Ivan Boesky, the infamous inside trader who at least partially inspired the fictional character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street, died on Monday, his daughter confirmed. He was 87.
Marianne Boesky told CNN her father died in his sleep, but did not share additional details about his cause of death. In an Instagram post, she called him a “dedicated and loving father above all else.”
Boesky’s name became synonymous with financial greed in the 1980s, when, after making hundreds of millions by working on Wall Street, he told business school graduates University of California, Berkeley, that “greed is healthy.”
“Greed is all right, by the way,” he said, which inspired a similar speech in Wall Street. “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
It was his own self-pronounced greed that earned him the moniker “Ivan the Terrible”on a 1986 Time Magazine cover, and led to his downfall as one of Wall Street’s titans.
The Dec. 1, 1986, edition of Time.
Time
Boesky cashed in on the corporate takeover boom in the 1980s, using insider information—which he paid top dollar to receive—to cash in on pending deals before they were publicly announced.
By the time investigators caught on to his trading practices, Boesky was among the richest men on Wall Street, amassing a personal net worth as high as $280 million (about $818 million in today’s currency) and a trading portfolio valued at $3 billion (about $8.7 billion today), The New York Times reported.
As the feds closed in on him, Boesky agreed to turn on his former pals in service of saving himself. He recorded calls and meetings with his associates, which proved critical in investigators understanding how some on Wall Street manipulated stocks and caught word of takeover bids. He also helped the feds bust others who practiced insider trading, including the “junk bond king” Michael Milken.
Boesky pleaded guilty himself 1986 and was sentenced to three years of prison and fined $100 million. He was barred from securities trading for the rest of his life.
As alluded to in Wall Street, Boesky, like others who made their fortunes on the exchange, had his quirks. He claimed to have only slept approximately three hours a night, rising before the sun each morning to workout before riding a limousine to work—where he would work 18-hour days during the week. Former employees said he would stand most of the day and hardly eat, sometimes consuming nothing but copious amounts of coffee.
Ivan Boesky smiles outside his limousine in 1986.
Getty Images
Outside of work, Boesky was a man of high fashion and high living, the Times reported. In the 1980s, he owned a house on the French Riviera, a lavish Paris apartment, and a condo in Hawaii. He once arrived to a tennis match in a pink Rolls-Royce, and, on another occasion, arrived by helicopter to attend a lavish boat-cruise bar mitzvah.
“All that mattered to Ivan Boesky was making money,” Jeff Madrick, the author of Age of Greed, told the Times. “He found a path to that and he abused it badly.”
After his release from prison, Boesky divorced his wife of 30 years and successfully convinced a judge to award him $20 million in alimony and $180,000 a year from her, claiming his legal woes and fines had left him penniless.
Boesky, a Detroit native, took that money to purchase a home in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, where he quietly lived out the rest of his life.
Boesky is survived by his wife Ana, his five children, and four grandkids.
