Dell buy: Icahn puts more cash on table than Blackstone or Mike D As El Reg expected, the deals offered separately by private equity firms Blackstone Group and Icahn Enterprises to take over IT giant Dell are not as generous as some have been arguing the company is worth. And, ironically, the company backed by activist investor Carl Icahn is offering considerably less than Icahn himself had …
Right you are.
If Ichan gets his slimy paws on Dell, he will gut the company, and sell off the bits to make himself a huge profit, just as he has done with countless other companies.
He has absolutely no feelings for the people who work for the companies he raids, he is solely in it for the money he can pull out of a company, and put in his own pocket.
He is a dirtbag of the highest order.
"If Ichan gets his slimy paws on Dell, he will gut the company, and sell off the bits to make himself a huge profit, just as he has done with countless other companies."
Yes, he is not trying to be coy about it. He is going to load it up with debt to take the company private and then probably sell it off to the highest bidder. I understand how you could do something like that with Motorola, which Icahn did, but I don't understand where he thinks he is going to sell Dell's divisions. Who, for instance, would be in the market for Dell's PC business... or server business? It is not like any of the major US IT companies, HP, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, etc, would want those units. It is not as though there is a ton of IP value or brand value in any of it... which there was in Motorola. He must have some thoughts on selling parts of it to Samsung, Toshiba or some Asian low cost players. Even there, would buying Dell do something for those companies they could not do for themselves? If they want to make low cost Intel PCs/servers, they can just go ahead and make them. They don't need to buy Dell to do it.... There is always the possibility that he is going to do the standard PE move and just load it down with debt to pay out massive dividends to the shareholders, himself and his partners. That is what he originally called on the Board to do. A one time, massive dividends to shareholders.
It seems like, if that is what he wanted to do, he would support one of the other two plans as they would allow him to cash out his 14% at a higher value. I think his plan was to buy the company at a very reasonable price from the shareholders with SLP. Then turn around the company, or try, without Wall Street hassling him every five minutes about their projections for the next quarter.... Maybe then, at some future point, sell it back to public shareholders at a higher price.
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