Fortune's JP Mangalindan interviewed eBay CEO John Donahue about Carl Icahn, board conflicts, and company strategy.

It's a hard hitting interview and there's some interesting replies:

On PayPal:

We have what others want: The only scale-payments platform in the digital area thus far. And one of the fundamental reasons PayPal has done what it's done is because it did it on top of eBay....

None of the other payments companies have had a flywheel to build on. Now, PayPal will be larger than the eBay Marketplace. PayPal has enormous potential....And that it'll be worth more three years from now together than by separating them today. I think the collective entity will be worth more together....Why would you divide up the data?! Everyone is paying millions to get to the data.

On board member conflicts such as with Marc Andreessen:

There are going to be conflicts, and when those happen, you recuse yourself. And if they're going to be material, you would step off the board.

On Carl Icahn.

We agreed to have ground rules. We agreed it would be off the record. This allowed an open conversation, and it was a good, mutually respectful dialogue that's different than all that stuff going on in the media. It was an intelligent, informed, mutual discussion.
Was there any gentleman's agreement to not criticize or "bad-mouth" each other publicly?
No! [laughs] But I'll say this about Carl. He said what he was going to do. We had different points of view.

On eBay share value:

The best way is to drive real, sustainable shareholder value. My goal is to have that $50 share value be $100, depending on a time frame....It's not a zero-sum game. I think Amazon can be a winner and Google can be a winner and eBay can be a winner.

 

Read more here: eBay's John Donahoe talks Icahn - Fortune Tech