Motorola activist investor Carl Icahn increases his stake again
Motorola Inc. investor Carl Icahn added to his stake months before the mobile-phone maker plans a breakup he helped instigate.
Icahn bought about 11.5 million shares of Motorola this week, according to a regulatory filing today. The billionaire investor now owns 247.1 million shares, according to the filing. That indicates he holds about 11 percent of Schaumburg-based Motorola, according to Bloomberg data.
Motorola intends to spin off its handset and set-top box operations into a new company in the first quarter of 2011. The plans were initially outlined in March 2008 after Icahn complained about how the company was run and urged management to break off the money-losing mobile-phone business.
Motorola was unchanged at $7.50 as of 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading and has declined 3.4 percent this year.