Icahn Offers a Hedge for Chesapeake Energy

[soonerguru]

To me this illustrates why I would never choose to work for a publicly traded company.

[adaniel]

To me this illustrates why I would never choose to work for a publicly traded company.

I've worked for a family owned private company in which the family was as greedy and ruthless as any spoiled Wall Street goon. Plus there was a lot of corporate "inbreeding," lots of ideas and leadership being recirculated 30 and 40 years after the fact. Being public does introduce a certain level of outside influence which, in moderate quatities, can keep things from getting stale within a business.

The problem comes when companies like CHK, in a effort to raise capital quickly, tout themselves as a hot, high growth stock, and produce crazy growth figures in the first couple of years. At one point they had a pitch that was very Penn Square Bank-ish. "Gas prices will keep going up, up, up!" CHK was always a popular pick on "Fast Money" and "Mad Money" and other financial infotainment shows from about 2005-2008. The thing is people who watch those shows could care less about the long term health of a company (No offense to anyone who watches these shows, but that's just my own experience). Its about make money tommorow, to hell with long term. These people get irritated when a company like CHK can't make money like that all the time. It is at the mercy of a single commodity price after all. Suddenly you have a management team that must respond to this sort of shortsided attitude.

There are several deep gas drillers out there that are publicly traded, making a (small) profit, and doing alright. You will have never heard their names mentioned on Fast Money, but unlike CHK they haven't completely sold themselves out to Wall Street either.