From Wikipedia

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Icahn made extensive use of financier Michael Milken's junk bonds. After the junk bond and overall market bust in the early 1990s, Icahn played a lower-profile role in the business world, preferring to be less public in his dealings.

Icahn developed a reputation as a ruthless corporate raider after his hostile takeover of TWA in 1985.[1] The result of that takeover was Icahn systematically stripping TWA of its assets and selling them off.[2]

perhaps better said, "He just wants their money."

...our streets would be littered with dead possums. Think about it. Icahn is the bliunt force instrument of Schumpeter's creative destruction, a very necessary process in capitalism. Given that Icahn has fired a shot across Yahoo!'s bow, maybe Jerry Yang should be thinking about how to ensure that his company is at least in the ballpark comparing its worth to even semi-liquid assets. Or maybe he should have thought about that when Steve Ballmer bet that he knew there was an issue there.

You must have studied Economics. I had to go out to Wikipedia to find out who Schumpeter was as I'd never heard of him before. Somehow his name didn't come up in my Geology program.

You could be right. Comparing Icahn to a crow or other carrion eater is not a bad analogy.

The story of economics and the economics way of thinking are as important to understanding and interacting with the world today as being able to add and subtract were important to balancing your checkbook 20 years ago. The barrier to wider understanding is that the discipline cloaks itself in pseduomathematical formalism. But the concepts, elucidated by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Joseph Schumpeter, Milton Friedman and many other notables are accessible and applicable by non practitioners. In my book, avoidance of the economic way of thinking would be willful ignorance if it weren't for the way the discipline isolates itself.

But that aside... Carl Icahn is just very good at what he does, an extremely efficient player in these value games. The irony of Yahoo! is that 8 years ago, it was the poster company for the Internet bubble, and now it is so undervalued in terms of its obvious assets that it rejected an uninvited buyout from Microsoft and now finds itself in the sights of a prominent corporate raider.

Yahoo!'s defenders are nostalgic for what's now. Seriously, it's the only defense of the company available! Employees and customers might be the most affected by any acquisition. We all feel compassion for them. But what of investors whose assets are undervalued by misuse and/or ineffective management? These investors might be your parents or grandparents or yourselves that have retirement money in pension funds! That's who Steve Ballmer and Carl Icahn represent. If Microsoft or Carl Icahn don't take care of this in the short term, the market will continue to punish Yahoo! until it takes care of it in the long term and losses are extended and spread out. Or maybe Yahoo! gets bailed out by a savior company which it will become a drag on. Or worst of all, maybe the government comes in like they did with Chrysler in the early 1980s, wasting billions of dollars supporting a company destined for perpetual irrelevance.

It's all pretty sad, but let's not get high and mighty about anyone's motives in this whole equation. They all have a role to play and the underlying problem is that Yahoo! is seriously underperforming for the assets it has available.

I've been surprised to find how much similarity there is between the economic world and the natural. Successful companies (species), new ecosystems that appear-evolve-and then mature, companies that run for a while and then die out, scavengers that help clean up the mess and recycle the good bits into the environment, parasites that drain companies of vital nutrients (money) etc. etc. Personally though, I'd rather piece together the environmental interactions during the Ordovician, or Triassic. To each his own.

There is likely a lot of truth in what you say about 'pseduomathematical formalism'. I might have called it 'economic technobabble'. It's unfortunate that most people's exposure to economics is in the form of talking heads on TV.