Reuters
Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman.
Icahn and Bill Ackman have had a long-running feud over Herbalife, the nutritional supplements company. Ackman is short the position, Icahn is long. Their battle came to a head earlier this summer, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Icahn was shopping around Herbalife shares.
Since then, Icahn has skirted around confirming the story, and as recently as last week, avoided a question on it during his interview at the Delivering Alpha hedge fund conference in New York.
The latest story by Fortune involves a Jefferies exec texting Ackman while he was vacationing in Italy to ask for a meeting to discuss a potential sale. Jefferies shopped the idea around to other investors, too, but the deal eventually fell through.
Here's Fortune:
"In the end, despite at least a month of scouring Wall Street, and hamstrung by legal restrictions (more on that later), the best bid Jefferies was able to get Icahn was for a little more than 11 million, of Icahn's 17 million, Herbalife shares at a price of $51.50 a share-about $10 south of where shares of Herbalife were trading on the open market at the time, sources familiar with the bid said. (People close to Jefferies put the figure a few dollars higher.) It didn't take Icahn long to reject the bid."