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Do you know who this man is? If you do, then you’re probably a smart, worldly Bro who (a. works in finance and/or (b. keeps up with current events beyond whatever dumb shit Kim Kardashian is doing today. This is 79-year-old Queens-born billionaire badass Carl Icahn. A hedge fund manager by trade, he is currently the 31st richest person in the world, according to Forbes. Since entering Wall Street in the 60s, he’s amassed an incredible $21 billion fortune, earning a reputation in the ’80s for being an activist investor and a corporate takeover raider.
Yesterday he just got a little richer. Actually, $2 billion richer.
Sold last of our $NFLX today. Believe $AAPL currently represents same opportunity we stated NFLX offered several years ago.
— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) June 24, 2015
“”Ichan bought 10% of Netflix in late 2012, according to Business Insider. Forbes says he spent $321 million for the stake in 2012. This was about a year after Netflix’s ill-conceived Qwikster disaster in 2011 and Ichan thought at the time that another company — presumably a big content company — would acquire the subscription streaming service. But then Netflix became hot with original offerings like Orange Is The New Black and House of Cards, causing subscription and revenue (and the share price) to explode.
Ready to kick yourself for not buying Netflix stock a couple years ago? Get ready… Queue the chart!
Ichan bought his Netflix stock at a trading price of $58 a share in 2012, according to BI. Yesterday morning, when Ichan announced the sale, it hovered up to $700 a share. It currently is trading at $658.13. That’s over a 1000% increase in Ichan’s original investment, cashing him out at about $1.9 billion. Here’s the thing though — He’s dumped quite a few Netflix shares over the years, when the company was up 457%. Had he held on to those shares until yesterday, he would have made $3.8 billion, according to Forbes:
If the mogul had held onto all the shares, Icahn’s initial position of $321 million in 2012 (10% of Netflix at the time) could be worth $3.8 billion. His son Brett Icahn, who first brought to the deal to his father’s attention, wanted to keep all their Netflix shares while the billionaire investor decided to cut back, slicing their positions in half in 2013. “When you are lucky and/or smart enough to have made a total return of 457 percent in only 14 months it is time to take some of the chips off the table,” the elder Icahn wrote at the time.
Ichan’s hedge fund currently owns about 53 million shares of Apple, worth of $6.6 billion. But don’t look for him to spend all that new cash on flashy new toys: He sold his yacht years ago because he “got bored spending time on it,” discovering that “for him, happiness means pursuing his activism actively.” And he’s worried about how hot the market is right now:
1/2 I believe the market is extremely overheated – especially high yield bonds.
— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) June 24, 2015
2/2 If more respected investors had warned about the market in ’07, we might have avoided the crisis in ’08.
— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) June 24, 2015
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All in the game, yo. Dude know how to pick ’em.