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American businessman and financier (born 1936)
Carl Celian Icahn is an American businessman and investor. He is the founder and controlling shareholder of Icahn Enterprises, a public company and diversified conglomerate holding company based in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. Icahn's business model is to take large stakes in companies that he believes will appreciate from changes to corporate policy; Icahn then pressures management to make the changes that he believes will benefit shareholders, and him. Widely regarded as one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time and one of the greatest investors on Wall Street, he was one of
Icahn was born on February 16, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family. He was raised in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens in New York City, where he attended Far Rockaway High School. His father, Michael Icahn, a "sworn atheist", was a cantor, and later a substitute teacher. His mother, Bella (née Schnall) also worked as a schoolteacher. Icahn graduated from Princeton University in 1957 with an B.A. in philosophy after completing a senior thesis titled "The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning." He entered New York University School of Medicine, but dropped out after two years to join the Army Reserve.
In the summer of 1978, Icahn, then 41 years old, met Liba Trejbal, a 28-year-old ballerina from the former Czechoslovakia. She became pregnant 8 months later and Icahn offered to marry her if she signed a prenuptial agreement. They were married in March 1979. In October 1993, Liba filed for divorce and sued to invalidate the prenuptial agreement, claiming she signed it under duress due to the pregnancy. The divorce was settled in July 1999. They have two children, Brett Icahn and Michelle Celia Icahn Nevin. His nephew is Rick Schnall. In 1999, Icahn married his longtime assistant and former broker, Gail Golden. She has two children from a previous marriage. The couple separated in 2025.
Icahn Stadium on Randall's Island in New York City is named after him, as is the Carl C. Icahn Center for Science and Icahn Scholar Program at Choate Rosemary Hall, a prep school in Connecticut. This organization pays for tuition, room and board, books, and supplies for 10 students every year for four years (freshman–senior), an endowment valued at about $400,000 per annum. Icahn made a substantial contribution to his alma mater, Princeton University, to fund a genomics laboratory which bears his name, the Carl C. Icahn Laboratory at the university's Institute for Integrated Genomics. He also made large contributions to Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, of which he is a trustee, which in return named a building the Icahn Medical Institute designed by Davis Brody Bond, and also, in 2013, renamed the Mount Sinai School of Medicine as the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The genomics institute led by Brian Brown, PhD, was renamed the Icahn Genomics Institute. His foundation, the Children's Rescue Fund, built Icahn House in The Bronx, a 65-unit complex for homeless families consisting of single pregnant women and single women with children, and operates Icahn House East and Icahn House West, both of which are homeless shelters in New York City. In 2010, Icahn joined the Giving Pledge list, pledging to give away more than half his fortune. Icahn is an activist investor, and has worked with the Humane Society of the United States in pushing McDonald's to achieve its pledge to end the sourcing of pork produced with gestation crates.
Biographical detail compiled from Wikipedia and Wikidata, which are edited openly and may be incomplete or out of date. Fleet data is our own. Source →
