He has aided fallen financiers including AIG’s Hank Greenberg and Enron’s Andy Fastow.
.. But he is also an inveterate risk taker — a lover of the action in Las Vegas as well as at his firm Boies Schiller & Flexner — who goes the extra mile for clients. He did a favour for Mr Weinstein, and it is costing him in the court of public opinion.
Mr Boies signed a contract on July 11 hiring a business intelligence firm called Black Cube to spy on Mr Weinstein’s accusers, The New Yorker magazine reported. Run by former Israeli intelligence agents, its operatives used false identities to gain the trust of the people in the case and collect information about them. Its objectives included helping Mr Weinstein “stop the publication of a negative article in a leading NY newspaper”.
However, the mis-step by Mr Boies was hardly an isolated incident. After allegations emerged in 2015 that the blood tests designed by Silicon Valley laboratory Theranos were inaccurate, Mr Boies could be found sitting on the board of the company while his firm was providing it legal advice.
.. he would listen to his mother read and memorise the information. His powers of recall served him well.
.. His courtroom style is notoriously disarming. His attire — typically, a Lands’ End jacket and trousers — comes straight from the heartland. But his questions are hard. After he was done with Westmoreland, the general said he wished he had a lawyer like Mr Boies.
.. Mr Boies matched wits so successfully with Bill Gates that the software supremo was left shaken. “I’m the one with the good memory,” Mr Gates protested to Vanity Fair. “He’s the one trying to confuse people.”
.. Mr Olson. “He has overcome a reading disability. He processes information very, very quickly. He remembers things very well.”
.. He is a man known for conducting several telephone conversations at once. Even as he was responding to the Weinstein scandal, Mr Boies returned to the headlines in a controversial dispute involving American football.
Meet the woman who gives bridge tips to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates
“There’s a big difference between Bill’s and Warren’s approach to learning the game,” Osberg said. “Bill is very scientific. He reads and studies on his own. Warren enjoys playing. Warren has good instincts.”
“When I first met Warren, his game was ragged around the edges,” she said. “We would play in the evening, and I would go through teaching points. He absorbed it like a sponge. Bill is the same way. Pretty big brain capacity.”
.. Some people have paid millions just to have lunch with the Oracle of Omaha. Osberg trades gossip with him on the phone and plays bridge remotely with him three to four times a week.
.. Bear Stearns, the investment firm that failed in the 2008 crash, was known as “the bridge firm” because its top management and many of its quant geeks were players.
.. Famed value investor and Buffett mentor Ben Graham reportedly compared the strategy of bridge to the discipline of long-term investing.
.. “As Graham pointed out, playing your hand right — in bridge or in the stock market — generally leads to success in the long term. It doesn’t, however, guarantee you success right now. Sometimes, playing a hand the right way leads to failure; sometimes picking a stock for the right reasons results in a loss.
.. “Bridge can teach an investor the importance of sticking to a well-thought-out strategy.”
.. “Everyone loses more than they win,” Osberg said. “Losing is much more common. You have to develop a thick skin.”
.. But Buffett, the steely capital allocator who moves world markets with mere utterances, had enough.
Osberg recalls: “He said, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ It was so stressful, he didn’t want to play in the finals.”
.. “I had no business being in it at all,” Buffett said. “We were playing people not as good as Sharon was, but a whole lot better than I was. I dropped out. I was on the board of USAir at the time, so I said I had to get back to a board meeting. This was not great behavior on my part. I love the game, but playing in tournaments is too many hours of concentration.”
At her peak, Osberg was one of the top players in the world.
“I am no longer a serious player,” she said. “I used to play just to win. Now I play for the beauty of the game.
A Solution When a Nation’s Schools Fail
“We have to do something radical,” he added.
So Liberia is handing over some public schools to Bridge International Academies, a private company backed by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, to see if it can do better.
So far, it seems it can — much better. An interim study just completedshows Bridge schools easily outperforming government-run schools in Liberia, and a randomized trial is expected to confirm that finding. It would be odd if schools with teachers and books didn’t outperform schools without them.
.. The idea of turning over public schools to a for-profit company sparks outrage in some quarters. There’s particular hostility to Bridge, because it runs hundreds of schools, both public and private, in poor countries (its private schools in other countries charge families about $7 a month).
.. “Bridge’s for-profit educational model is robbing students of a good education,” Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, declared last fall.
.. I understand critics’ fears (and share some about for-profit schools in the U.S.). They see handing schools over to Bridge as dismantling the public education system — one of the best ideas in human history — for private profit.
.. Americans wonder why 60 million elementary school-age children worldwide don’t go to school. It’s no wonder if you have to pay under-the-table school fees and know that years of “education” will get your children nothing.
Five Men Now Hold as Much Wealth as Half of the World’s Population Combined
A new analysis of 2016 data shows that five men now possess as much wealth as half of the world’s population combined. The five men—Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Spanish businessman Amancio Ortega, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, American investor Warren Buffett and Mexican telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim—combined hold $400 billion. Slim is a major shareholder in The New York Times, while Bezos owns The Washington Post.