Icahn will be advising the President as an individual, will not be a member of the Administration, or a federal employee, and will not have any specific duties other than providing advice and counse, according to the transition team.

Trump has pledged to eliminate two regulations for every one added and initially impose a moratorium on new federal regs, though that would not apply to independent agencies like the FCC and Federal Trade Commission.

Related: Icahn Wants Role in Gannett Split

"Carl was with me from the beginning and with his being one of the world’s great businessmen, that was something I truly appreciated," President-elect Trump said in a statement. "He is not only a brilliant negotiator, but also someone who is innately able to predict the future especially having to do with finances and economies. His help on the strangling regulations that our country is faced with will be invaluable.”

Related: Icahn Wants Role in Gannett Split

Icahn is a familiar name in media and tech investment circles. His investments  have included Gulf + Western, Viacom, Time Warner, Motorola, Dell, Netflix, Apple, and eBay.

Time Warner Inc. — under scrutiny from a trio of activist investors — has moved in a direction that could make it easier for minority investors to affect change.

In the long run, though, it might just be the company’s size and the volatility of the content business that keeps it together.

Time Warner has quietly amended its corporate bylaws, allowing holders of at least 3% of its stock for at least three years to nominate two members to its board of directors.

Also, per documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 3, as many as 20 investors could band together to meet the 3% requirement and elect new directors.

Investors who meet those criteria even can have their board slate included in Time Warner’s proxy statement, saving them the hassle and cost of having to contact other shareholders directly.

Other companies have adopted so-called “proxy access” rules. Time Warner had been asked by some shareholders to do so in the past, but the rules failed to win sufficient votes.

ACTIVISTS CIRCLING

That the company decided to bypass another vote on the matter and go directly to implementation is a bit curious, given reports that activist investors Carl Icahn, Corvex Management chief Keith Meister (an Icahn protégé) and Trian Fund Management head Nathan Peltz are all circling the company.

People familiar with the company said the move is not a reaction to those reports. “The timing is unfortunate,” one person familiar with Time Warner’s thinking said.

But is it? According to several analysts, breaking up or selling Time Warner wouldn’t just be di_ cult — it also wouldn’t make much sense.

Driving most of the breakup speculation has been the 24% decline in Time Warner’s stock price in 2015.

So far this year, the stock is up about 10.5%, mostly on deal speculation. But the entire sector has been in a tailspin, as media companies across the sector are pressured by sluggish TV ratings, declining ad rates and falling subscriber rolls due to cord-cutting.

Time Warner is unique in that it successfully pushed back against 21st Century Fox’s unsolicited $85-per-share offer in 2014 by growing the stock.

Through bold moves like the launch of its standalone HBO online service HBO Now and significant changes at Turner, Time Warner pushed its stock price above the Fox offer, ending that year at $85.42 per share.

The stock continued to grow in the early part of 2015, but slid again in August after The Walt Disney Co. lost about 3 million subscribers. The Disney losses touched off cord-cutting fears for some investors and sent the sector as a whole into a downward spiral.

TOO BIG TO BUY?

With the latest declines, investors are looking for another bold move and the easiest one to make is a breakup.

Wells Fargo media analyst Marci Ryvicker did a sum-of-the-parts valuation of Time Warner that showed potential take-out values for the company ranging from $71.63 to $105.16 per share, but she couched that data with a heavy dose of skepticism. Ryvicker couldn’t see any company in the programming space that was large enough to swallow Time Warner whole. 21st Century Fox, which tried and failed in 2014 to take over the company, is trading at $26.49 per share — about 1.5 times lower than Time Warner at $71.70.

While premium channel HBO and the Turner Broadcasting System cable networks are obviously valuable assets, Ryvicker didn’t see them as having any more value as separate or spun-off entities.

“A sum of the parts is always just math, and to be frank, our math doesn’t matter,” Ryvicker wrote in her January report.

Credit Suisse media analyst Omar Sheikh took it a step further last week, releasing a detailed report mapping out three potential strategies for Time Warner: spinning off HBO, Turner and the Warner Bros. movie studio as three separate entities; spinning off just HBO; and spinning off just Turner.

One of the biggest barriers to any of the spin scenarios is that they would trigger between $10 billion to $11 billion in redemption penalties to certain bondholders, according to Sheikh. Add in the loss of synergies and scale economies inherent in separating the business, and Sheikh estimated that the value range of a Time Warner breakup is just $79 to $89 per share.

Bottom line: Time Warner is worth more together than apart, according to Sheikh.

According to the analyst, Time Warner in its current form could grow cash flow by 25% and net income by one-third over the next three years. And initiatives to slow down content licensing to third-party subscription video-on-demand services like Netflix could help expand multiples. Taking those factors into account, Time Warner could increase its valuation to $90 per share in 12 to 18 months, Sheikh estimated.

BETTER TOGETHER

According to Sheikh, vertical synergies benefits to Turner and HBO from buying content from Warner Bros. would mostly be lost in a Turner spinoff, as the studio wouldn’t have as much incentive to sell its content to the networks and could lose the benefit of having an anchor buyer for its TV and movie output.

A spinoff would also erode horizontal synergies — mainly higher affiliate fees — because Time Warner’s networks would no longer be bundled. And content costs could also rise for Turner and HBO, which would no longer have the economies of scale of being part of a larger parent.

Sheikh said he also believes that separating Turner from HBO eliminates any potential benefit from the premium network’s relationship with Apple for HBO Now.

“These benefits are highly likely to grow over time, in our view, particularly if the cost of developing content is pushed higher by competition from new digital competitors like Netflix and Amazon,” Sheikh wrote.

That could be significant, given the growth the analyst expects from HBO Now. The over-the-top service could have 14 million subscribers by 2020, with 4 million of them churning off the MVPD service, according to Sheikh.

SIDEBAR: For What It’s Worth

Credit Suisse media analyst Omar Sheikh doesn’t believe much is happening via speculation around a possible breakup of Time Warner Inc. Here are three potential scenarios he foresees:

Scenario                        Market Value                Market Value Per Share

Three-Way Breakup . . . . . . .$66.7B-$74.4B . . . . . . . . . . . . . $79-$88

HBO Spinoff . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$67.3B-$75B . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$80-$89

Turner Spinoff . . . . . . . . . . . . $66.7B-74.5B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $79-$88

SOURCE: Credit Suisse estimates

Time Warner stock surged 4% Tuesday after reports claimed activist investor Carl Icahn was building a stake in the content giant, even as Icahn denied he owned even a single Time Warner share.

Reports first surfaced in the New York Post, citing unnamed sources, that several activist investors were considering making a move on the company, including Corvex Management, a fund run by Icahn protégé Keith Meister. Other reports said Icahn himself was building a position in Time Warner, perhaps in a rerun of his 2006 takeover attempt of the company. Later today Icahn himself told CNBC that he did not own a single Time Warner share and was annoyed “that certain speculators use my name to make profits at the expense of other shareholders.”

Time Warner declined comment.

The media giant has been the focus of intense takeover speculation over the past several weeks. The stock declined about 24% in 2015 along with the rest of the programming sector, as cord-cutting, cord shaving and lower ratings have cut into revenue.

The last time the company’s stock was in a tailspin, it attracted the attention of 21st Century Fox, which launched an unsuccessful $80 billion bid for the company.

While Time Warner was successful in beating back those advances, some reports suggest that some investors believe spinning off its HBO unit would unlock value akin to subscription video on demand giant Netflix. Netflix stock more than doubled in 2015 and is off to a strong start this year, up about 2% since the beginning of the year.

But others have noted that an HBO spinoff won’t necessarily reap the same gains because it isn’t growing as fast as Netflix.

Time Warner shares were up as much as 4.1% ($2.83 each) in earlier trading Tuesday to $72.44 per share. The stock closed at $71.09 each, up 2.1% or $1.48 per share.

Apple “searched for breakthrough features to justify building an Apple-branded television set” but came up short, the paper reported, citing unnamed sources.

Such breakthroughs that were apparently under consideration sound pretty ho-hum – Ultra HD/4K display, sensor-equipped cameras to make video calls, among them.

But Carl Icahn, in an open letter on Monday to Apple CEO Tim Cook holding that the company’s shares are worth a lofty $240 (they’re trading at about $130 per share at the time of this writing), remains confident that Apple will still make a go at the TV, as well as connected cars.

“Apple is poised to enter and in our view dominate two new categories (the television next year and the automobile by 2020) with a combined addressable market of $2.2 trillion, a view investors don’t appear to factor into their valuation at all,” Icahn wrote.

With respect to the long-rumored Apple television, that’s sort of a replay from October 2014, when Icahn expressed confidence in another open letter that Apple would introduce a 4K set sometime in fiscal year 2016.

Icahn wrote this week that he still expects Apple to start selling two Apple television sets – UHD models with 55-inch and 65-inch screens, in FY 2016, so at least he’s consistent. He also sees Apple generating revenue of $15 billion in FY 2016 on sales of 10 million units, rising to $37.5 billion on 25 million units in FY 2017. 

“[W]e view television’s role in the living room as a strategically compelling bolt-on to the Apple ecosystem,” Icahn wrote, adding that he also plays into the rumor that Apple is preparing to launch its own "skinny bundle” of pay-TV channels and a new Apple TV device.

Icahn then went on CNBC, saying that he read the WSJ article but stands by his belief that Apple will still pull the trigger on its own television set.  

For now, Apple’s public video strategy continues to center on the current generation (and recently price-reduced) Apple TV device, and support for services such as HBO Now, HBO’s new stand-alone OTT service.

But when the HBO Now deal was announced, Cook open the door to much more, noting that the aim of Apple is to “reinvent the way you watch television, and this is just the beginning.”

It’s been awhile since anyone has stirred things up about that mysterious Apple television. Leave it to Icahn (iCahn?) to stoke the flames of hype.

In that letter, Icahn basically urges Apple to repurchase a bunch of stock posthaste because Icahn believes Apple “is dramatically undervalued in today’s market,” and included a product-by-product review on how he came up with his forecast for the mighty CE giant and a model that values Apple at $203 per share (Apple shares were trading at $101.68 each Thursday morning).

On the product end, Icahn discusses products such as the new Apple Watch, iPhone, and the iPad, and a section on a purported Apple-made UltraHD TV that leaves enough wiggle room to drive a Mack Truck through.

“While Apple has not announced plans for a TV set and may never do so, we believe we have good enough reason to expect the introduction of an UltraHD TV set in FY 2016,” Icahn writes. “We think television represents a large opportunity for Apple, one that reaches far beyond ‘the hobby’ that Apple TV currently represents.”

He then goes on to mention that Cook has stated publicly that “TV is an area of great interest for Apple,” and agrees that it should be.

Count Icahn among the 4K believers, holding that it will drive a “major TV replacement cycle” as prices drop, with Netflix viewing UltraHD streaming as major catalyst.

And despite saying that Apple may never release a TV, Icahn has a good idea of how many units Apple could move. In his view, Apple stands to sell 12 million 55” and 65” TV sets in FY 2016 and 25 million in FY 2017 at an average selling price of $1,500 “at gross margins consistent with the overall company.”

And Icahn sees the UltraHD TV as more than a TV, but a “centerpiece to the modern living room” that could serve as a gateway into the home for Apple’s expanding ecosystem.So, what are you waiting for?

If Apple does build a TV, I agree that it might as well go the 4K route. But short of going all-in on a product category that is insanely competitive, I don’t know why Apple wouldn't want to simplify everything by developing a new version of an Apple TV device that features an HDMI pass-through. In that scenario, Apple can easily hijack the user experience  while still supporting traditional pay-TV services and layering in iTunes and any other OTT fare it (and its users) desire. Building a TV and perhaps its own virtual MVPD offering could come later when or if the economics to do so improve.

But in the meantime, we've got a fresh hype cycle underway on the elusive Apple Television, the techno-unicorn of this age.