Banach spaces for which the space of operators has $2^{\mathfrak c}$ closed ideals

Abstract: We formulate general conditions which imply that $L(X,Y)$, the space of operators from a Banach space $X$ to a Banach space $Y$, has $2^{\mathfrak c}$ closed ideals where $\mathfrak c$ is the cardinality of the continuum. These results are applied to classical sequence spaces and Tsirelson type spaces. In particular, we prove that the cardinality of the set of closed ideals in $L(\ell_p\oplus\ell_q)$ is exactly $2^{\mathfrak c}$ for all $1<p<q<\infty$, which in turn gives an alternate proof of the recent result of Johnson and Schechtman that $L(L_p)$ also has $2^{\mathfrak c}$ closed ideals for $1<p\neq 2<\infty$.