King Icahn

Unauthorized biography. Icahn tried to stop it and then sat down and talked to Stevens at length anyway, which is a very Icahn sequence of events.

You get the early years, the options arbitrage and the first raids, while he was still working the machinery out. The part worth the price is watching how he uses structure. He is almost never the guy with the most money in the room. He worked out early, around Hammermill, that what makes a small position dangerous is not the size of it, it is whether the other side believes you can finance the next step.

Nobody taught me more about the difference between a price and a deal. Anybody can agree on a price. What happens after the price is where the money is: who controls decisions, what happens when somebody wants out, how the thing gets valued and who picked the valuer.

I draft that structure myself now, before a lawyer touches it. Whoever writes the first version sets the default.