Carl Icahn’s relationship with Apple has been rocky ever since he became the company’s most loquacious investor last Fall. While ribbing Tim Cook publicly with one hand for not doing a bigger buyback, the other has been busy forking over fat stacks of cash for more and more AAPL shares.
This morning Carl went classic Icahn and took to Twitter again to complain about Cook and the Apple board not giving him and other investors more money with his proposed $50 billion buyback, while also announcing he’s been gobbling up AAPL shares faster than Jaws went after those guys on the boat:
Having purchased $500 million more $AAPL shares in the last two weeks, our investment has crossed the $3 billion mark yesterday.
— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) January 22, 2014
Icahn started with an initial investment around $500 million to $1 billion back in August when the stock was at $468 per share. He’s since increased his stake to $3 billion, making him the 33rd biggest AAPL shareholder while the stock is selling around $554 per share this morning.
All that money made off the stock price isn’t satisfactory for a multi-billionaire corporate raider, so Icahn made sure to push for the buyback while he was at.
We feel $APPL board is doing great disservice to shareholders by not having markedly increased its buyback. In-depth letter to follow soon.
— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) January 22, 2014
So why is Carl complaining about Apple while investing deeper into the company? Not even Carl Icahn knows sometimes. After his morning shower of tweets he appeared on CNBC and admitted that in some ways he’s better off if the company doesn’t increase its buyback so that AAPL remains cheap enough for him to buy even more.
AAPL is up about 1% today. Well played Carl.
