Carl Icahn amped up his already fevered battle with eBay on Thursday — challenging the online auction retailer to a duel.
Not the pistols-at-20-paces kind of duel, but a live TV debate that the activist investor hopes would settle his argument that the current eBay board is not fit to decide what is best for shareholders.
Icahn, known for upping the stakes in his board battles, issued the challenge in his third letter to eBay shareholders this week.
Icahn is trying to convince eBay’s shareholders to press the company to split off its financial transaction arm, PayPal.
As a first step, he is seeking to add two allies to eBay’s board — and has attacked some current directors in an effort to get them off the board.
EBay quickly rejected Icahn’s challenge.
“We will not be going head-to-head against Icahn” on TV, a person close to eBay told The Post.
The refusal prompted Icahn to compare the online retailer to a restrictive government regime.
“It doesn’t surprise me they don’t want to have a debate because in a totalitarian state there are no debates,” Icahn told The Post.
“They just want to keep repeating the same thing over and over again,” he added. “It’s like they took a course, PR 101, taught in a totalitarian state.”
“What they don’t seem to realize,” said Icahn, “is that unlike in a totalitarian state, there are people that can answer back.”
Icahn, who owns a 2 percent stake in eBay, took his feud with the San Jose, Calif., company to new heights this week when he blasted two of the company’s long-time directors over what he says are conflicts of interest with eBay’s shareholders.
Icahn said eBay director Scott Cook, founder and chairman of Intuit, should not be on the board of the $75 billion company because Intuit’s payment-processing business directly competes with PayPal.
Icahn also criticized Marc Andreessen, a big venture capitalist, for profiting off discarded eBay assets, including online voice company Skype.
EBay has countered that any overlap with Intuit is “small” and that Andreessen had recused himself from the process when eBay sold Skype to an investment group the VC had a financial interest in.
On Thursday eBay also brought out the big guns: eBay founder and Chairman Pierre Omidyar, who famously became a billionaire at age 31 when eBay went public in 1998.
Omidyar, in a statement, called Icahn’s attacks on the board and CEO John Donahoe “false and misleading.”
Omidyar also rejected Icahn’s request to split off PayPal and said he stands by Andreessen and Cook.
EBay shares, which have risen 6 percent during the past year, rose 1.7 percent on Thursday to close at $58.34.