Carl Icahn: Founder of Icahn Enterprises and Activist Investor
Business Owner · Hedge Funds & Investing
Carl Icahn made his name as a 1980s corporate raider through TWA and pioneered shareholder activism as a mainstream hedge-fund strategy.
About Carl Icahn: Founder of Icahn Enterprises and Activist Investor
Carl Celian Icahn (born February 16, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American businessman and investor, the founder and controlling shareholder of Icahn Enterprises, a public diversified conglomerate holding company based in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. His business model is to take large stakes in companies he believes will appreciate from changes to corporate policy, then pressure management to make the changes he thinks will benefit shareholders, and him. Widely regarded as one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time, he was one of the first activist shareholders and is credited with making that strategy mainstream for hedge funds. In the 1980s Icahn developed a reputation as a "corporate raider" after profiting from the hostile takeover and asset stripping of Trans World Airlines. He is on the Forbes 400 with a net worth of approximately $3.8 billion to $7 billion, and since 2011 no longer manages money for outside clients, though investors can still invest in Icahn Enterprises. Icahn was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens, in an Ashkenazi Jewish family; his father, Michael Icahn, a "sworn atheist", was a cantor and later a substitute teacher, and his mother, Bella, was also a schoolteacher. He attended Far Rockaway High School and graduated from Princeton University in 1957 with a BA in philosophy, after a senior thesis titled "The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning". Sources: English Wikipedia (Carl Icahn, accessed September 2026).
Basic Information
Founder and controlling shareholder, Icahn Enterprises
Company Details
Icahn Enterprises
Activist Investing, Diversified Holding Company
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