Thursday, April 03, 2008
The funniest billionaire
If you are a corporate lawyer, you absolutely know about the most ridiculous tortious interference case of all time, Texaco v. Pennzoil. Texaco had snatched Getty Oil out from under Pennzoil, which thought it had the deal. Pennzoil spun around and sued Texaco in a Texas state court, winning $12 billion under an absolutely absurd legal theory. Corporate "raider" Carl Icahn's description of the settlement "talks" marks him, for sure, as the funniest billionaire. Ruthless, but funny. (Icahn uses some "bad words", so the audio is almost certainly NSFW.)
All lawsuits should settle that way.
CWCID: Houston's Clear Thinkers.
[Scheduled]
5 Comments:
By 
Charlottesvillain, at
Thu Apr 03, 04:44:00 PM:
By 
, at
Thu Apr 03, 08:46:00 PM:
Excuuuuse F..ing me. Didn't you see that these guys, Icahn and his buddies, screwed a lot of widows and orphans out of 2/3 of the value of their stock? I'm sure that if Icahn was on side A on this deal that he was on side B with these same guys in a lot of other scams.
TH, you should have paid better attention in lawyerly ethics class at, where was it, Michigan?
JLW III '67 an engineer and proud of it. I'm no f...ing lawyer and I don't play one on the internet, but my parents and teachers taught me right from wrong.
By TigerHawk, at
Thu Apr 03, 09:18:00 PM:
JLW III'67 - Actually, I think Icahn is something of a doucehbag; I was not really defending him as a human being, just being amused by his story. And I have a fairly amusing story from his 25th reunion, when he ran TWA and Tom Kean'57 was governor of New Jersey. I'll probably blog it at some point.
By , at
Sat Apr 05, 10:19:00 AM:
"screwed a lot of widows and orphans out of 2/3 of the value of their stock"
Widows and orphans huh? Who knew that Texaco was such a hard-luck case?
By ScurvyOaks, at
Mon Apr 07, 12:45:00 PM:
Awesome, TH; thanks for posting!
I'm no fan of Joe Jamail (who's Lebanese, by the way, not Armenian), but he did give away some of the money. Next time you watch a Texas Longhorns home football game, you can notice the sign for "Joe Jamail Field" at Memorial Stadium. It doesn't surprise me that he would tell Icahn that he was going to buy p**** with his $600 million, though.
In addition to Jamail's formidable jury skills, considerable credit for the result has to go to Baker Botts, the white-shoe firm that was Jamail's co-counsel and got that legally pathetic case past Texaco's MSJ.
