About a month and a half ago, Carl Icahn and I went to dinner at Tse Yang, an upscale Chinese restaurant in New York. Icahn, the corporate raider turned activist investor, came blustering through the dimly lit restaurant about 20 minutes late, grabbed one of the waiters — they all know him — and ordered a martini.
“It’s been a very long day,” Icahn sighed as he slumped into his chair.
It is tough being the Superman of Shareholders, rescuing investors from villainous corporate boards. Or at least that’s the way Icahn, who is 72, sees himself these days.
“It’s awful the way all these entrenched boards act,” he grumbled in his raspy voice as he slurped shark fin soup. “Someone’s got to stand up and say something. That’s what I do. And maybe I’ll make a little money at it.”
If we had been having dinner last week, he might have been talking about his latest mark: Yahoo.
Icahn, who doesn’t even use a personal computer, jumped headfirst into the Microsoft-Yahoo saga by mounting a proxy contest to oust the board members of Yahoo. He has proposed replacing them with his new pals, including Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks; Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School who wrote the book “Pay Without Performance”; and Frank Biondi Jr., the former chief executive of Viacom and Universal Studios whom Icahn unsuccessfully tried to install as Time Warner’s chief executive two years ago.
But make no mistake: Icahn, who has been called a “savior” and “sinner” in the same breath, does not want actually to win the proxy contest he has started — not if winning means taking seats on the board.
He has no intention of running Yahoo himself. His intention was to bring Microsoft, which withdrew its $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo,…