American business magnate Carl Icahn ups his stake in Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two

American business magnate Carl Icahn has increased his stake in video game publisher Take-Two Interactive Software from 11.69 percent to 12.9 percent, according to a regulatory filing made today.

Reuters reports that this is the fourth time since Nov. 5 Icahn has bought shares in Take-Two, which has led to him owning more than 12 percent of the company's stock.

Icahn is known as an "activist investor" – an individual or group that buys a large number of shares in a company in order to affect change.

Icahn recently purchased a 10 percent stake in Netflix and said in an interview with Reuters that he had not ruled out a possible hostile takeover of the company. In 2007 Icahn owned 33.5 million shares in Motorola and made a bid for a seat on the company's board but was turned down by the majority shareholders. In 2008, he bought 50 million shares in Yahoo before commencing a proxy fight (action taken by shareholders when they disagree with some aspect of corporate governance) against the company for rejecting a takeover bid from Microsoft. The proxy fight was dropped a month later when Icahn was given a seat on Yahoo's board of directors.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia told Reuters that as Take-Two gets closer to the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, Icahn is upping his stake in the publisher. "This is just more endorsement of how he sees fundamentals of Take-Two developing," Bhatia said.

Take-Two's shares closed on the Nasdaq at $11.51 today.