I'm seeing a lot of people (some know a lot, others don't have a fckng clue) analyzing the financial engineering the company has been carrying out in recent months. Well, none of that is a coincidence, considering who is at the helm.
Without a shred of admiration, but with all the recognition he deserves, it must be said that our CEO is an absolute wizard when it comes to high-stakes Wall Street finance, and it all goes back to his time running with Carl Icahn.
For five years, our CEO was Icahn’s right-hand legal guy, which is basically like getting a master's degree in corporate warfare from the most aggressive shark in the business.
When you work for Icahn, you are learning exactly how to rip apart corporate balance sheets, we-ponize debt, and corner massive boards into doing what you want.
So when Icahn won that brutal proxy fight against Xerox back in 2018 and ki-led their multibillion-dollar deal with Fujifilm, he planted LP inside Xerox as General Counsel to be his eyes and ears. Over the next five years, LP probably was the secret architect behind some of the wildest financial stunts you can imagine.
We are talking about helping orchestrate a crazy $33B hostile takeover attempt where Xerox, the smaller company, tried to swallow HP using a mountain of structured debt.
The real proof of how savvy this guy is came in 2023 when Icahn decided to cash out and sell his entire share back to Xerox for over $0.5B. Usually, when an activist investor leaves, his people get kicked out the door right behind him. But LP had made himself so indispensable by rewriting the company's entire operational playbook that Xerox couldn't afford to lose him.
FF to 2026, and the company is in a tough spot with the stock down, and the board immediately handed him the keys as CEO.
If anyone knows how to engineer a financial miracle out of a tight corner, it is a guy who spent a decade learning the ropes from Carl Icahn himself.