with polio.
He supported his wife's activities in charter schools.
Sorkin: Carl's, to his credit, been charitable.
But because money is his army,
and because he still enjoys doing what he does
and he needs the money to have the leverage,
he probably has not obviously been able to give away
the majority of his wealth, yet.
What's the relationship between the two halves of this paradox?
On the one hand, you got all these generous rich people,
on the other hand, you have the fact
that it's an age of inequality, an age of anger.
(intense music playing)
The 25 richest Americans in federal income taxes,
they paid relatively little and sometimes nothing.
The political narrative right now is that
average Americans should look at guys like Carl and say,
"Ah, they shouldn't have that much money,"
and, all right, I don't know whether Carl should or shouldn't.
Carl: The wealth gap between
the very rich and the very poor
is getting wider and wider.
Part of it is the ridiculous amount of money
that top management is paid for doing a poor job.
Most CEOs are way overpaid. That's not even a secret.
However, I have no objection to people
that risk their own capital for profit.
I mean, what incentivizes people
is feeling they're going to be rewarded.
The free enterprise system is supposed to be there.
(intense digital music playing)
(elevator bell dings)
Carl: Thank you.
-We need a piece here. -Yeah.
A sculpture.
Do you like the paintings on the wall?
Carl: I think it's too many.
Too much.
How you doing? Everything going good today?
man: Good, yeah.
We're going to have you guys, the brain trust.
Talk to you later.
Brettsky.
♪ ♪
Carl and Brett finally reach a deal
for Brett to return to Icahn Enterprises.
If you just do it pro rata yourself,
it doesn't really help out your return very much.
Then it doesn't matter about the 10%, then.
Lombardo: Brett will come to Carl with investment ideas.
Carl will get the final say over whether or not they do them.
Anything that they invest in, Brett has to put a little bit of his own money in.
You might have this job.
Cara: So Carl got comfortable
because he's still squarely in charge.
Brett: It's exciting.
It's as close to an official succession plan
as you're gonna get,
and Carl Icahn is gonna keep working
until he cannot work anymore,
and hopefully that's a long time from now.
Carl: I like this.
-This is nice. -Yeah. Very nice.
(Perry Como playing "Catch a Falling Star")
♪ Catch a falling star ♪
♪ And put it in your pocket ♪
♪ Never let it fade away ♪
And they wanted me to settle, everybody settles. I said, "I'm not settling."
nephew: Happy birthday.
Oh, let me see this.
That is the coolest thing.
-Las Vegas. -I'm keeping--
-This is the coolest. -Yeah, it's for you.
-Wait, um... -Where is my office?
Mom told me that you rented this place or something?
-Gail: He owned that place. -He owned that.
I owned the Stratosphere!
(indistinct chatter)
♪ ♪
1978 is when our paths crossed.
Hard to believe it's 42 years ago...
Sorkin: I think that Carl Icahn's had
a profound impact on society.
I think he has changed the way
boards of directors operate,
the way companies think...
Gail: Cheers!
Sorkin: ...the way shareholders think.
I think all that has been impacted
by Carl Icahn.
(intense music playing)
Foroohar: I sometimes wonder if peak Carl
doesn't represent some kind of shift
in the direction of capitalism in this country.
♪ ♪
Lombardo: You can't deny that Carl is a seminal figure
of capitalism in the last 50 years.
He's a lot of different things rolled up in one.
I think that's part of the reason that people are so captivated by him.
♪ ♪
Wapner: Maybe some people see Carl as everything
that's wrong with the current system,
that people are becoming too rich.
I think the other side of that is that you could make an argument that...
Carl Icahn is capitalism at its best.
A guy who grew up with not much,
who worked his butt off
and became one of the richest men in the world.
-Carl: Oh, God, this is it. -♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.
-What, do I make a wish? -Gail: You gotta make a wish.
♪ ♪
Carl: It's like Alexander the Great, right?
He's 31 years old and he won Persia.
To everybody in the world, he was the best and the greatest.
But he cried because he didn't think
there was any place else to go to do a battle.
He put his army together and then he went to India.
The army all worshiped him, but a lot of them deserted
'cause they said he's crazy.
He just kept going and going till they killed him.
And I think about that. I'm a little bit like that.
Just keep going at it.
Okay, I'll leave that there.
Okay, I think you got everything.
Bruce: We didn't get everything. We got a lot...
Well, I'm not doing any more. Don't even think about it.
Bruce: No, no, no. For this, for right now, we did everything.
Carl: No, what do you mean, for right now? Wait a minute. I'm not doing this.
(intense digital music playing)
So, one time they wanted to build this terrace behind my house.
My grandfather lived upstairs, see, so he said,
"Look, if you give me bricks, I'll build a terrace."
And my mother said, "We can't afford to pay for bricks."
So I was tired of the arguing.
So I'm in this gang with those hoodlums,
those friends of mine, so I said,
"Get your wagons, guys," and they listened to me.
"Okay, Carl, what are we doing?"
I said, "We're gonna take bricks, see?
"Nobody will miss them because we'll take three bricks here,
four bricks there." "Okay, that's fun."
♪ ♪
So we come back with all these bricks.
My grandfather's excited. "This is great."
"I can build a terrace." And my mother comes home,
says, "What is that?" I say,
"They're bricks, Ma. I got bricks for you to build your terrace."
And she says, "We can't steal.
That is wrong."
I said, "You cut the bullshit."
I said, "You, first of all, you keep talking about
you hate these builders, they're all making too much money."
And she goes, "Don't talk to me like that."
And my father says, "Hey, who's gonna miss 'em?
They're not gonna miss 'em."
"Yeah... I guess they weren't gonna use them anyway."
And we, "Here's the bricks," and we took 'em out. That was it.
I just, I'll never forget that.
♪ ♪