Activist investors are becoming tamer

“WHEN WE GOSA at ’em,” Carl Icahn growls, proudly, “we go at ’em.” After decades as chief executives’ number-one tormentor, the 86-year-old’s disdain for them has softened only a tad. “I wouldn’t call them buffoons,” he told Schumpeter recently, “but, with many exceptions, they are in way over their heads.” Mr Icahn continues to browbeat managers for poor performance. As went to press he was in the final throes of a fight with Southwest Gas, a utility. His gripes are broadening, too. This month and next he will seek to oust directors at McDonald’s and Kroger over the treatment of sows. Yet Mr Icahn also considers himself a vanishing breed. “Activism is dying,” he laments.Not on paper. In the first quarter of the year activists launched 73 campaigns, the busiest three months since Lazard, an advisory firm, began keeping track in 2014. This week Bluebell, a newish activist fund based in London that made its name last year by ousting the boss of Danone, a struggling French yogurt-maker, set its sights on Saint-Gobain, another icon of France . Still, Mr Icahn has a point. Activism isn’t what it used to be.