The Stratosphere and Arizona Charlies are changing hands now that New York investor Carl Icahn has decided to move on. He has made $1 billion on getting those very distressed properties up and running over the last seven or eight years.

Of course, he was helped by the folly of the Stratosphere’s original owner Bob Stupak. His overspending got the property into a pretty distressed state that allowed Icahn to buy not just low but really low. As Icahn has been saying since at least the 1980s when he was derided as a corporate raider who was only in it for the greenamail, that’s how the markets work.

Now, reports BusinessWeek, Icahn is cashing out his Las Vegas investments and some other holdings in energy to build a war chest to make an assault on the car industry. Domestic carmakers are having their worst run in years. Perhaps the last decade of cheap oil and SUVs gave them false confidence but they’ve been on a long downhill slide that was punctuated by the news Tuesday that Toyota has topped GM in first quarter sales for 2007.

Icahn sure is sticking to his plans to buy low. That’s the strategy of MGM Mirage majority-owner Kirk Kerkorian. He seems to be pushing for control of Chrysler after his recent tilt at GM. It’s hard to see how these guys can make money out of the car industry without jettisoning the dead weight of those fat union contracts. We all know that $1,500 a car is added to the average GM sticker to pay health benefits for past and present UAW members. People need cars but there’s going to blood on the floor before any owner gets the Big Three back into shape.