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Carl Icahn (AP)
Carl Icahn is pumped up.
The billionaire investor yesterday reached a deal with Herbalife that allows him to nearly double his stake in the Los Angeles company — while giving him two seats on the company’s board.
The moves amp up his battle with nemesis Bill Ackman, the outspoken hedge-fund mogul who has bet $1 billion that shares of the company — a distributor of nutritional supplements and weight-loss products — will crash.
Ackman has called Herbalife’s multi-level marketing set-up a pyramid scheme — a claim the company and Icahn deny.
Icahn, after reaching the deal and boosting his stake in Herbalife to 13.6 percent from 13 percent, couldn’t resist tweaking his rival.
“Ackman has given [me] an opportunity to buy a company cheaply at a discounted rate,” Icahn told Bloomberg TV. “They are in 87 countries, and it is an opportunity for unemployed people in these countries to make money. I think it’s a really good product.”
Herbalife does not provide a living for many, however. According to the company, 88 percent of its US distributors make no money, even before hefty expenses are deducted.
The Icahn-Ackman feud goes back 10 years but had cooled recently.
But the bad blood flowed again soon after Ackman made his Herbalife short public on Dec. 20.
The Ack-attack knocked 40 percent off Herbalife shares and investors Robert Chapman, Dan Loeb and Icahn — each disliking Ackman — started piling in.
Loeb and Chapman began building their stakes at an average price of around $30, according to sources.
Chapman called the moves by the investors “Kill Bill 3,” a reference to the Quentin Tarantino movie, because they were motivated by the prospect of killing Ackman’s short.
‘“Kill Bill 3,” that’s the game being played,” said Chapman. “A lot of guys want to kill Bill Ackman’s ego.”
In a widely circulated investor note on Dec. 30, Chapman argued that Ackman was vulnerable to a short squeeze, pointing out that Icahn hated Ackman, due to a decade-long legal battle between the two that Icahn lost.
Loeb also talked to Icahn about his pro-Herbalife views around that time, a source told The Post.
Loeb declined to comment.
Icahn later went on television berating rival Ackman and talking about the “mother of all short squeezes” that Herbalife presented.
He described the ability to knock down Ackman as the “strawberry on top of the sundae.”
The 77-year-old Icahn did not return calls for comment yesterday.
The stock had faltered when the Federal Trade Commission shut down a Kentucky pyramid scheme on Jan. 28.
So when Herbalife began to soar on the news that Icahn increased his bet two weeks ago, Chapman and pal Loeb — who had taken an 8 percent stake in the company — sold their Herbalife shares.
The sales occurred long before the stock reached the price target of around $70 the two had said it was worth.
Loeb told Ackman he made $50 million for investors on the trade, so he has likely closed out his position in the stock.