Early in the process of writing the film Wall Street, Oliver Stone found his drafts to be lacking in authenticity, so he sought out a guide to walk him through the wild world that was boom-time 1980s finance. The man Stone eventually found was an ideal guide, a cutthroat capitalist who bit everything but his tongue while antagonising the executives at the companies he took over – most times with hostility. This man not only greatly informed the character that became Gordon Gekko, but one of this man’s shareholder meeting harangues provided the skeleton for Gekko’s timeless “greed is good” speech.
This man, as it happens, was Carl Icahn, the estimable financier and principal subject of Icahn: The Restless Billionaire – the HBO documentary that sifts for meaning in Icahn’s four decades-long impact on the American financial system. And while the connection to Gekko, which Stone himself reveals in the film, would appear intended to reinforce the popular perception of Icahn as a heartless one-percenter who only cares about the bottom line, the Restless director Bruce David Klein sets up the legendary wolf of Wall Street – whose worth is at least $17bn – as a paradoxical figure at first.
On the one hand, explains the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, who leads the parade of financial journalists who drop in throughout the film, if Icahn wasn’t the Street’s pioneering corporate raider, there’s no doubt he relishes playing the villain – one who openly…
