Finally, someone has gotten to the bottom of the most pressing question of our age: why isn't Carl Icahn blogging? Last month he announced that he was starting a blog at The Icahn Report. But so far it's been a disapointment. There are no posts and repeated trips to the blog reveal just a dour picture of Icahn and the promise: “blog coming soon.”

Fortunately, Dane Hamilton and Megan Davies at Reuters have uncovered what's delaying Icahn's blogging.

At a meeting last night, Icahn explained that he’s not suffering from writers’ block, but said his lawyers are stopping him. ”Every night, I write for an hour and they tear it up,” said Icahn with a sardonic laugh.

Icahn, who has a history of hiring lawyers away from top-notch firms so he doesn’t have to pay astronomical New York law firm fees, might want to consider hiring new lawyers?

Icahn loses battle to his own lawyers [Reuters]

'Portfolio' shares the Ichan theory, which he shared yesterday at the World Business Forum, to a room of 750 CEOs. Brilliant and ballsy!

Many college kids seek refuge in their fraternities or clubs (when Icahn tells it, "sorority" is conspicuously omitted) for a friendly face. Without fail, the president of the club, who never seems to open a book, is there to cheer them up. He's a nice and friendly guy, the kind of guy you want around to make you feel better with a beer or a game of pool.

Not surprisingly, that guy goes into business. He's never the smartest guy in the room, but he's likable and he's a survivor. He moves up the corporate ladder, without a single original idea that might make his boss feel threatened by his potential.

Eventually, he gets to be the #2 guy at the company. He's a little dumber than the C.E.O., but the board likes him, so he eventually gets to be C.E.O.

Of course, he assigns a #2 who is a little dumber than he is. "And eventually, we're going to have all morons running our companies," Icahn concluded. "We might not be that far off from that right now."

How Did THIS Guy Get in Charge? [Portfolio]

Carl Icahn and Hank Greenberg don’t play golf. And they don’t like executives who do. On Wednesday we went to the Wall Street Journal’s Deals and Dealmakers conference, and while everyone else was frantically scribbling down what Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said about globalization—hint: he’s for it—we found ourselves more interested in the slightly less, well, earth moving details.

Golf—arguably the most popular pastime in America—didn’t score well with two headliners.

“I hate golf,” former AIG chairman Greenberg told the assembled crowd of investment bankers. “I play tennis. It doesn’t take long. Then I get back to work.”

After his talk we asked Greenberg about the popularity of golf among corporate executive.

“A lot of people like to get away from their work,” he said. “You have to wonder about whether they like what they’re doing.”

Icahn, the legendary corporate raider turned shareholder activist, was even more dismissive of golf. For him golf players symbolized the kind of clubby, chummy corporate executive he thinks is dragging down American business.

“These guys would rather play golf, slap each other on the back,” he said. “I want a guy running a company who sits in his tub at night thinking about the challenges he faces. The guy who can’t let it go. The focused guy.”

Yesterday we noted that Carl Icahn is not just short golf. He also tried to short Blackstone just after it's IPO.

Carl Icahn tried to short the stock of the Blackstone group immediately after its IPO, the billionaire "corporate raider" told an audience at a conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal.

"I tried to borrow the stock but I couldn't do it in time," Icahn said.

After he spoke to the conference, Icahn asked reporters not to print the story of his attempt to short Blackstone. Although he had bashed executives and told the audience that private equity had peaked, Blackstone was one of the few companies Icahn discussed specifically.

It’s a little upsetting to find out that one’s publicly professed deity includes the bit “A thief stole my wife's credit card, but I didn't report it. Guess why? The thief spends less than my wife!" in his set of “favorite” jokes. The chafing is slightly salved when reminded that the fallen god has previously told adversaries, “You’ll never work on Wall Street again” and “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” purposely “mangles” people names, and once told Ken Moelis, chief of investment banking at UBS that he was a “Mollusk.” But that’s nothing compared to the sunshine on one’s face that is this:

As those of you who read Opening Bell already know, Carl Icahn lost his bid for a seat on Motorola’s board yesterday. He’d previously written a letter to shareholders describing the current board as “passive and reactive” and detailed its failure to “steer management in the right direction.” Icahn failed to win the support of large funds, but was confident that he’d sent a “wake-up call.” One wonders if it was a RAZR phone set to ring at 6am? (Our's never actually wakes us up because: 1. It’s not loud enough. 2. We don't use it anymore because our fourth in a row broke).

Everyone here is a little (a lot) depressed that our favorite hybrid of Walter Matthau’s grumpiness and Philip Goldstein’s particular brand of testicularity didn’t get his way, but we’re trying to suppress our feelings of hopelessness and look on the bright side: Icahn will rise again and there’s going to be a Wall Street sequel starring Michael Douglas and (fingers crossed) Ben Affleck.

In honor of these upcoming events, we’ll be playing a round of our favorite game today: Icahn or Gekko. First person to get all correct wins a copy of Jack Welch’s Winning: The Answers signed by Johnathan Fess (the down and out broker who hangs out near our lobby begging for change).

Let’s play.

1. “I have been a professional investor for almost forty years. I seek out companies that I believe are undervalued by the market -- I seek them out and I invest. ”
2. “The Carnegies, the Mellons, the man who built this industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake.”
3. “My significant stock ownership is many times that of the entire board.”
4. “Today management has no stake in the company.”
5. “Whether it's 100 shares or 100 million -- we invest in the hope and belief that the market will recognize that overlooked value and we'll prosper.”
6. "In the last seven deals that I have been involved with there were 2.5m stockholders who have made a pre-tax profit of $12 billion."
7. My activist investments over the past 2 years in companies [...] have seen their stock prices add billions in market value for all shareholders.
8. “Over the past 6 months, on this board's watch, almost $20 billion of market value, of stockholder value, of your money, has disappeared.”
9. Altogether these guys sitting up there own a total of less than 3%...
10. “I am convinced that significant stockholder representation in the boardroom, even by a single director, is absolutely necessary at this troubled company.”
11. “You own [the company], the stockholders, and you are being royally screwed over by these bureaucrats with their steak lunches, golf and hunting trips, corporate jets, and golden parachutes!”

Bonus: Identify the speaker: "You motherfuckers aren't going to get away with this."

Icahn loses bid for Motorola board seat [BusinessWeek]
Icahn Appears to Fall Short at Motorola [NYT]
Icahn Fails to Win Motorola Board Seat [WSJ]
Even for a Billionaire Like Icahn, Life Isn’t Always a Breeze [Deal Journal]

Dear Time Warner Shareholders,

I’m not going to pretend to say I’m sorry to say this—it’s so trite, so phony, so somewhat conciliatory, so just not me, Carl Icahn—so I’m just going to say it, without pretense: I told you bitches so. Yeah, that felt good.

-Carl

More Talk of a Time Warner Revamp [Dealbook]

Carl Icahn really does seem to be in full-out barbarian mode with his bid for WCI Communications. Recall that words like "corporate raider" and "barbarian" were coined, for the most part, by defenders of corporate management against outsiders like Icahn who sought to oust the managers. We have no doubt that something like these terms must have been going through the heads of WCI's management when they "declined to comment' after Icahn tears them a new posterior orifice.

Mr. Icahn has also signaled his unhappiness with WCI's current management. "While clearly now is not the right time to sell, in my opinion, Mr. Starkey [WCI Chief Executive Jerry Starkey] and the current board are not qualified to navigate WCI through the difficult industry conditions that lie ahead," Mr. Icahn said. WCI said it will review Mr. Icahn's bid but declined to comment on his criticism.

That line about "will review Mr. Icahn's bid but declined to comment on his criticism" is just about one of the most effective summaries of humiliation via fiduciary duty we've ever scene.

Is Icahn's WCI Bid the Start Of Home-Builder Buyouts? [Wall Street Journal]

DealBook reported this morning that Carl Ichan has "made clear" that he will try to destroy WCI Communities (or at least its board of directors) in order to save it. There's no source named in the DealBook story, no links to an underlying news story. But you should probably believe it for two reasons. One the same sort of thing is being reported all over the place. Two, we've seen DealBook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin in the same room as Icahn. Those two are, as they say, tight. If DealBook says battle mode, it's very possible that Andrew and Carl went to see "300" together this weekend and Carl came out looking for a fight.

Carl C. Icahn is getting tough with WCI Communities. The billionaire financier said Tuesday he would offer to buy the residential homebuilder for $22 per share — and if the company resisted, he made it clear that he would try to throw out the board and get the deal done regardless. WCI is just one of several companies that Mr. Icahn has been prodding in recent months in what has been an especially active period for the activist investor.

In many cases, he has gotten what he wanted. He successfully pushed for a breakup of Temple Inland and put his allies onto the board of Cyberonics

Icahn, in Battle Mode, Offers to Buy Homebuilder [DealBook]

Among the gems from BusinessWeek's profile of Carl Icahn is the fact that the corporate raider activist shareholder has 22 phones in his East Hampton phone. The reason for all those phones?

He often works until 2:30 a.m., and has 22 phones at his East Hampton (N.Y.) home to help him stay in touch at all hours.

Someone really ought to tell Carl that they totally make phone that work for like the whole day. If he's burning through one an hour, he really need to speak to his telecom provider.

Just Don't Call Him A Raider [BusinessWeek]

(And don't feel bad about invitees already calling tonight's bash The Poor Man's Schwarzman. He might've had jumbo sized shrimp puffs and an ice sculpture of Dick Parsons, but jumbo sized shrimp puffs and an ice sculpture of Dick Parsons aren't John Carney serenading you with "Happy Birthday, Mr. (Activist) Investor," now are they?)

Our ears always perk up whenever someone mentions that "management" is backing a bid by corporate raider activist investor Carl Icahn. Because, well, you kind of have to wonder if "management" knows who Icahn is. As part of his bid package to acquire Lear—which the troubled auto-parts company announced this morning it was officially accepting—did Icahn have to specify exactly which of members of management he regards as morons and frat-boys?

Interestingly, the Icahn's buyout agreement reportedly contains a "go shop" provision that gives the company 45-days to consider competing bids. It's not clear yet whether anyone expects this to actually happen. There certainly are some Lear shareholders—even some other "activist investors"—who think Icahn's bid is too low. But for the most part "go shop" provisions are CYA moves—meant to provide legal cover against shareholder lawsuits claiming that the company was undersold: "Hey, we waited around for a month and a half and no-one else wanted this thing!"

And you better believe that when you are accepting a bid that is more than four bucks below where your stock is currently trading, those CYA provisions are pretty important.

Lear Accepts Carl Icahn's $2.8 Billion Cash Offer [Bloomberg]

Roddy Boyd today reveals some interesting-ish similarities between two seemingly dissimilar investors—Stevie-boy Cohen and Carl Icahn.

Rabble-rouser extraordinaire Carl Icahn has found a wingman in fellow billionaire Steve Cohen when Icahn has acquired stakes in some of his most recent high-profile targets.

In the past few months, filings detailing Icahn's headline-grabbing investments in WCI Communities and Take-Two Interactive Software have been followed by disclosures by Cohen's $6 billion SAC Capital about investments in the same companies.

The coincidence has raised eyebrows in the hedge fund community because the two billionaire hedge fund titans could not have more different investment styles.

Just how closely the two men are linked philosophically will be put to the test with Take-Two: The Post has learned that over the past few trading days, Icahn sold his entire 2.9-million share stake, making him the second big shareholder in the past month to dump shares in the videogame maker. Glenview Capital is rumored to have reduced its nearly 3 million-share stake.

Horrible imagery of Cohen and Icahn being each other’s “wingmen” aside, what does all this mean?

a.Just that Cohen and Icahn share a mutual love of, among other things, Grand Theft Auto.

b.Cohen sees Icahn as a father figure and wants to emulate daddy in every way possible.

c.Icahn—flirting with senility—has run out of investing ideas of his own and now simply waits to see what the younger, more virile Cohen’s doing and then quickly does the same, adding in a dose of “You’re a moron” and “I could do this job better than you, I could do this job better than all of you!” for good measure and to throw people off his game.

d.The two, tripping on mushrooms and freaking out after hallucinating visions of Tom Hudson awash in pirate garb and Gretchen Morgenstern in some sort of mermaid getup one afternoon, came up with a crazy scheme that would “bring Wall Street to its feet,” to be revealed at a future date.

ICAHN-OCLASTS [NYP]

Carl Icahn, best known for waging a near-lethal war against the wastefulness of jet-ownership, cautions that a decline in the dollar will cause serious problems for U.S. stocks, going so far as to comment that a slide would “really blow up” the market’s four-year rally. The “activist investor” said in an interview yesterday that “a lot of these earnings are because these companies are able to buy a lot of goods abroad,” which is why a fall in the dollar would be less than desirable, Bloomberg reports. Icahn also commented that Federated Department Stores Inc. would be the target of a possible leveraged buyout. Of additional note is that Icahn complimented Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons on his work, stating “I’m happy with it.” Not exactly exuberance, but considering Icahn’s previous accolades for Parsons (and CEOs in general), including but not limited to RP being a “moron,” we’d say it’s a step in the right direction. Expect flowers and candy, early next week.

Icahn Warns U.S. Stock Gains Are Vulnerable to Slide in Dollar [Bloomberg]

John "$40 Million Man" Mack isn't the only one having a good day. Carl Icahn and Bruce Wasserstein are probably pretty pleased with life this morning, too: Time Warner shares were up over 1.3% yesterday, closing at $21.65, a high not seen since 2002.

Icahn, who owns 55 million Time Warner shares, is now up over $200 million since waging a contentious proxy fight against chief Dick Parsons earlier this year.

Wasserstein and Lazard, which took big hits for advising Icahn on his failed proxy fight in February, is set to rake in over $28 million in fees if the stock stays at this level and more if it goes higher.

Lazard gets paid about $6.5 million for every $1 that Time Warner shares rise above $18.

Happy Hanukkah, indeed.

CARL'S GOOD TIME [NY Post]

It’s totally cute. Yesterday Time Warner CEO Dick Parson’s was all over Carl Icahn, crediting the high profile investor with helping Time Warner get in touch with their shareholders and convincing the company to increase its share buyback plan.

Reuters reports on Parson's comments at the Reuters Media Summit:

"When someone accumulates even 3 or 4 percent of your stock and starts making the kind of noises Carl was making, it causes you to get in touch with your other shareholders," said Parsons. "There was a sense that you could use more of your capacity to buy back the stock."

Parsons said he's not worried about another assault by Icahn. "Someone asked me if he is happy. I'm not sure if that's a word I would use. I'm sure he is happier."

Icahn, for his part, said he is happy, now that Time Warner stock has risen over the past several months.

"I'm happy concerning Time Warner," said Icahn in a phone interview on Tuesday. "The hedge fund make over $200 million and to me, that's a lot better than having a debilitating proxy fight."

"Dick kept the promises he made to me and that makes me happy," Icahn added. "He promised to cut expenses and do a huge buyback.

"We helped facilitate some of those changes. I think some of those things would not have happened to the extent that they did if we hadn't been around," said Icahn, adding that he "got some criticism for backing off" and dropping the campaign for a full breakup.

Reuters has the whole thing up on an audio file that you can listen to here.

Time Warner CEO gives Icahn some credit [Reuters]

This morning Carl Icahn woke up for the first time as chairman of biotech drug maker ImClone Systems—a company with one product, falling sales, a rocky relationship with its marketing partner Bristol-Myers Squibb, no chief executive and a troubled history that involves insider trading, Martha Stewart and a founder serving a seven-year sentence in an upstate New York federal prison.

And, presumably, he woke up with a smile. This is exactly the situation Icahn has been struggling to create for the last few months, criticizing the companies choice of executives and threatening the board with a proxy fight for the election of directors. So is the fun part now over? We can’t help but suspect that for Carl Icahn, somewhere deep in his heart, it’s all the fun part.

Icahn Named ImClone Chairman; Profit Rises 85 Percent [Bloomberg]

When Carl Icahn was pursing Time Warner, we kept hearing that Icahn didn't really understand the business--or businesses, as it were. (And we couldn't help but think that Icahn's assertion that TWX was big and bloated and might function more efficiently in smaller pieces wasn't exactly a rocket-science observation.) But Dick Parsons directly suggests as much in an interview with The Oxford Press, while indirectly suggesting that the shareholder base as a whole understands the company better than Icahn:

Our shareholders who have been with the company a long time. They understand its strengths, they understand the industry. ... I'm not sure that Carl really did. While I would be wrong to say there isn't a lot of frustration, the whole media sector right now is in a little bit of a malaise. No one who really has been around this space for any period of time believed that Carl had any answers that were novel or likely to result in the stock moving up.

Conversations with Dick Parsons [The Oxford Press]