The Smart Man

Carl Icahn ups his stakes in Apple and eBay

Carl Icahn continues to eat up shares in his favorite tech companies after doing battle with them.

Carl Icahn

A Thursday regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission spotted by The Wall Street Journal showed Icahn's stake in eBay at 27.8 million shares as of March 31. With eBay stock trading at around $51 Friday morning, Icahn's holdings in the company are now worth more than $1.4 billion.

Icahn's contentious relationship with eBay aired in public earlier this year when the two sides fought over such issues as the alleged conflicts of interest among board members and the future of PayPal. After several months of trading insults and accusations online, Icahn and eBay finally made peace last month.

The billionaire investor withdrew his proposal that the board spin off eBay's PayPal business and appoint two of his choices to the board of directors. In return, eBay appointed Icahn nominee David Dorman as an independent director to its board.

Icahn also increased his stake in Apple by 2.8 million shares to more than 7.5 million shares, the Journal added. With Apple trading at around $587 Friday morning, those shares are worth around $4.4 billion.

Icahn's dealings with the iPhone maker have been more civil, though he has publicly criticized the board for not aggressively buying back more stock as a way to spend excess cash and increase shareholder value.

In January, Icahn tweeted that "Apple's board is doing great disservice to shareholders by not having markedly increased its buyback." But in February, Apple bought back $14 billion in shares, prompting Icahn to pull back on his proposal that the company spend at least $50 billion on stock repurchases in 2014.

Buy an abandoned amusement park on eBay

Discarded dinosaur statues littering Spreepark make the place feel more like "Land of the Lost" than Euro Disney.

(Credit: emil250 video screenshot by CNET)

Ride a rickety roller coaster without standing in line. Stay on the Ferris wheel as long as you darn want. Woo someone special with a romantic row around a swamp.

It will only cost you 1.62 million euros ($2.2 million) to make an abandoned Berlin amusement park all yours. Yep, Spreepark is now for sale on eBay.

Granted, it's been closed for more than a decade ever since its former manager used "The Flying Carpet" ride equipment to smuggle cocaine in and out of Germany. And the place needs a bit of vacuuming and dusting. But now new owners can breathe life back into it.

The only things that stand in line at Spreepark these days are the dead trees.

(Credit: emil250 video screenshot by CNET)

If you do plan to buy the property, keep in mind the stipulation that Spreepark's land remain as an amusement or recreational park until 2061. Most potential buyers who might consider the space for condos or hotels probably aren't interested.

Built in 1969, Spreepark was then called Kulturpark Planterwald. The Berlin Wall was still up, making it one of the most popular destinations for East Berliners who wanted to add some fun to their lives.

The amusement park is quite the fixer-upper, with boarded-up rides, overgrown plants, and graffiti everywhere thanks to trespassers. While limited tours of Spreepark still go on complete with a newly opened cafe, the rides remain closed and rusting away. The park still needs a lot of work and love -- and perhaps an exorcist to get rid of any vengeful clown ghosts.When East and West Germany reunified and the wall came down in 1990, the park was renamed Spreepark and got more of a Westernized makeover including the addition of a water landscape, roller coasters and an English village. But the park accrued large debts and went under new management in 2002, who then misused the park as their own personal drug trafficking center.