Carl Icahn gains two JetBlue board seats

Activist investor Carl Icahn and JetBlue Airways (JBLU) have agreed to a deal that gives Icahn two seats on the airline's board. Joining Icahn on the board will be Icahn Capital portfolio manager. It comes after Icahn revealed a 10% stake in the company earlier this week. JetBlue also recently had a shake up in the executive ranks with Joanna Geraghty assuming the CEO role on Monday,

Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton discuss the details of the report in the video above.

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Editor's note: This article was updated to reflect that Icahn and JetBlue reached an agreement on board seats.
This article was written by Stephanie Mikulich

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Well, activist investor Carl Icahn reportedly close to a deal to get two seats on the JetBlue Airways board. This is according to the Wall Street Journal. Icahn earlier this week unveiled a 10% stake in the airline, and this is really his first activist campaign since his own publicly traded arm Icahn Enterprises, came under fire from a short seller. By the way, also, we should say happy birthday to Mr. Icahn. He is 88 today, even as he embarks on his umpteenth activist campaign.

JOSH LIPTON: And clearly still working hard. It was interesting. So we knew, we knew he had this stake, and in fact, I think we heard about that on Monday, and you saw that the stock really pop on that headline. Of course this is what Carl Icahn does, right? He finds a target, he gets inside, and starts rattling the cage for changes. It's not clear what specific changes Mr. Icahn wants here, exactly.

We do know that JetBlue has issues to work out. We talked, of course, the attempt to takeover Spirit was blocked. Stock is down about 20% over the past 12 months. So it'll be interesting what changes he wants to see at the airline.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah. I mean, and JetBlue is appealing that, JetBlue and Spirit are appealing that, but it doesn't seem like the prospects are very good. There's a new CEO who's just starting also at JetBlue, Joanna Geraghty, who now.

JOSH LIPTON: I believe the stake was revealed when she formally took the reins.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah. So it was announced as the person who was going to be taking the reins. So we'll see to your point. It's very interesting, we've heard about a number of activist campaigns recently, not just by Icahn, but we don't know what they want specifically. So hopefully we'll get more details as we learn more about these board seats.

JOSH LIPTON: And by the way, meta Icahn is now the third largest shareholder, that's according to data compiled by Bloomberg. So big sized stake.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah.