Carl Icahn, William Ackman, and a Seven-Year Fight Over “Pennies”

In one corner is Carl C. Icahn, the corporate raider who made C.E.O.’s tremble back in the 1980s and, at 75, is still chasing deals.

In the other is William A. Ackman, 45, one of Mr. Icahn’s figurative heirs and a leading practitioner of the bruising, Icahnesque craft politely known as activist investing.

These ultrarich men battled for seven years in multiple courts, over a relatively paltry $4.5 million. That might be real money to mere mortals, but to these two, it’s barely a rounding error.

So why bother? This battle, it turns out, was more about big egos than big money.

Well, it will be difficult to find billionaires without big egos, but it might be more difficult to find billionaires wasting their time for small pieces of money to satisfy their egos.

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Being J.K. Rowling, and Coping with Fame?

How many of us would NOT like to be a famous billionaire? I don’t see any hands up, and that’s expected.

Should your dream come true, you might also need to be prepared for some tough times.

Tough times, did I say? Yes, I did. Read about the trauma of JK Rowling just so that you are prepared

JK Rowling has revealed that she felt ‘under siege’ in her own home and had to ‘cover her children in blankets’ to hide them from photographers and journalists, who constantly hounded her after the success of ‘Harry Potter’ books.

The 46-year-old author told the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics that she had to fight a fierce battle to protect her children from the consequences of her fame.

Rowling also said that the paparazzi unceasingly targeted her family and one incident that left her really infuriated was when one of the journalists slipped a letter into her five-year-old daughter’s schoolbag.

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Does Robin Li of Baidu have the hardest job in the world?

The Chinese search giant is growing at incredible rates and dominates its home market. That means it has to contend not only with a domineering government, but also with cunning state-run media and increasingly aggressive private competitors.

Unlike Google, Baidu, China’s largest search engine, cooperates with the government’s policy of censorship. The western press commonly asks the company’s CEO, Robin Li, how he justifies such a decision. Naturally, Li’s responses are generally quite deferential to the government. An unfavorable onlooker might even consider some of his rhetoric to veer precariously close to pandering. Take, for instance, Li’s dictum on big tech in China: “…walking the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics is the well-spring of strength that will allow the Chinese Internet to continue its healthy and rapid development.”

So it came as quite a surprise when CCTV, one of the government’s many state-run media organizations, aired a damning 26-minute documentary on Li’s company last month. Millions of Chinese viewers watched footage of a Baidu (BIDU) employee helping a man posing as the owner of what he admitted to be a sham healthcare company buy a fraudulent advertisement for a phony weight-loss pill. For weeks, the media speculated on the rationale behind the attack, which struck many as particularly harsh. Was the government getting uncomfortable with Baidu’s monopoly on the search market? (It controls about 80% of the market.) Or was CCTV acting out of commercial opportunism, since the broadcaster is also developing a search engine of its own? Did someone at CCTV have a personal vendetta against a higher-up at Baidu?

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Alex Denner, earlier with Icahn, $2 Billion Man Starts Biotech Hedge Fund

Alex Denner knows how to spot biotechnology companies with promising drugs and make sure investments pay off.

Working as Carl Icahn’s top health-care investing executive for the past five years, Denner has targeted at least six drugmakers from ImClone Systems Inc. to Biogen Idec Inc. (BIIB), prompting sales of three. He’s generated about $2 billion in profit for Icahn, said a person familiar with his record who declined to be identified because the matter is private.

Now the 42-year-old Denner, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, is splitting with Icahn to start his own hedge fund. As some investors avoid health care, partly because of regulatory hurdles, Denner’s knowledge of science and business gives him an advantage as one of the industry’s few activists

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The Gates Notes – Read Bill Gates’ Mind from Here

The Gates Notes is a wonderful repository of thought from Bill Gates, on topics as diverse as energy, healthcare, development and education

Be sure to bookmark it

The Gates Notes

Larry Ellison sets sights on promoting sailing

Larry Ellison’s team had just won another sailing race. His gear was still damp from the salt spray and the Champagne, and he was wearing a gold medal around his neck.

“The gold medalist passenger,” Ellison said mockingly of himself as he sat for an interview.

A self-made billionaire who co-founded Oracle Corp. and is one of the world’s wealthiest men, he remains a conspicuous consumer in a nasty economy: A collector of trophy properties and, after quite a chase on the water and in the New York courts, the America’s Cup trophy, too.

Ellison, an accomplished sailor, hopes to take a more active role when the real America’s Cup is raced in a 72-foot version of these catamarans in 2013 on San Francisco Bay.

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Where to find billionaires, sort of

In the network of American wealth, billionaires tend to cluster.

They enjoy one another’s company, often on boards of organizations that enjoy their money.

We queried Muckety’s national database for connections to non-business organizations, and came up with some of the most popular American gathering places. Here they are, in descending order of billionaire density. More from here

Billionaires Who Benefit From Today’s Climate Crisis

The International Forum on Globalization (IFG) released a special report today, “Outing the Oligarchy: Billionaires Who Benefit From Today’s Climate Crisis,” which identifies the world’s top 50 individuals whose investments benefit from climate change and whose influence networks block efforts to phase out pollution from fossil fuels.

IFG’s report comes as global debates intensify on how best to protect the climate and how best to counter the corrupting power of extreme wealth over politics.  The report draws the links between the two debates and identifies the emerging, ultra-rich tycoons who are deepening the world’s climate crisis.

The world’s richest corporations and capitalists have been branded by the Occupy Wall Street movement as the “one percent,” yet there has been scant attention to the individuals within in the “one percent” who have greatest responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions.  Little information has been publicly available about the identities of the industrialists, investors and ideologues who are most responsible for the decisions over carbon-intensive activities that drive greenhouse gas emissions far past danger levels.

IFG’s new report brings this information to light. The task of calculating carbon decision-making footprints is highly complex. However, IFG’s new study is an initial step in what will be a longer-term initiative of analyzing the roles played by the planet’s worst carbon culprits and how they fund sophisticated influence networks over almost all aspects of government policymaking, especially energy.

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Mark Pincus – The Newest Billionaire in Silicon Valley

Zynga, the maker of Mafia Wars and FarmVille, is about to go public in the biggest tech stock offering since Google. Gary Rivlin profiles the company’s iconoclastic founder.

He had a net worth north of $30 million. He had given birth to two successful tech startups; he owned a house on a hill overlooking San Francisco. He owned, or at least co-owned, a plane.

But in 2004, Mark Pincus, aging whiz kid creeping up on 40 and with crow’s feet deepening around his eyes, felt he hadn’t really made it in Silicon Valley.  Charlie Rose’s producers never phoned to have him on the show. Heads didn’t turn when he walked into a room. Strangers didn’t instantly recognize him the way they recognized Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

But with Zynga—the online game maker behind Mafia Wars, FarmVille, and other elaborate time wasters that he founded in 2007—poised to go public on Friday, Pincus is certainly A-list now. The company he named after his bulldog, now deceased, is expected to raise around $1 billion, making it the largest tech IPO since Google. And with its public offering, Pincus is set to become Silicon Valley’s newest billion-dollar man.

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Analysis of World’s Billionaires – What’s Common, What’s Not

For those yearning to be the richest man in the world (or even just a top billionaire), here’s a tip: Have an entrepreneurial parent. Studying engineering wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Those are conclusions one can draw from the 2010 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires. (I know I am a year late with this news, but the billionaire list, nor their characteristics, would have changed much in year, one can justifiably presume).

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