The $10 Billion Difference:
No Obstacle to Two Amigos

By Ira Ellenthal

email: iellenthal@gmail.com

When I met Carl Icahn, the fabulously wealthy financier, his formal education – P.S. 104, Far Rockaway High School, Princeton University and two years of medical school at New York University – was behind him and his business career was just beginning.

After introducing ourselves one Monday morning on the platform of the Wavecrest subway station, we sat together on the ride into the city where Carl, 25, worked at a brokerage firm and me at a trade magazine publishing company. He had an apartment on East 37th Street in Manhattan and had spent the weekend visiting his parents in Bayswater; meanwhile, at 23, I still lived with mine in the Wavecrest Gardens.

An intense aversion to the sight of blood, he explained, had persuaded him to leave medical school and seek his fortune on Wall Street.

We hit it off immediately and began a fast friendship that has endured for nearly 50 years. The first couple of them included double-dating, vacationing together and sharing and splitting the cost of his Manhattan apartment. Before leaving Carl for my first and only wife, it was clear to me that he was destined to make it big, although $10 billion was beyond the boundaries of my imagination, as even $10 million might have been in 1960 or 1961.

Carl Icahn, 1953, and Ira Ellenthal, 1955, in their graduation photos from Far Rockaway High School.

At the time we met, his income was already approaching $40,000 a year; mine was slightly less, at $6,000.

On a flight to Puerto Rico on Trans-Caribbean Airways, which was later purchased by TWA (Carl bought TWA in 1986), he asked me my net worth, a question no one before had ever posed.

Carl saw me struggling and helped me figure out my assets and liabilities. After completing the exercise, he began to laugh; in fact, he broke up with laughter.

“What the hell is so damn funny?” I demanded to know.

“You’ve got a negative net worth, that’s what,” he said. And then he laughed some more before admonishing me for handling my money so poorly.

Lots of young couples, even unmarried heterosexual ones like Carl and I, experience financial problems – and we had ours.

After dropping off the girls following a double-date one night, Carl said sternly, “You spend too much money, Ira, so unless you agree to cut back, we’re going to have to stop double-dating.”

Many years later – by then, I had a positive net worth – we were driving to the U.S. Open at Flushing Meadows where Carl owned a lifetime box, part of the spoils of a corporate takeover, when I seized a serious moment to tell him, “I just want you to know that I’m very proud of you for all that you’ve accomplished.”

He seemed genuinely touched, thanked me and, after a pause, said, “I’m also very proud of you for all that you’ve accomplished – especially considering your limited abilities.”

Don’t let his acerbic wit convey the wrong impression, though. Every time we’ve gotten together over the years, Carl has spent more time talking about me and my life than about him and his.

And he has been consistent about something else, too, always asking the same initial question before every shared meal: “Whose turn is it to pay?”