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searching4value's avatar

Likes it.

Did some fellow substcker (maybe dirtcheap stocks?) write about it, or some lawyer involved earning the best fee of his life? (I might be completely wrong!)

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Mr Market Miscalculates's avatar

Not sure about the question: you mean who is author of the book? Or if someone else wrote a review?

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Mr Market Miscalculates's avatar

Wow, thanks!

Few comments:

1) The settlement happened after the book was published, so it doesn’t cover Icahn’s involvement

2) I can understand Texaco didn’t want to pay $11.1bn, but Pennzoil wasn’t “stealing from them”. Quite the contrary: the way it’s presented in this book Pennzoil had a very strong case and I would have sided with them. Gordon Getty, the museum (especially it’s advisor Mary Lipton) and Getty Oil’s internal lawyer all sabotaged an agreement that the board had blessed

3) Pennzoil asked for $7.53bn in actual damages and the same amount in punitive damages (for the latter they only got $3bn from the jury). But that number wasn’t pulled out of thin air: they used the barrels of oil they were getting by buying Getty Oil (1 billion) and multiplied it by the average profit per barrel of oil sold. At the trial they also presented other methodologies that arrived at even higher valuations: the mistake was in Texaco not presenting their own methodology, so they jury only saw that $7.53bn

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