Billionaire Carl Icahn Mulls Over Diving Into Cryptocurrency in a 'Big Way' With About $1.5 Billion Investment

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, the founder of Icahn Enterprises, says that his company is exploring how to get involved in cryptocurrency “in a relatively big way,” which he said could be an investment of about $1.5 billion.

Carl Icahn Exploring Getting Into Cryptocurrency

Carl Icahn, the founder and controlling shareholder of Icahn Enterprises, a diversified conglomerate holding company based in New York City, revealed his cryptocurrency plan in an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday. He said:

I’m looking at the whole business and how I can get involved in it with Icahn Enterprises in a relatively big way because, I think, it’s here to stay in one form or another.

Icahn is one of Wall Street’s most successful investors. In 1678, he formed Icahn & Co., a securities firm focusing on arbitrage and options trading. In 1978, he began taking substantial positions in individual companies, including RJR Nabisco, Texaco, Phillips Petroleum, Western Union, Gulf & Western, Viacom, Uniroyal, Dan River, Marvel, Revlon, Fairmont, Time Warner, Yahoo, Lions Gate, CIT, Motorola, Genzyme, Biogen, Chesapeake Energy, El Paso, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Lawson Software, Medimmune, Dell, Netflix, Forest Laboratories, Apple, and Ebay.

The billionaire investor was asked specifically what a “relatively big way” means for him and his company. He described:

A big way for us would be a billion dollars, a billion and a half dollars, something like that. That would be sort of a big way, I guess, for us. But sometimes we go bigger than that, sometimes a lot smaller. Im not going to say exactly.

Icahn further clarified: “To be clear, we have never bought any cryptocurrency, but we are studying it.”

The billionaire noted that many cryptocurrencies out there are overvalued in his view. He opined: “Much of the cryptocurrency issued today will not survive, but we believe cryptocurrency in one form or another might be here to stay.”