Originally Posted by
Flyby1206
He is allowed to buy airlines. You're thinking of Frank Lorenzo who was barred by the DOT from being involved in the US airline business.
Yes, he pretty much can. If you control a significant amount of voting shares you could put forth a shareholder proposal at the annual meeting to put Carl Icahn on the JB BOD. He has 34m shares and they would all vote in favor of that proposal. Even though Blackrock and Vanguard hold a lot of shares they usually dont vote in stuff like that. I own JBLU shares and have never voted in an annual meeting either.
Yes, assuming that JB was profitable and we had a different DOJ. I think Icahn's Plan A will be to shrink JB to profitability (or attempt to) and then sell us in a whole to either UA/AA/WN/AS after we get a new DOJ.
Plan B would be shrink us to profitability, and if we cant turn a profit and/or we dont get a new DOJ start parting out the airline. Sell BOS gates to WN, 20 JFK gates/slots to UA, 80 gates/slots to AA, the remaining to WN. Sell majority of FLL gates to UA and/or WN, sell MCO gates to F9 or UA. Sell newish A321 airframes to DL/UA, sell A220s to DL. This leaves JB with a roughly 100 A320 classics and a token number of gates in the NE/Florida at which point we announce a rebrand to become a single fleet ULCC and are either bought by some ULCC like Avelo/Frontier/Spirit or we declare BK and restructure to lower costs even further to be competitive as a ULCC on our own.
Hopefully this is all overly pessimistic and he enacts change to get us on a profitable path as a standalone and we grow in the future.
Ichan took large stakes in EBay, Netflix, and Apple. None of which are out of business today.
he did make eBay sell off PayPal.
I could see, if the merger appeal were successful that after the operations were combined, saddle the spirit brand with debt and then bankrupt it. Who knows.
all of the stuff you mention decreases the book value of the company, which will hurt his investment.