HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024242.tif

paneled station wagon to the family’s country estate and Sulzberger talking to the chauffer on a phone from the backseat to the front.) Another Dalton father, asking “wouldn’t you rather be rich than be a teacher?” introduced him to Bear Stearn’s chief Ace Greenberg. Hence, Epstein, like many in the late ‘70s, arrived on Wall Street. If on one side of Wall Street there were the salesmen (the Wolf of Wall Street model), on the other side there was a new sort of finance type able to embrace a level of acute abstraction. “In the past,” says Epstein, “investing was all about reputations and relationships. You invested in a company on the basis of who was running it. Did they have integrity? Were they married? Good family men? It was a ‘50s mentality. But in the mid ‘70s options started to be traded. In essence, the first formal derivatives. The movement of this instrument is not directly attached to the stock price. The world of investing began turning from relationships to math. In a sense I didn’t really make money as much as I tried to create it..” He soon became the protégée of Jimmy Cayne (also hired by Ace Greenberg on a whim—he met him in a bridge game), who would go on to run Bear and to lose his fortune in Bear’s 2006 collapse). Epstein’s leave- taking or ouster from Bear was the result of politics, envy, overreaching, or a securities violation, or...unclear. But, no matter, when he left in 1982 he took with him billionaire clients, including Marvin HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024242