Carl Icahn Quotes

If a company's stock is undervalued - as many managers believe theirs is - a repurchase may offer the best payoff of all.

By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption.

The activists play the balance sheet by selling a division to buy back stock and leveraging the balance sheet and buying back more stock.

United spent $1.2 billion repurchasing shares in 2015 and plans to spend $1.5 billion on share repurchases in the first quarter of 2016. We have a lot of positive momentum, but this is just the beginning.

A buyback is itself a special kind of acquisition, made at prices that are typically a bargain compared with those a company must pay for an outside purchase.

When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options.

My guess is that Apple won't just pass Microsoft in market capitalization, but will go way beyond it.

If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.

I don't like stock buybacks. I think if a company has the money to buy their stock back, then they should take that and increase the dividends. Send it back to the stockholder. Let them invest their money again from the dividends.

When investors, particularly investment bankers, talk about splitting up companies, there's a lot of discussion about multiple expansion, and the reality is multiple expansion is an outcome, not a strategy.

I think most CEOs think their stock is undervalued, probably.

The day I was announced as CEO, I think the stock dropped another 20%.

[Corporate] takeovers are for the public good, but that's not why I do it. I do it to make money.

At the end of the day, dividends are not being paid with margins; dividends are paid with earnings per share.

I have long believed the corporate world is plagued by poor capital allocation decisions.

Some managements do not even think of buybacks as an option. The idea of shrinking their equity base repels them. Their inclination instead is to get bigger, and this often leads them to pay rich prices for acquisitions that never earn their keep.

If you look at Apple... They are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, and they go out and borrow money against their overseas bank accounts. This makes no sense.

Our first use of cash is invested organically, secondly returning values our shareholders - roughly 100 percent free cash flow. And then thirdly, mergers, acquisitions, partnerships that complement our organic strategy. We are going to continue down that path.

It was an important and daring decision to open Eletrobras capital to private investors.

If you were a corporation needing financial services, and I can give you something better, faster, and cheaper across 12 products as opposed to eight, that's business. I'm doing it because I'm serving you; I'm not doing it because I want to be universal.

Driving stock up from one day to the next is not what we are about. We are about building a good company and performing for the long term. I know everyone says that, that sounds trite when I repeat it that way, but that is and has always been our attitude about our business. If we do the right things, the stock price will take care of itself, and our shareholders will be rewarded.

Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.

No CEO examining books today understands what the hell is going on.

On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.

Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.