Paul Touradji, commodity trader extraordinaire, once sent an employee to fly in a tiny helicopter over Madagascar to survey the coffee crop there. Touradji liked first-hand information about the things he bought and sold. The poor employee crashed and had...
Abilio Diniz can run backward. On a treadmill. In the dark. At age 77. Don’t hate Abilio Diniz. He wants you to do all the things he can do when you, too, are pushing 80: box, play squash, pump iron, even...
When Larry Robbins was a boy in the Chicago suburbs, his father, Sheldon, worked two jobs and wasn’t around much. If the young Robbins wanted to see him on weekends, he had to travel to Arlington Park, a nearby horse-racing...
Mark Rachesky, a Stanford University M.D. who’s never practiced, worked for deal junkie Carl Icahn for six years. Then he left to start his own company: MHR Fund Management LLC. Master and apprentice met again in 2008, when Icahn, a...
Andrew Feldstein, the Harvard-educated lawyer who leads BlueMountain Capital Management LLC, has had a good run. His firm boasts just one losing year since it started in 2003. Assets have swelled to $12.7 billion, and he has 150 people in...
Past the two Bentleys in the driveway and beyond the pool and mini water park, the home theater and a sports bar hung with enough memorabilia to equip a basketball team, Tom DeMark has his office — a dark, wood-...
One thing Sean Healey missed most when he left Goldman Sachs Group in 1995 was his business card. Flashing it was a surefire way to convince people of his credentials. “People would say, ‘Oh, you must be a genius,’ ” Healey jokes. Then he moved...
In late January, billionaire Steven A. Cohen hosted a golf outing for two dozen people at the Bear Lakes Country Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Most of his guests were investors in his hedge fund firm, SAC Capital Advisors LP, plus a few prospects....
Bruce Wasserstein, dead for two years, still casts a pall over the Rogue River Valley of southern Oregon....
Philip Falcone left his hometown of Chisholm in northern Minnesota’s rusting Iron Range in 1980 in the passenger seat of a 12-year-old Mercury Cougar that cost $150. He became one of the richest men in New York. Then he dabbled...