- Tech billionaire Michael Dell this week attacked his old rival Carl Icahn.
- Dell mocked Icahn Enterprises’ falling stock price in a post on X.
- Shares of Icahn’s holding company have fallen 63% this year due to an attack by short-seller Hindenburg Research.
Michael Dell on Tuesday took aim at his old foe Carl Icahn and mocked the investment giant’s struggles this year in the latest twist in a decade-old feud between the two giants.
Shares of Icahn Enterprises, the holding company controlled by Dell’s longtime rival, have fallen 63% this year. The tech billionaire highlighted this by comparing the stock’s performance over the past decade to the benchmark S&P 500.
“Over the last 10 years, Icahn Enterprises’ stock was down 80.7%,” he said. post on x, “The S&P 500 was up 155.9%.”
“What is the opposite of play nice but win?” Dell added, referencing the title of his 2021 autobiography, where he criticized Icahn.
In May, short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report in which it revealed it was betting against Icahn’s company. It says the activist investor deliberately inflated asset values and ran his business empire using “Ponzi-like economic structures”.
As Dell reported, the stock has fallen 54% since then, bringing its losses over the past 10 years to more than 80%.
The billionaires’ feud began in 2013, when Icahn tried to block Dell from taking the PC company he founded private at a $24 billion valuation. Icahn built up the stake and made a counter-offer, forcing Dell to ultimately raise its bid to $13.88 per share.
Icahn later described Dell’s board as “dictatorial” – and Dell responded by saying that Icahn was “a bad guy” with “no moral boundaries”.
Tensions arose again five years later, when Icahn sued Dell in an attempt to thwart his efforts to go public. Icahn said Dell and its private equity backers were using “scare tactics” to get VMware shareholders to accept the buyout offer.
Again, the company was forced to raise its offer from 60 cents on the dollar to 80 cents on the dollar to secure the deal and take Dell Technologies public once again.
Source: markets.businessinsider.com
