We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP 104 : Billionaire Carl Icahn - A Rare Look Behind the Scenes w/ Mark Stevens, author of King Icahn (Business Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 We study billionaires, and this is episode 104 of The Investors Podcast. Broadcasting from Bel Air, Maryland. This is the Investors Podcast. They'll read the books and summarize the lessons. They'll test the waters and tell you when it's cold. They'll give you actionable investing strategies. Your host, Preston Pish, and Sting Broderson. Hey, how's everybody doing out there?

Starting point is 00:00:30 This is Preston Pish, and I'm your host. for The Investors podcast, and as usual, I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson, out in Seoul, South Korea. Today, we have got a really, really fun guest for you because we got Mark Stevens with us, and Mark is the guy that wrote the book, literally wrote the book on Carl Icon, as net worth is somewhere around $16, $17 billion here in 2016. And Mark wrote the book called King Icon, the biography of a renegade capital. and Stig and I have both read this book. We were actually going to record a discussion about

Starting point is 00:01:06 some of the stuff that we learned from this book. And luckily, we were able to actually land Mark on our show. And he is here today with us to talk about all of his adventures in writing this and studying and learning all about Carl Icon. So Mark, with that said, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day. You've been running your own business. I just want to throw this out there. He's the founder and CEO of MSC. Oh, it's a marketing company. He's been running it for almost 21 years now. Mark, my initial question after reading this,

Starting point is 00:01:38 and for anybody that hasn't had the opportunity to read your book, the amount of research that you had done to write at such a detailed level about all these different transactions, all these different deals that Carl did through the years, I mean, I can't even imagine the amount of research that you did to write this book. I was just, I'm reading some of the stuff in the detail that you put into. It was just mind-blowing. So my first question is this.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Why Carl Icon? Why did you put all this time and effort into learning about Carl? What intrigued you to do this? It was mostly because we lived in the same town of Bedford, New York, which is a small town, an hour from 42nd Street in Manhattan, but a world apart. This is sort of more horses in town than there are people. A few stores.

Starting point is 00:02:28 George Soros lived probably a half a mile. away from Carl and then there's a lot of movie stars. So anyway, I kind of knew about Carl's reading about him, but never paid much attention to it. And I saw him in town one day. And given the most of our in Bedford, any given time, is 12 people. I went up to him and said, you call Icon. And he said, yeah, we just started chit chatting.

Starting point is 00:02:52 Turned out and make a long story short. We turned out we were both tennis players. And we made a date to play tennis. No way. Yeah. So Carl had this. this beautiful, this is part of Carl's Audities, he had this 220-acre property with a gorgeous English stone mansion, but he didn't live in it. He lived in a sort of an upper middle-class house

Starting point is 00:03:15 that he built on the 220 acres, and I'll tell you why in a moment, but he had a gorgeous tennis facility that he built for himself. I mean, like a beautiful club, like any club that you would go to for membership, you would say this is really a top-rated club. And, you know, the English living rooms off the court. And we've started playing twice a week. I meet him at midnight. We'd play till two, and then we'd have dinner in his house. Now, a couple of things about Carl's personality, et cetera, which come across through this is that he bought the house from a movie star Jennifer, Jennifer O'Neill, who started in the summer 42. But in the living, I said, Carl, why don't you live in his house? He says, oh, I think he was worth $1.2 billion at

Starting point is 00:03:56 time. Yeah. It'll cost about $5, $6 million to think there's no way. I have a spanned heck on him. So he lived in this nice house, upper middle class house. That's what he lived in. Never locked the doors, nothing. And that's the way Carl is. And at the tennis facility, which was beautiful. When you went in to take shower after we played, the bars of soap were little

Starting point is 00:04:17 TWA bars or soap because he owned. Yeah, yeah. So he had these little three bars of soap. He wasn't letting Matt go to waste. So we met that way. And I got fascinated in him just by being his friend. Wow. So here's the thing that I'm so amazed with, Mark, is the fact that I didn't get that

Starting point is 00:04:37 out of your book. Like, you'd never let on that you had any type of personal relationship with him. To be quite honest with you, the detail of the deals and the way that you had interviewed close friends, people who were nemesis to Carl, that's what you really portrayed in the book, which was really kind of fun to hear all those different perspectives, which I think the truth really kind of comes out when you hear. hit all those different perspectives. So I didn't even know that.

Starting point is 00:05:04 I said to Carl one day, I mean, I'm going to write a book about you. And he said, well, you're just not going to do that more. I'm going to sue your butt off. You're one of a house, one of a business. Your kids will be in the street. There'll be nothing to eat. I'm telling you, I'll let up in 50 lawyers against you. You're not writing a book.

Starting point is 00:05:20 And I said, Carl, you know, read my lips. I'm writing a book about you, right? So, Paul Stiles is to call you at 4 o'clock in the morning. Yeah. And then he gained a three the next day and all kinds of things. He basically never sleeps. It was always threatening me while playing tennis. You know, simultaneously we're friends talking.

Starting point is 00:05:41 We went on a vacation to Palm Beach with my wife and his girlfriend. Yeah. Who's his wife now? And just he was bringing hell down on me. What he found out is I just went out and started talking to the M&A guys at the big MNA firms and the law firms, etc. Scaddonarps and those kind of guys. and he started getting word back.

Starting point is 00:06:01 This guy, Stevens is in my office and he wants to meet with you. And don't forget, Carl had plenty of enemies. So they will have talk. The personality that I read about in the book, I could tell that he would just absolutely devour your personality, just like, well, then go ahead, man, because this is the way I'm going to do it. Like, I can tell he probably ate that up.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Yeah, but he was really serious. He was really serious about, you know, really, he's going to stop this book. and he says, all of a sudden, this guy is just writing his book, and I keep reminding him, and calls the smartest person I ever met. Yeah. Now, we can get to that later, but, you know, I kept telling him, there is a First Amendment. You know, it actually applies to you, too, and he dismissed that.

Starting point is 00:06:44 So then he called me one night, and he said, okay, look, I have an idea. We'll do it together. I'll tell you everything. Yeah. But we'll have a contract, and we'll share the earnings. Now, here's a guy at $1.2 billion. You know. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:59 He wants to do a contract. So I said, you know what? You'll tell me everything. And I can be flying a wall, then fine. So he had his lawyers draw up a literally like a 50-page legal agreement. I was going to do it. I went home. I read it.

Starting point is 00:07:17 And I said, it's not because of the terms. I just know Carl. And I knew that once I went into a gave him some control over me, yeah, book would never come out. He's in a company. Wow. I went back to him and I said, Carl, I'm not signing anything. And he went crazy. You know, it cost me $50,000 with this contract. And it went crazy. I said, look, Carl, I'm walking out of here.

Starting point is 00:07:39 So either accept the fact that I'm doing a book without you. The interesting thing happened is that he accepted it. And he opened up to everything. And he gave me his mother. He gave me his uncle Elliot, who gave him the money to buy his first seat in the stock exchange. he opened up the doors to everybody and told me everything. And I also interviewed all those other people. And it was a hobby for me because I was running one of my businesses. So I've written a lot of books. This was a hobby to me, writing these books, how I learned. You learn, you learn fascinating stuff.

Starting point is 00:08:13 But really, that's how it evolved. And this is the other thing, Mark, is I don't think that you necessarily portrayed him in a manner that was all that favorable. That's probably not the right word because he comes across extremely intelligent. And I think most of that is just because of the detail of the deals that were constructed in the thought process. But the way that he went about working the deals and the way that you described it in the book, I thoroughly enjoyed it because I really appreciate a great negotiator. But for some people, they might take his personality in a very negative connotation. So I think that he, although he gave you keys to the castle, if you will, he also allowed you to really kind of write

Starting point is 00:08:58 a very authentic biography that captures his personality so well. Oh yeah, Preston. And it's so much fun that you're saying that because we're big Warren Buffett fans and just knowing how he's going about his business and the way that he treats other people and how he negotiates is just very, very different from what Kyle Icon is doing. Yeah, you might be saying that he's not even running his own business because there are no business. He has no company, really. I mean, so Bill Gates, who I spent a day with at Microsoft Campus in 1990, he just crossed a billion dollar more.

Starting point is 00:09:35 And he asked me to come out there and I spent a day with him talking about various things with Microsoft at the time. So Bill created an oil well and company like a lot of the billionaires. Warren has a bunch of oil wells and they just pour out the money. Carl never how to really have a company. he jumps on the necks of CEOs and he believes him to death. And it's his, it's that way. It's that epiphanies that he has about who to go after and the fact that he can outsmart anybody.

Starting point is 00:10:02 In fact, you know, it's just interesting, but I did for Bloomberg TV. It's in the can now. I did it last summer. Carl Iconzo Obit, one hour show. Me talking about Carl. I had to talk about him in the past tense. They asked me what his legacy. He said he has no legacy.

Starting point is 00:10:18 You think about a call created nothing, he built nothing, he changed nothing. He just got really rich. Really unusual thing is you think about the other billionaires they made, as Steve Jobs used to say, some kind of dent in the universe. He probably didn't do that. It really seems like his goal is always to outsmart other people. So could you comment on that but also perhaps tell the audience why you mentioned before that he's probably the most intelligent person that you ever encountered?

Starting point is 00:10:48 Well, last part first. Carl was a chess player at Princeton and a philosophy major. So he looks at the world through the eyes of a chess master. He wasn't a global chess minister, but he looks at the eyes with a chess master. And he was a very good chess player. And as a philosopher, so when we would be talking about anyone of his deals, he and I talking, he'd talk about it in terms of what would Mackey Evalia do, what would Estabell do, what would Nietzsche do, you know, and he would quote them. And that's how he sees the world. And so, So I always say that the average CEO, these are the guys who call who has gone after, Carl doesn't go after Warren Buffett. He's smart. So he goes after CEOs, who he always said CEOs are all in their position through reverse Darwinism. The CEO's dumb and he picks a person dumber than him until you have a moron at the top. He felt all these guys were morons. They had 500 degrees.

Starting point is 00:11:41 They had whatever. They were making $30 million a year and $100 million of stock officers. But to call, they were idiots. And so if these CEOs thought three or four, most people think one move ahead, they're lucky. But mostly CEOs think three or four moves ahead. Carl thinks 11. That's why he beats them. But the interesting thing is it isn't hard for him because it's not hard for Usain Bolt to win either.

Starting point is 00:12:06 If you have the gift, you're saying toys with people in a dash and a sprint. He has time to toy with people. Carl does that. It's just you can't really try to be as good as Carl. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord,

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Starting point is 00:16:23 All right. Back to the show. Wow. So I want to throw this out to the audience. There's a book called The Art of Learning. I don't know if you've ever seen this mark, but it's about a guy who he beat a grand chest master at like the age of 14. The movie Chasing Bobby Fisher is after the gentleman who wrote this book, The Art of Learning.

Starting point is 00:16:44 And one of the things that he talks about in this book is how the guys that are really great at outthinking their opponent, they really capture that middle game. Like you got these guys that are really good at their opening move and maybe their closing move. But the guys who are brilliant, the ones who do the best, are the ones who can handle the situations that have never been thrown at them before, and they can literally think through 11 or 15 steps in advance in the middle game of a chess match. And so what you were just describing there with Carl, I think that totally relates to the fact that A, he's a chess player,

Starting point is 00:17:19 and B, when you look at these deals in the way he was doing them, and we're going to get into that a little bit later. So if people are listening to that, we're going to get to that next. When he'd get into these deals, they were so complex, had so many variables. And I think for him, that is such an appetite for him to fulfill that desire of being in that complex environment and then outsmarting and beating the other person. And I can totally see how much of his life is oriented around this idea of chess and how all these acquisitions, these mergers and acquisitions and buyouts and all the other things that he was doing were motivated in a very similar context. And when I was reading your book, that theme really comes out that Carl, if he ever got in a position, where it was an end game where somebody basically you had to put your cards up and see who

Starting point is 00:18:05 won. Carl always had the winning hand because he had stacked that in advance and he knew that he wasn't going to go toe to toe to with somebody unless he had that final hand to win. Well, he wouldn't be there. You'd be his sucker. I would know that he stacked the deck. He was able to, you know, he wouldn't never put himself. You don't just realize that you just position yourself as somebody that call would kill because you went in with a sense of bravado

Starting point is 00:18:36 and a little nugget of dime store wisdom. The call's not going there because that's a gamble. So he's not doing that. He's not doing that. He had a guy standing behind me that told him the two cards I was holding. So Mark, the next thing I would like to add to this interview

Starting point is 00:18:51 is the whole discussion and the concept about activism. Because activism, that's really kind of icons, bread and butter. Could you explain plain English what activism is and perhaps also come up with a story of how he's used this concept in a given business transaction? So what an activist is, is somebody who, and all this sounds easier than it is, so you have to remember we'll go back to what I was talking about at a moment. But an activist buys some shares of stock in a publicly held company and then put simply starts making demands on management of a public health.

Starting point is 00:19:27 company saying, I want you to take some of the money off the balance sheet and distribute to the shareholders, which I am one up now. Management says, especially in the beginning of course career, go straight to hell. Yep. So he says, okay, I have 4% of your stock. Tomorrow, I'm going to make it 11. And I'm going to ask you again, it gets 11%. Still not playing small ball. They say, still, that path to hell is what you want to take. So then he buys more. So in other words, what happens is now particularly, Carl goes in, you can go to any company he wants except an app or something. He has enough money, enough resources to buy enough stock to buy enough of position and it influence other shareholders that we want the money that's on the balance sheet to be distributed to the shareholders using one example. An activist wants change.

Starting point is 00:20:15 They want change. They always position wanting change for the good of the shareholders, plural. Carl always wants to change for the benefit of the shareholder being called. Some of the other shareholders benefit along the way when he does his thing successfully. Yeah, and one key element of activism, and especially activism that is used to, activism today, I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's definitely harder in some ways compared to the 80s where Carl Akan really hit his stride. And the reason why I think has changed is because activism became so popular that basically

Starting point is 00:20:50 the government has to regulate it differently. But Mark, you tell this story at the very beginning of the book where he's actually using the concept of green mail the first time. So let's actually briefly talk about that because I think that's a super interesting concept. So green mail, that's basically money to go away. So let me give you an example. He was trying to take over a company. And as you said, Mark, the management really didn't want him to tick all the company because, hey, they might lose the job or whatever could happen. So they were actually telling him that they would smear his name, that they were going to print out more stocks, basically, or see printing out stocks because they want to dilute his shares. But they also knew that he was a threat. So they actually told him

Starting point is 00:21:35 that he could get $10 million just to go away. And they even gave him a list of 10 other companies that might be a good target for activism. And what actually happened at the end of the story was that Carl took that money and he actually used that to threaten another company. I just think that the whole entire concept of Greenmail, it might sound super counterintuitive because the management is basically using other shareholders' money to fight up another investor. And you might be thinking, why can that even be possible in the first place? Well, sometimes if the shareholder has bad intention, at least that's the intuition behind Greenmail, then it might be beneficial for other shareholders to have their management actually pay that guy off,

Starting point is 00:22:21 so he would just go away. And this is not necessarily to say that activism is a good or bad thing. It is done to unlock shareholder value, which is really the pure and the good intentions that are behind activism, because it is the shareholders that owns the company. And I think a key point to this, Mark, is when he's looking for these companies that would be a hit, if you will, as he's looking across the array of different stocks that are out there that are publicly traded. He's really looking for something that the market is currently pricing at a parity or lower than the book value and has some type of something that he could quickly liquidate in the balance sheet or it's already

Starting point is 00:23:01 liquid that he can then turn into a dividend payment or something that can be extracted out of that balance sheet. Is that a correct statement? The company can be trading at a premium, but if there's too much money on the balance sheet, for example, And it's not being distributed to shareholders. Management has no plan. It has no plan. Or they have dumb plans. And they start using the shareholders' money, which is what is on the balance sheet, making ridiculous acquisitions.

Starting point is 00:23:27 Paul can then come in, take a big chunk of the company's equity, and then gather you and I, who are other shareholders and hundreds of others and say, let's put pressure on them. And if they don't, you can see, we'll buy more stock and we'll replace the board and we'll take the control. So the CEOs of these big companies, the thing they fear most is not the company. It's like politicians. They fear most is losing their job. So, Mark, you mentioned the point where Carl was concerned about Carl. And then you have the shareholders, plural, and how sometimes they kind of benefit it most of the time. That's really not a consideration.

Starting point is 00:24:04 Even though he would use that from reading your book, he would use that as a lot of leverage to get support from the other share. shareholders in order to help him force his position against the management. Talk about that idea, just a little bit more so our audience understands what you're referencing and how this is really kind of a short duration play for Carl to basically extract the money out and then leave the scene, you know, smoking and no war chest left with the company. Carl is looking at other things, including why are they paying a dividend? Why is a dividend this low? and he suddenly starts making noise.

Starting point is 00:24:41 And now when Carl speaks, everybody listens. So the other shareholders say, hey, what's Carl talking about? Oh, this company, ABC company, you know, he's right. Why are they paying a dividend at 1.2% when they can clearly double or triple or quadruple that? So then you start to say, hey, yeah, like, you're right. And then he'll gather the other shareholders around to join him with the weight of their holdings in the company to petition for a, greater dividend. But at the same time, Carl is calling the CEO and saying, hey, buddy, I know you're a versed a winnie and moron at the top. I'm going to take your goddamn job. So I'm making playing

Starting point is 00:25:22 nice here, but I'm going to take your job. You're going to be without a job. You're not going to have a company. Yeah. And one of the concepts that I really like to throw out there is the concept of a proxified because as you're saying, Mark, he's basically taking over the management of the company and how that works it through a proxified so you will have the shareholders vote about the new board. And the way that he's doing that, really to convince the other shareholders that she vote for him, it's actually they were saying, I'm actually going to do this for free because like you, I'm a shareholder. I just want what's best for the shareholders.

Starting point is 00:25:56 And if you compare that to management that are getting juicy bonuses and perhaps haven't performed that well in the past, then ICON has been successful with that approach with a proxified approach several times in his career. It's totally amazing that you would think that management wants to basically dig in on their position so much so that they would go to a shareholder that owns 10% of the company and say, hey, we're going to take money out of our retained earnings, sitting there in cash, and we're going to pay this to you to go away. That's totally nuts. Again, I disagree with you. Because if your view of the world is my power and role as CEO of this company is the

Starting point is 00:26:37 thing I value most. Yeah. And I've got this bully who may approve that. Yeah. Why wouldn't I pay him? So actually their view of the world was, I want to keep my job as CEO. I want my suite. I want my jet.

Starting point is 00:26:49 I want my money. I want everything. I want my power. And if I pay this guy with somebody else's money, which is your sharehold, money. Fifty million dollars to go away. Golden. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So

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Starting point is 00:30:20 Back to the show. Yep. And Carl was perfectly fine with the fact that that was really the other, all the other shareholders, let's say he has a 5% stake, the 95% of other people that own that company that have owned that company past tense. And he comes in, takes a quick position. And you talk about this in the book, I mean, two months on some of these deals that he was an equity holder.

Starting point is 00:30:43 Yeah. And he walks away with millions from the other shareholders that own the other part. It's funny in person because as investors, clearly we know about Kyle O'Icon and we talked about him several times on the podcast, but this is just very different reading Mark's book and how detail it is. And I think definitely things are a lot of interesting takeaways in terms of investing lessons, but I think that the funny stories and the anecdotes about how Kyle Icahn's personality is, I think that's something that's really hilarious.

Starting point is 00:31:15 So Mark, I've got to ask you, could you tell a. funny story, just something that you experience in person or something you know a by-coll icon icon that you would like to share with the audience. There's so many, but I'll pick this one. He asked me to co with him one day to meet pilots at TWA. He wanted concessions from them. So these guys were in a hotel in Manhattan, I think it was a Waldorf, I forget. It was 500 of these.

Starting point is 00:31:40 However, World War II vets, right? Guys who flew the whole war, fighter pilots, and they're spending the latter part of their careers flying around to the void jets. But they still have a fighter pilot in them. And they hate this guy. And Alta had never met him. So Carl dressed, he always, he had a Colombo, the old detective series. He had that sort of bumbling persona he'd put on.

Starting point is 00:32:05 He was never really dressed me nicely. It was like wrong tie, doll a shirt, a little disheveled. And he got up on the stage and they said, man, this is the guy that we're concerned about. We're going to win this one easily. and Carl doesn't say anything. He just stares at them for about 10 minutes. I'm literally talking 10 minutes. So this fighter pilots are there,

Starting point is 00:32:25 pissed as hell about this guy who owns CWA, who wants to reduce their wages. They serve their country, and they serve this TWA, and he wants to cut their wages. And he doesn't say anything, which is silence can sometimes be a great weapon. I didn't know what he's going to do.

Starting point is 00:32:40 He asked me to come with him. I didn't know he's going to do the sack. He reaches into his suit pocket, and he pulls out an egg. And he holds the egg in one hand. So if you can imagine an egg in a guy's palm, and he extends it out. The first thing he says is, guys, he points to the egg. This egg is you.

Starting point is 00:32:59 This is not a cooked egg. This is a raw egg. I've been carrying around my pocket. So this egg is you. These five fingers is me. If you don't agree to the concessions, me squeezes you and breaks the egg. I don't mind ruining this suit. So as we start this negotiation, let me tell you where it's going to end.

Starting point is 00:33:19 You agree or I squashed the egg? And that was his opening scene. But that was his opening, but again, because he doesn't bluff. Yeah. Yeah. He had told me, I'm going to say something to the process and really disturb them, but I'm going to go through with it. If I have to replace them, no matter what I have to do, this is not going to be a bluff. So here's an interesting thing that I'm thinking about, Mark.

Starting point is 00:33:42 So he doesn't really care if the entire world hates him either. No. He doesn't care at all. There is no world. There is no world. He just tell me, Mark, think of the word fair. There's no such thing as fair. Artificially manufactured work. He says when two people sit down to a negotiate,

Starting point is 00:34:00 this is a very instrumental part to your listeners, his negotiating style at how you go into a negotiation. Two guys sit down in a business deal. There's $100 on the tail. everybody else who sits at the table says we're going to find some way to divvy up this $100, right? I'm going to get some and the other guys and get just as a matter what percentage one gets and the other gets. Carl always said to me, no, I want every one of those $100,000 bills. I don't want to be fair.

Starting point is 00:34:30 I don't want you to get anything. There's no reason to be fair. There's no reward for fairness. You do fair with your kids. Business in war, is that fair in war? There really is no fair. People don't think I'm just some hard-ass, but I'm not. I mean, I have kids that I adore.

Starting point is 00:34:48 I've been married 41 years to one of a woman. I want to be very fair to my employees. Always done that. But I understand what he's saying. But Mark, I look at it this way. I look at the world as being very reciprocal. So if I have a deal with somebody that I'm never going to see again in my entire life, then I guess you could take that approach.

Starting point is 00:35:08 But I guess I see the world through a completely different lens in that every single action that I put out into this universe is going to come back to me in some way, shape, or form, maybe not the form that I expect. And so I look at a guy like Carl, yeah, he has material wealth beyond anyone's comprehension. But at the end of the day, like, it doesn't seem like he really has too many friends. And then the question is, so what's it all about? And I think that your quote that you were saying for the one hour documentary, you said it was with Bloomberg that is like, what's his legacy? Well, he has no legacy.

Starting point is 00:35:44 He hasn't really created anything here. And on a friend's thing, I saw all the time that when we, like, when we're on beach with his girlfriend, my wife, like, he was always counting, you know, who paid for breakfast, who paid for lunch, you know. And he's a billionaire. He was a billionaire. I don't want anything to him, Carl. I didn't want anything from him at all except his company, which was exhilarating.

Starting point is 00:36:05 But he was a billionaire at this point. Yeah, he had one point a billion. He says, well, this is my money. is my army and I need my army around it. That's one of the great quotes about how Carl views the world. Without the money, you can be brash as you want, but you can't threaten CEOs if you can't go buy their stock. So this is a question I got to ask because I know everyone in the audience is wondering this. Do you still talk to Carl? Do you still have a relationship with him after the book and everything else? We had a relationship after the book for quite a while. When he got divorced from

Starting point is 00:36:40 Leba, who he was married to when I was most of the early part of my relationship with him, who was a beautiful Czechoslovakian ballerina. They didn't get along. After the divorce, he gave her the Bedford estate, part of the settlement.

Starting point is 00:36:56 He left Bedford, and we saw each other after he left Bedford, but then we never had an argument or anything like that. It just dissipated. He kind of moved to a different geographical location, and you're not really Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And was he a good tennis player?

Starting point is 00:37:13 So he never won. And he always wanted to play for money. And I knew that I, with anybody else, I'd be just walking home with extra $5,000. But I knew if Carl has money and he's going to find some way to pull it off. Oh my gosh. All right, Mark. Well, this interview was just so enlightening to capture really his personality and who he is. Because, I mean, you see him on TV.

Starting point is 00:37:38 You see him saying different things about the market now, which I know he's an enormous bear. He has these videos saying he's a bear on the market. When you pull into his publicly traded company, which is IEP, and you look at his positioning, he's short. He's over 100% short on the market. So for me, when I look at that and he's saying things vocally, I know the vocal part, would you hear him saying on the news, you really can't really trust or realize that that's legitimate. But I think when you look at his positions that he's filing on his 10 Q's and his 10 Ks, that's truly his position. So let me hear your take on that. He's not going to say to anybody, this is what I'm going to do, until it benefits him for you to know and you act like a puppet going to direction.

Starting point is 00:38:23 I wouldn't be surprised if he's a million long positions because I always find that what Carl says publicly is diametrically opposite to what he's doing. Wow. Really. And it's not evil, it's just his MO. And he doesn't even almost realize it. It's just like, it's so baked into him. It's so baked into him. You got trained as a pilot.

Starting point is 00:38:44 You knew what to do when you saw lightning. He was trained, right? He was trained by his DNA, act in a certain way, his DNA being primary. So he just instinctively, I'll end with this and say one more thing. He instinctively fools everybody most of the time. Wow, that's really interesting and something that we probably need to look out for in financial media and in general. Okay, let me just shift gears here before we wrap up this episode. Mark, one of the questions that we always like to ask a guest is if they have a great book they recommend.

Starting point is 00:39:19 And, you know, this might be a book about entrepreneurship because we know that you have your own business or it might be finance or investing in general, more activism kind of. literature, do you have anything that has really influenced your way of thinking? Actually, I'm reading a book right now that's the best book I ever read about how someone starts an entrepreneurial way, a very, very, very, very successful service business and becomes very wealthy doing it, which is called, I'm reading it now, Powerhouse. It's a story of CAA Creative Artist Agency and Michael Olitz. It's just recently out. It's the best book I've ever read about how does somebody grow.

Starting point is 00:39:59 a service business and become, I don't know what all this is worth, over 500 million, maybe a billion, and built a really amazing company. It's just fascinating. That sounds awesome. So, Mark, I want to give the opportunity to you now to give our audience a handoff to the books. I know you've written multiple books. Please name those books. We're going to then have a link to those in our show notes. So for anybody that's listening to this, if they want to go to any of these and they can't remember the titles or whatever. They can just click on those links that we're going to have in the show notes. But I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about some of the products and things that you've put out there so that everyone knows how they can learn more about you.

Starting point is 00:40:37 So I think the best thing to do is really to go to your marketing sucks.com and or go to Amazon and just log in books by Mark Stevens. And you'll see all of my books. There's a number of Mark Stevens, but I usually come up number one. You see the books there, but the books I'm proud of stuff is King Icon and Your Marketing Sucks. Awesome. Mark, thank you so much for your time. I know our audience is going to get a real kick out of some of this discussion. This was amazing, but we really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks so much. Enjoyed it a lot. Okay, guys, that was all we had for this week's episode. We'll see each other again next week. Thanks for listening to The Investors Podcast. To listen to more shows or access to the tools discussed on the show, be sure to visit www. www.com. Submit your questions or request a guest appearance to The Investors Podcast by going to www.

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP 104 : Billionaire Carl Icahn - A Rare Look Behind the Scenes w/ Mark Stevens, author of King Icahn (Business Podcast)

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