Carl Icahn is somehow neither bitter nor angry over the fact that in the past ten years, he lost about $15 billion of his total wealth. The founder of Icahn Capital Management’s estimated net worth is now a measly $9.3 billion. The poor guy lost 60% of his net value – on paper – by betting against the American economy.
Apparently, Carl Icahn has been down on the economy ever since the crash of 2008. So, he has been making short bets, among other things. Now, in an interview with Financial Times, Carl Icahn admitted, “I obviously believed the market was in for great trouble. [But] the Fed injected trillions of dollars into the market to fight COVID and the old saying is true: ‘Don’t fight the Fed.’”
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One would think that a successful investor like him would have learned that a long time ago.
Well, at least he does know a few other things. Carl Icahn told the Financial Times about his deep losses, “I’ve always told people there is nobody who can really pick the market on a short-term or an intermediate-term basis. Maybe I made the mistake of not adhering to my own advice in recent years.”
“You never get the perfect hedge, but if I kept the parameters I always believed in…I would have been fine,” added Carl Icahn about learning from his mistakes.
But none of this has stopped him from being a pessimist on the future of the world economies.
“I still to some extent believe that this economy is not good and there are going to be problems ahead,” Carl Ichan said. “We are still hedged, but not to the extent we were.”
According to his official bio, Carl Icahn is a New York City native and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. After receiving a degree in philosophy from Princeton University in 1957, he attended medical school at New York University and then joined the Army.
In 1961 Carl Icahn began his career on Wall Street. He has gone on to become one of the most well-known and influential investors in America. In 1968, he formed Icahn & Co., a securities firm that focused on arbitrage and options trading. In 1978, he began taking very substantial and sometimes controlling positions in individual companies.
