http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-27647437

Icahn's an arsehole and there'll be any number of parties willing to stick the boot in...

Given how he had publicly tried to manipulate stock prices, it isn't really a wonder. He buys stock cheap, then goes on a bunch of talk shows and says it is under priced or he writes open letters to the board saying they should sell of bits of the company, then sells once the price rises.

My biggest gripe is, he isn't interested in the company he is 'investing in', sorry, screwing over to make a quick profit. He doesn't care that most of his suggestions would destroy the company, once he has made his quick profit in the next quarter.

Doesn't he normally just build up a stake and then tell the managers to hive off under-performing units or else stop hoarding glorious war chests?
Outside of Hollywood fictions, that doesn't destroy companies

No, with Dell, he wanted an extra $4bn from the new investors, if they wanted to buy out the company, over and above its market value. Basically he was trying to bankrupt the company as it went private. If he had won, Dell would have been out of business by the time it went private and if the board then rejected going private they would have had to pay a $4bn or so forfeit to the shareholders, leaving it in bad shape and ripe for another takeover or bankruptcy.

With eBay, he wanted them to sell off PayPal and then pay out what they got for the sale. He also wanted to sue the board, because they sold off Skype for a pittance. By its next sale it had increased dramatically in value - no wonder, eBay had left it to rot and the private equity firm invested a lot in getting it back on track; but Markus Andresen (board of eBay and part of the Andresen Horowitz equity firm which bought Skype) was his main target, even though Andresen recused himself in all dealings with the sale of Skype.

With Apple, as well as a payout, he was saying that the stock price was 20% below what it should be.

From the cases that appear in the press, he is just out there to asset strip the company as quickly as possible, get a good dividend and sell off before the share price collapses, because the company can no longer do business, while all its key divisions which were generating revenue have been sold off and the cash reserves plundered.

Press stories are obviously a tiny bit simplified. Activist shareholders are valuable, they exist because of something called the agency problem.

Apple is doing practically nothing with a giant mountain of cash. It isn't a finance company or an asset manager, it should spend that money or return it to investors. Any plan that involves bankrupting a company as you describe is imbecilic, nobody would do that. You are reacting to a vision of cartoon villainy sold to you by third rate journos who know how to manipulate you.

Icahn is in it to make as much money as he can for Icahn, as quickly as possible, with no real interest in long term consequences or business planning.

You may say "that's fair enough, he's behaving in his own best interests, nothing wrong with that", but I'd say if anyone behaved in 'their own interests' to that degree in any other aspect of life you'd call them a selfish, ignorant [LIFTED] and would cross the street to avoid them. I don't see why share trading is somehow exempt from the considerations of what reasonable behaviour would be in any other sphere of life.

So which companies did he dismember and destroy?

He fought other greedy basts for ownership of Dell, which is hardly so especially bad. He made a pile investing in Netflix, but last I knew they were doing very nicely in spite of their brush with Beelzebub. He was right to point out that Yahoo were total [LIFTED] idiots not to cash out to Microsoft (I'm sure if he were a large stakeholder in MS he would have correctly complained had that deal gone through). BEA was ripe for acquisition.

Apple is sitting on money simply because they can't think of anything better to do with the stuff - so much of it that they are buying Beats with some change they found in an old jacket. It's not like they plan to spend it on R&D, so move it along, let it do some work.

I just don't see what he's done that is so bad by the standards of his peers other than making more money than most of them. He seems to make that money mostly by recognising which companies are not making best use of their assets. He's not a hero, and if he has been telling his golf buddies what stocks he's about to inflate then that's very silly, but he seems to fail the evil test.