The Scammer That Ruined Wall Street

Ivan Boesky is the money-loving inside trader whose behavior in the 1980s inspired the famous fictional Wall Street character Gordon Gekko.
He really did say greed is good-and was applauded at a Berkeley business school graduation in 1986.
In just under 25 years, Boesky went from a college failure serving as a law clerk in Detroit to being the man who almost single-handedly killed the Wall Street boom era of the 1980s.
Unlike any other time, the 1980s was the biggest decade in New York’s history and more specifically Wall Street.
It was labeled “the decade of greed”, and while that's every decade on Wall Street, in the 1980s the unapologetic pursuit of money became a sacrament.
At the apex of his renown, before his spectacular fall, he parlayed a 10-year run of bafflingly prescient stock picks (using his wife’s money) into finance superstardom, with laudatory magazine profiles, a book deal, and lecture invitations from the best business schools.
From an early age, Boesky knew he wanted to be rich but struggled to find his way.
He was born in 1937, to middle-class Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father was a Detroit restauranteur who owned delicatessens, restaurants and bars.
Boesky’s origin story was always shrouded in mystery.
But in 1962, his luck took a turn. At the age of 25, he married Seema Silberstein, who came from a wealthy real estate family that owned the Beverly Hills Hotel. And everything changed for him.
By 1975, Boesky opened a stock brokerage, called Ivan F. Boesky & Company, with $700,000 in seed money that mostly came from his wife’s family.
Ivan Boesky was what’s known as an arbitrageur and relaxed financial regulation under Ronald Reagan opened the door for a flood of corporate mergers and acquisitions in the 1980s, creating a fertile ground for traders like Boesky to make bank.
As a result, Boesky became the highest-paid trader on Wall Street in 1985. At the peak of his investment business, Boesky was overseeing an investment fund with over $3 billion in assets and he had a net worth of more than $200 million (more than $475 million in today’s money) and a place on the Forbes 400 list of America’s wealthiest people.
00:00 - Intro
01:00 - The Rise of an Arbitrageur
06:44 - Dark Edge
08:40 - The Financier
10:59 - Party's Over
This Ivan Boesky documentary is based on Den of Thieves book by James B. Stewart and CNBC Empires of New York.

[@anshulgandhi965]

Great video, Im surprised this channel has so few subscribers. Keep up the good work.

[@bad_money]

Thank you! I appreciate the support 🙏

[@thehindiscreen]

Yo! Just a tickle in my mind.... But will it be possible to video edit for ya....... Am a really good editor though, and not flexing but i do got a good portfolio!! And edited for Iman back in 2020, that's way back but that flex still works... Haha! 😅

[@aimanmarzuqi4804]

From everything that I know about him, Ivan is just generally a very unpleasant guy. He's a hypocrite and never owns up to his own mistake.

[@jayelm5392]

His mom Lee Boesky was a very nice person. She was the 2nd wife of my Grandfather , Harold Ekelman.