Eddie Lampert is one of the most legendary activist investors of all time: just thinking about what he did at Auto Zone makes some investors’ hearts flutter to this day. But nowadays he’s less of an activist investor and more of an old-fashioned CEO, running his own company, Sears Holdings, and having activist-investor troubles of his own:
[Bill] Ackman’s New York-based Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund ranks as Sears’ fourth-largest investor, with a 4.7 percent stake. At most companies, that is enough to command access to executives. But Ackman traveled thousands of miles to attend the [Sears annual] meeting because Lampert wouldn’t take his call, the investor said in an interview after the event.
Maybe Lampert could call up the then-CEOs of some of his former targets in search of a little sympathy. I wonder what they’d say.