He may feel more than comfortable publishing an open letter to Tim Cook calling for Apple to engage in an immediate $150 billion buyback of shares, but (vocal) activist investor Carl Icahn has said that he would never push Apple to buy Nuance Communications Inc., maker of the software that runs the Siri feature on Apple’s iPhones.
Why would Icahn hypothetically want Apple to buy Nuance? Because as an investor he has a sizeable stake in both companies — with his firm owning 3.88 million shares of Apple as of September 30 and a 16.9 percent stake in Nuance as of August 29.
However as much as an acquisition might potentially benefit Icahn, at the Reuters Global Investment Outlook Summit on Monday he said that his investment at Nuance has “zero” to do with his involvement in Apple.
“[Pushing Apple to acquire Nuance] is something I would never micromanage and never even think of telling Tim Cook,” he noted. “I don’t have the expertise or the presumption to say I have the expertise to tell him to do that.”
Source: Reuters