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There Will Be Blood

In an increasingly nasty proxy battle, Paul Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, is agitating for board seats and what it claims is long-overdue change at Big Oil’s Phillips 66, whose C.E.O. and chairman has chosen to dig in and fight.

paul singer
There is one proxy fight that has caught my eye this year: the battle between Elliott Investment Management, the hedge fund behemoth founded by billionaire Paul Singer, and Phillips 66, the Big Oil giant with a $43 billion market cap. Photo: Misha Friedman/Bloomberg/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
May 7, 2025

It’s been a relatively quiet proxy-contest season on Wall Street, with nothing even approaching last year’s conflagration between Disney’s Bob Iger and Nelson Peltz, the “Smiling Crocodile” who teamed up with fellow billionaire and Mar-a-Lago habitué Ike Perlmutter to agitate for changes and a few board seats in the Magic Kingdom. Peltz and Perlmutter lost resoundingly, as you’ll recall, and Iger got to celebrate maintaining the status quo.