Twice in five years, the same activist investor bought a stake in a Dallas company, forced its leadership and its board to change course, waited for the stock to move, and left. Both times, it was gone before anyone could actually find out whether the change it demanded made the company better.
AT&T, headquartered in downtown Dallas since 2008, closed its $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner on June 14, 2018, adding it to a company that had already spent roughly $49 billion on DirecTV in 2015. Between debt assumed and cash paid, the two deals put AT&T's total outlay north of $100 billion.[1]
On September 9, 2019, Elliott Management disclosed a $3.2 billion stake and sent AT&T's board a letter — signed by partners Jesse Cohn and Marc Steinberg — describing the company as "a sprawling collection of businesses battling well-funded competitors, in new markets, with different regulations, and saddled with the financial repercussions of its choices." Elliott's letter named specific fixes: divest non-core assets including DirecTV and AT&T's Mexican wireless business, adopt a formal capital allocation framework, and add outside operational expertise to the board. Its own math put the payoff at $60-plus a share by the end of 2021, roughly 65 percent above where the stock closed the day before.[2]
AT&T conceded quickly — two new independent directors, though not Elliott's own nominees.[3] CEO Randall Stephenson announced his retirement on April 24, 2020, effective that July; AT&T frames it as a succession process already underway, though CNBC reported at the time that Elliott had initially pushed for an outside CEO candidate and only came around to Stephenson's chosen successor, John Stankey.[4]
Elliott sold out entirely in the third quarter of 2020 — about a year after its letter, and with the stock nowhere near its $60 target.[5] The actual divestiture it had demanded didn't happen until nearly two years later: AT&T spun off WarnerMedia and merged it into Discovery in a deal that closed April 8, 2022, valued at roughly $43 billion — against the $85.4 billion AT&T paid for Time Warner alone, before DirecTV or the assumed debt.[6] Elliott was not a shareholder by the time that verdict came in. It had already been exited.
Southwest Airlines, headquartered at Dallas Love Field, had never made a comparable acquisition — Elliott's June 10, 2024 letter, disclosing a $1.9 billion stake, went after something else entirely: "outdated software, a dated monetization strategy and antiquated operational processes," pointing specifically to the airline's December 2022 holiday meltdown. The letter noted Southwest's stock had fallen more than 50 percent in three years and called for CEO Bob Jordan's removal, faulting Jordan and Executive Chairman Gary Kelly's combined 74 years at the company for an insular board with no outside airline experience.[7] A follow-up presentation that August added a specific target: Southwest's decades-old open-seating policy, which Elliott argued left real ancillary revenue on the table.[8]
Unlike AT&T, this one went to a real proxy fight. It settled on October 23, 2024: Gary Kelly's retirement moved up to November 1; six other directors left with him; five Elliott nominees — David Cush, Sarah Feinberg, David Grissen, Gregg Saretsky, and Patricia Watson — joined the board, alongside one additional new director from Southwest's own separate refresh. Bob Jordan, the executive Elliott had originally wanted gone, kept his job.[9]
The changes that followed were real ones. Southwest had already announced in July 2024 that it would end fifty years of open seating in favor of assigned and premium seats; in March 2025, it announced its first-ever checked-bag fees, a reversal CNBC explicitly tied to "months of pressure from activist Elliott Investment Management."[10] The stock, which had bottomed in mid-2025, was up more than 55 percent by December.[11]
And then the same pattern repeated. Elliott began selling Southwest shares in December 2025, sold more in February 2026, and had cut its stake from a peak near 16 percent down to roughly 9 percent by the most recent filings. Two of its own five board nominees, Cush and Saretsky, left the board that same February.[12] Southwest's turnaround, if it holds, will play out with fewer of the people who forced it still in the room.
These aren't the same complaint. AT&T's problem was a bad acquisition; Southwest's was a legacy culture and an outdated product. Treating them as one identical playbook would flatten a real difference — Elliott never got board seats at AT&T, and Southwest's five-director settlement is, by Elliott's own account, the largest board change it has ever forced at a U.S. company.[9]
There's a real, honest case for what Elliott did at both companies. AT&T's own board approved two enormous acquisitions without a coherent case for how they fit together, then let the resulting debt sit for years with no real capital-discipline framework attached to it — someone had to force that accounting, and the board that approved the deals was never going to force it on itself. Southwest's board had two executives holding a combined 74 years of tenure between them and no outside airline experience in the room at all, the textbook shape of a board too comfortable to catch its own company's failure before customers did it for them. Measured on their own terms, neither set of changes — new directors with real industry backgrounds, a formal capital allocation framework, a seating and bag-fee model that brought Southwest in line with every competitor it has — looks unreasonable.
The problem isn't the changes. It's that Elliott's own profit was never actually tied to whether those changes turned out to be right. AT&T's own price target was $60 a share by the end of 2021; Elliott sold out in the third quarter of 2020, more than a year ahead of that deadline, with the stock nowhere near the number Elliott itself had proposed. It got paid on the market's belief that change was coming, not on the results of the change. That's the same gap that keeps showing up whenever the actual variable is who controls a decision, not what the decision is: a decision-maker whose incentive is calibrated to something other than the outcome it's supposedly chasing. An owner who has to live with a company for decades and an activist fund that's structurally gone before the real answer arrives aren't taking the same risk, even when they're asking for the exact same fix. Not because the fix was wrong either time. Because knowing whether it was right was never actually part of either fund's business model.
What's identical across both cases is the shape of the exit, not the complaint. In both, Elliott's actual holding period was calibrated to how long it took the stock to move, not to how long it would take to know whether its own prescription made the company better. At AT&T, that meant leaving before the divestiture it demanded had even closed. At Southwest, it means selling down the stake and losing its own board seats while the turnaround is still in progress. Whether either company is actually better off five years out, the fund that forced the question usually isn't there to answer it — by design, it's already gone.