A $200 million gift and a medical school
CORRECTION: The photo accompanying this interview originally misidentified the interviewee. His name is Dr. Kenneth Davis. The text has been corrected.
Carl Icahn made headlines again today — no, not about Netflix or another company he’s invested in or taken over. This time it’s for his $200 million donation to the Mt. Sinai Medical School in the Upper East Side in New York City. It’s a big donation, one that took about nine years to work out.
Dr. Kenneth Davis is the president and CEO of the Mount Sinai Medical Center that includes the school. He negotiated the deal with Icahn and says it took nearly a decade because “What we had to do was reach an agreement around how that would be formulated. He had IRS issues that he had to work through. We had some concerns [too] but ultimately, all the parties were able to get together.”
Dr. Davis is especially proud of what the medical school will be able to do with the money by way of medical research. His only problem now? Figuring out what to call his alma mater. He says, “As I left the signing ceremony with Carl, I thought how incredible it is that I’ve just changed the name of the medical school I went to and how would I refer to that medical school going forward? Did I go to the Mt. Sinai school of Medicine or the Carl Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai?”
He says it’s a good problem to have.
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