‘Icahn: The Stressed Billionaire’ Overview: Proper on the Cash

To the uninitiated, the time period activist investor can sound as if a shareholder is out on Wall Road with a picket signal and a trigger. Carl C. Icahn, an activist investor par excellence, is a veteran of what the apply truly entails: shopping for a stake in an organization and pushing for adjustments in administration or technique. Above all, because the genial documentary portrait “Icahn: The Stressed Billionaire” explains, he’s dauntingly good at being profitable.

The octogenarian Icahn anchors this deft pocket biography, together with his interesting directness and dead-level stare, as he presides on the workplace and round the home. The Queens-raised son of a cantor and a trainer, Icahn has for many years focused companies like Tappan, Texaco and Apple, whereas in search of out undervalued shares.

The director, Bruce David Klein, neatly builds out Icahn’s battle tales when it comes to drawback fixing and negotiation, not mere bets. Icahn’s triumphs, in addition to his previous tangles with the Transport Staff Union and the hedge fund supervisor Invoice Ackman, create ready-made drama, whereas visits together with his household (and a wizardly synthesizer rating) sustain a sunny vibe.

However even for Icahn, a revered headline-maker who has taken the Giving Pledge, the profile generally is a little mushy. It blurs comparisons to company raiders in its rote account of the Eighties. The talking-head commentary is dominated by finance journalists (together with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Instances) and millionaires, with out at all times clarifying Icahn’s monetary maneuvers (or his political ones, reminiscent of his service below Donald Trump as a special adviser).

The attitude — whereas producing one thing eminently watchable — could strike some viewers as old style and incomplete.

Icahn: The Stressed Billionaire
Not rated. Working time 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on HBO Max.