Carl Icahn Tweets & The World Listens As he Takes His Final Profits From Netflix And Runs

Billionaire equity investor Carl Icahn takes his last profits from Netflix and runs… After once owning as many as five and a half million shares of the television movie streaming company, Icahn has just sold his last 1.4 million shares to clear a final profit, reportedly, of some $700 million on just these shares alone, which he sold for a total value of around $960 million.

Icahn proudly announced the sale last week on Twitter:

Sold last of our $NFLX today. Believe $AAPL currently represents same opportunity we stated NFLX offered several years ago.
— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) June 24, 2015

True to form Icahn continues to tout his latest favourite stock, which remains Apple as you can see in the tweet, and which he believes is undervalued. That is known as talking your book, which is legitimate, and it does not necessarily mean he his wrong either.

Just a year and a half ago Icahn had lost an earlier bet with his son Brett who had forecast continued increases in the value of Netflix. At the time Icahn had argued of the need to take some profits prudentially, which he has clearly continued to do despite losing the bet…

In the last three years Netflix’s share value in total has increased several times over, to its current $39 billion in total capitalization. In 2015 alone it has doubled since a late 2014 dip, and has been one of the S&P 500’s best performing shares so far this year. Last week, also Netflix announced a 7 for one stock split, which had been approved by its shareholders at their Annual General Meeting in May.

As its business has expanded in the US and become more mature, and facing more dangerous potential competitors, Netflix are now looking to invest for further growth by developing additional overseas markets for its web based television streaming service. This can certainly impact its overheads for a while one may imagine moving forward. The key for them to stay darlings of the investment business will therefore be to demonstrate consistent increases in subscriber growth – i.e. pretty much exactly the same story we used to hear from the mobile telephone companies, the equivalent favourite stocks in days now long gone by it would seem.

The new Netflix share split, which takes effect by way of a stock dividend on July 14th, for shareholders of record July 2nd is, actually, somewhat eerily, exactly similar to the one Apple also had engineered for itself a year ago. Since then Apple’s shares have gone up “only” by 41%.

Icahn continues to hold some 53 million shares of Apple, worth recently some $6.7 billion, according to Bloomberg Data so at least he is continuing to put his money where his mouth is.