Remember thpse rapacipus finan- ciers from the 1980s who took over underleveraged companies and stripped them clean of assets before selling them off? They're back in a somewhat different guise, politely rebranded as "activist investors," and this time around they are targeting the world's richest and most powerful firms. The battle between Apple and private-equity titan David Einhorn is probably the best evidence of this comeback. Einhorn brought a lawsuit, recently dropped, asking Apple to part with some of its $137 billion of spare cash in the form of shares yielding a rich 4% dividend. Apple, one of the world's most profitable firms, said, No, thank you, most likely believing that it could do better things with its money than Einhorn could (a sentiment with which I completely agree).
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