Bear Stearns Billionaire Blunder
At this point, the Bear Sterns debacle has gotten extensive coverage so I won’t comment on the unfortunate demise of this once mighty company. As I read through the news stories, though, I found one piece of information often significantly under reported:
Joseph C. Lewis, a British businessman, lost $1 billion on the sale of Bear Sterns!
OK, so the guy was a billionaire, and even after losing a cool billion he’s probably going to be just fine. Don’t lose any sleep over poor ol’ Joe. Still, it got me think about the very fine line and significant amount of luck that goes into becoming successful in business or otherwise for that matter.
Joe was so confident in Bear Stearns that he purchased the stock in large amounts at upwards of $150 per share just a few months ago. I’m sure Joe is a smart guy, or at least smarter than most, but this is a blunder of gigantic proportions. When Bear Sterns sold to JPMorgan, his cut was only $22 million.
photo credit: Shiny Things
What does this say for the rest of us? Certainly, Joe had probably taken big risks before and had them pay off. Perhaps he was overconfident, but who wouldn’t be as a billionaire. My gut tells me that he didn’t do anything stupid necessarily. Rather, a series of unfortunate events completely out of his control ended very negatively for him. The same probably holds true for a lot of his successes.
As I now look back at my early career, I had a few fortunate coincidences that played a major role in my future. There was the professor who just seemed to like me and consequently set me up with a job interview. There was the first candidate who declined a job offer to move with her husband leaving a position open for the second candidate: me. There was the boss who went to church with a VP at another company and introduced me resulting in a better job for me.
Let’s not lose the opportunity to reflect on Joe’s huge financial loss as an expression of the good and bad things in our lives that are out of our control and know that even very successful billionaire’s are subject to the same laws of probability. It’s the tie that binds us together.
