Brett Icahn to Rejoin His Father’s Firm
Carl Icahn’s son to lead new investment team and join Icahn Enterprises Board
Carl Icahn is finally ready to loosen the reins on his investment empire.
His son, Brett, is rejoining Icahn Enterprises IEP +0.87% LP, which he left in 2016, the firm said Thursday. He will manage a new team of portfolio managers, buy a $10 million stake in the firm and join its board as part of his 84-year-old father’s succession plan.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the deal was in the works and reported Wednesday that such a deal was imminent.
The elder Mr. Icahn will for now remain in charge of the publicly traded firm, which hasn’t managed outside money for years and has a market value of roughly $11 billion. But the firm said it would adopt a plan for Brett Icahn to succeed his father as chairman and chief executive of its investment segment either in seven years or sooner at his father’s request.
Brett’s team will pitch ideas to Carl, who will have the final say and require Brett to invest a small amount of his own money into each investment. Rather than oversee a set amount of capital, the amount of money managed by Brett’s team will depend on their investment ideas.
The agreement was as extensively negotiated as some of Mr. Icahn’s activist campaigns. The two men spent roughly two years on-and-off hashing out details of Brett’s return, a process that moved slowly in part because the younger man didn’t see many opportunities in a strong market.
Brett Icahn, who is 41 and decidedly more reserved than his famous father, has already hired three portfolio managers to help him look for the firm’s next activist targets. He said in an interview last year that he plans to employ his father’s favored approach of pushing companies to make changes designed to boost their stock prices, though he hasn’t ruled out friendly bets too.
Brett previously spent nearly 15 years at Icahn Enterprises, beginning as a low-level analyst in 2002 and later overseeing the firm’s Sargon Portfolio, which at one time totaled around $7 billion and included profitable investments in companies such as Netflix Inc. and Apple Inc. Over those years the annualized return was a market-beating 27%. He stepped away for the past several years but remained a consultant.
Mr. Icahn has been laying low since moving to Florida from New York around a year ago. The billionaire hasn’t publicly taken a major new position since last year, though he is still known to spend late nights and weekends working. Since Covid-19 began spreading around the country in mid-March, he has mainly stayed at his beachfront estate on Miami’s exclusive Indian Creek island with his wife Gail, their dogs, and a small staff that brings him a nightly “quarantini” cocktail after tennis.
The pandemic altered Mr. Icahn’s plans for some investments and forced him to abandon others. As the coronavirus roiled markets and helped send oil prices tumbling in mid-March, Mr. Icahn bought an even larger piece of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and later that month hammered out a deal to get seats on the oil-and-gas producer’s board. The company, struggling with the untimely acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum Corp., slashed its dividend and its stock has continued to fall.