Rock-star bond investor Jeffrey Gundlach made $70 billion at his old firm TCW before they fired him for stealing company secrets and, according to a lawsuit filed against him by the firm, keeping 70 pornographic magazines and videos, 12 “sexual devices,” and several bags of marijuana in his office. Before that, he was just your average stoner, according to Fortune, which this week describes how a guy who “played drums in a variety of rock bands,” worked a “dreary” day job in his early 20s, and speaks in “manic stream-of-consciousness” monologues came to be one of the world’s most profitable and notorious traders.
One night in 1985 he was watching an episode of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” that described the most lucrative careers. Gundlach decided he would, as he told one interviewer, “figure out my life.”
Damn it. If only we had watched that show when we were figuring things out. Instead we watched Days of Our Lives, so we thought all we had to do when we grew up was walk to and fro in a well-decorated parlor sipping bourbon.
Firing the $70 billion man: Full version [Fortune/CNN]
