the high, windowless, wainscoted room, under a chandelier, two dozen heads swivelled to look at Ben. Jamie Dimon was there. Lloyd Blankfein, whoâd succeeded Hank as head of Goldman. The Johns: John Mack from Morgan Stanley and John Thain from Merrill Lynch. It was like a meeting of the five families in the New York mob. A predatorsâ convention. Lehman hadnât been invited.
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Reading Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., by Ron Chernow, Verne was struck by the magnateâs daily luncheon routine. Each day, without fail, heâd sit down with his key people, have lunch, and talk with them. At first, the meetings included only Rockefeller and the four cofounders of Standard Oil. But as the decades wore on and the company
grew, the meetings came to include Rockefellerâs nine directors. And yes, they continued to meet daily.
A century later, Steve Jobs repeated the same ritual, having lunch almost every day with Apple design genius Jonathan IveâŚ
Consciously or not, these leaders understood the root meaning of the word company: âto share bread.
Jerry York, Rick Thoman, and John Joyce, three great financial executives who instilled a level of productivity, discipline, and probing analysis into a company that appeared to value these quite lightly when I arrivedâŚ
29: Capital and Wealth
âI read with interest a Harvard Business School case in which a senior Morgan Stanley executive recounted the companyâs response to the incident. I anticipated at least a mention of Rick Rescorla, the head of security for that company, who ordered evacuation in defiance of the Port Authorityâs advice to occupants to stay put, with the result that only thirteen of Morgan Stanleyâs 3,700 employees in the towers died. They included Rescorla himself, who returned to the South Tower to ensure that no one remained inside the wrecked structure, and who is now buried in the Cornish village where he was born. There was no such mention, but considerable self-congratulation for the contingency planning which enabled trading to resume less than an hour after the first plane hit the North Tower. Such are the priorities of modern financiers.
The independent directors laid out what they knew: This was not the first time that senior leaders had described Altman in this way. In total, the three of them had heard similar feedback from at least seven people within one to two levels of Altman, inclusive of Sutskever, Murati, and Amodei, who oversaw safety and nonsafety parts of the company. Several had described Altmanâs behaviors as abuse and manipulation; most had highlighted his lack of honesty and their inability to trust what he said. Then there were the myriad other issues that the independent directors themselves had found, including the disempowerment of the nonprofit; Altman not disclosing his legal ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund; Altman neglecting to mention Microsoftâs DSB breach; Altman trying to force DâAngelo and now apparently Toner off the board.
James was twenty-seven and never had a boss again. Until that moment, he and Roland had lived as employees, as if in the warm, dark, cosy-fetid hold of a ship. What happened up at the helm was not their concern. Their preoccupations were how to get a better position, and the whims and characters of their superiors and colleagues. Even James had never cared about what was best for McKinsey. Now, however, they were up and exposed. The wind blew away the comfy indoor reek; the horizon was a wide blue empty circle around them, as if the ship were the fluttering needle on a gigantic compass. And they had to choose the direction.