Felix Salmon

It’s easy to see why Marc Andreessen is grinning on the front cover of Wired magazine this month. Inside, there’s an interview where he’s introduced as a “tenacious pioneer”, one of “our biggest heroes”, and someone who was so far ahead of the curve on his “five big ideas” that he had them “before everyone else”.

It’s easy to admire Andreessen, a man whose disarming and engaging blog was a must-read during the financial crisis, when he would provide some very smart perspective from the point of view of a wealthy man, thousands of miles away from the epicenters of the crisis, who had some very sharp insights into what was going on. He then launched Andreessen Horowitz, and the blog became more of a public seminar in how to be senior management, which is great if you like that sort of thing. And it’s true that the five big ideas in the interview are all pretty revolutionary things, although I don’t think he actually had them all first.

But Andreessen has never really been a public intellectual. His single greatest achievement — the creation of the world’s first web browser, Mosaic — took place under the auspices of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. But ever since then he’s been a red-blooded capitalist, founding and funding a long series of for-profit companies, and becoming one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Silicon Valley in the process.

And when you look at Marc the capitalist, rather than at Marc the ideas guy, the hero-worship becomes a bit more difficult. I certainly like the way that he’s dragging Silicon Valley into the world of philanthropy, where it’s historically been very weak. But a lot of my own Wired story, last month, can be read as a push back against the IPO culture which Andreessen, almost more than anybody else, has managed to create.

“Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist,” I wrote in that piece, and Andreessen is Exhibit A if you want to look for such a person. His first company, Netscape, lost the Browser Wars and ended up getting sold to AOL. His second company, Loudcloud, was (to be charitable) too far ahead of its time, so it “pivoted” into something called Opsware; eventually Andreessen managed to sell it off to HP. His third company, Ning, was even less successful, and ended up buried somewhere in Glam Media. None of them exist today in any recognizable form; none of them ever made much money; and none of them even really made it as far as building anything approaching a permanent income stream.

The Netscape IPO, in 1994 1995, was in its own way revolutionary. It broke the rules by going public without ever having made any money, and it also had that eye-popping first-day rise, from the issue price of $28 to as high as $75 in the first day’s trading. For the first time, people in Silicon Valley understood that you could make enormous sums of money just by timing the markets — buying in at a low valuation and selling at a high valuation — even if the underlying company never made any money at all.

Andreessen’s current company, Andreessen Horowitz, is devoted to doing exactly that. Andreessen Horowitz does provide a bit of expert advice and name recognition, but at heart it doesn’t make anything at all; its sole predictable income stream is the management fee it skims off while investing other people’s money. Those investors, in turn, are not particularly interested in creating long-lasting standalone companies which have large profits and create jobs. Instead, they’re primarily interested in buying into any company, no matter how flash-in-the-pan, where Andreessen Horowitz can exit its investment for a large multiple of whatever it bought in at.

After all, that’s how Andreessen made his money. I’ve never met anybody who thought that Netscape was a good acquisition for AOL, or that HP gained much from buying Opsware beyond getting Andreessen to sit on its famously-dysfunctional board. (He became the semi-official spokesman for the board in 2010, which did almost nothing to improve the board’s reputation, but did quite a lot to hurt Andreessen’s.) In many ways, Andreessen’s entire fortune has been built on the greater-fool theory: if you build something trendy enough, there’s probably going to be a huge lumbering company out there somewhere willing to overpay for it. Hence the buzziness of the Wired interview — clouds! social! SAAS!

Andreessen’s also very shilly, when it comes to his own businesses: when Ning finally died, for instance, he put up a blog post all about how the team there had “brilliantly executed a dramatic transformation of the company”. The fact is, as a close reading of the Wired interview will attest, that while Andreessen does have a lot of good ideas, brilliant execution is not at the top of his list of abilities. His own social-media company went nowhere, and his consolation prize — a seat on the Facebook board — is so important that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t even bother to consult him before dropping $1 billion on Instagram. His main job there is to ensure that Mark can do whatever he wants, to provide a layer of insulation between Zuckerberg and shareholders. Meanwhile, the Twitter guys didn’t let Andreessen Horowitz invest in their company, forcing AH to buy its stake in the shadowy secondary market instead.

While Andreessen is very good at making money, then, he’s much less good at creating lasting value for the long-term shareholders of his companies. In his world, buy-and-hold public shareholders are the patsies, the people left holding the bag when the fast money has long since departed. He’s smart; the rest of us are chumps. I guess it makes perfect sense that he’s recruited Larry Summers as a Special Advisor.

Update: I should have mentioned (I was going to, and forgot) that Mosaic 0.9b is, to this day, my favorite-ever web browser. It was a beautiful thing, which worked wonderfully. And yes, in large part it was responsible for The Internet As We Know It today. Andreessen’s influence is felt far beyond the companies he started. But there’s another thing that Netscape started, which is the monster funding round which is so big that no one (except a true giant like Microsoft) will dare compete. A correspondent writes:

Firms such as his have been leading truly insane rounds lately, sometimes in excess of $100 million. This is a different kind of investment than traditional venture capital. Under the old model, a hundred companies raised a million dollars each. Market competition then (theoretically) selected the best. Under this new model, kings are made, and there is no competition. Who would compete with a company that just raised $100 million in a day? Who would invest in a company that would dare to compete with such a sudden colossus?

This kingmaker strategy (also at work in the payments world, see Square) is the opposite of portfolio diversification. It encourages the formation of massive bubbles. And it locks out true innovation to the extent that the kingmakers choose incorrectly–which they often do.

Update 2: Chris O’Brien, writing in 2009 when Andreessen Horowitz was launched, made much the same points in a more rigorous and quantitative way. It’s a really good post, you should read it.

Andrew Ross Sorkin takes a look at the private life of Apple’s chairman today, passing on rumors about activity he clearly doesn’t want publicized, in the face of stony silence from Apple. But hey, Sorkin’s a journalist, I guess that’s what journalists do.

The column is headlined “The Mystery of Steve Jobs’s Public Giving,” but really there’s no mystery at all: there is no public giving from Steve Jobs. Sorkin isn’t happy about this. “Most American billionaires have taken up philanthropy in a public way and helped inspire future generations of charitable giving,” he writes, concluding that “perhaps” in future years Jobs might “inspire his legions of admirers to give.”

Some of Sorkin’s points are good ones. There’s no good reason, for instance, for Jobs failing to reinstate Apple’s philanthropic programs, which he cut on the grounds of wanting “to restore the company’s profitability.” Similarly, Apple’s failure to match its employees’ charitable giving does make it stand out — and not in a good way — from its Silicon Valley peers.

I think this is maybe a downside of Jobs’s famous micromanaging: if he’s personally not interested in something, then his entire company becomes uninterested in it.

Now there are good reasons why Jobs might not be much of a philanthropist, at least in public. For one thing, it’s far from clear that seeing billionaires give away lots of money and put their names on hospital wings does any good at all in terms of inspiring other people to make charitable donations. So if a private man like Jobs wants to make his charitable donations privately or anonymously, I don’t see much if any harm in that. And the coverage of Jobs in recent days is proof positive that he’s hardly in need of good press.

On top of that, effective philanthropy is hard work. Just ask Bill Gates. If it’s as difficult to give away money as it is to make it, and if you’re already stretched between making Apple insanely great, spending time with your family, and dealing with personal health issues, then it’s reasonable not to even try on the philanthropy front.

The sad fact of the matter is that Jobs’s wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, will almost certainly outlive him; what’s more, she is more familiar with the philanthropic world than he is, sitting on the boards of Teach for America and the New Schools Venture Fund, among others. Jobs is a technology visionary; that doesn’t make him a great philanthropist. Maybe he’s simply and lovingly trusting his wife to be able to take care of such things after he’s gone. That would be a very admirable and selfless act.

It’s a sad day: only this morning I was reminiscing about my days exploring the Apple Macintosh in Palo Alto in 1984. Like much of the world right now, I’m reliving Steve Jobs’s greatest hits on YouTube, I’ve got a bit of a tear in my eye, and yet I can’t imagine how Jobs could possibly go out on a higher note than this.

Jobs took Xerox PARC’s ideas about what the personal computer could be and made them reality; he brought back Apple Computer from the brink of death to being the most valuable company in the world; he created a whole new class of electronic device, with the iPad; he even reinvented the telephone. And, of course, he’s still around, at least for the time being — he’ll stay on as Apple chairman (and, in one of the most touching parts of his resignation letter, as “Apple employee”).

So thank you, Steve, for everything you’ve done. You’ve relieved me of more money than I care to mention in public, and I don’t begrudge you a cent of it. In fact, even with the massive run-up in Apple’s share price over these past years, I’ve always been convinced that the best use of $1,000 or so has always been to buy an Apple computer, rather than Apple stock. The extra productivity conferred by the machine, I’m convinced, will give you a much better return on your money than any equity.

Here at Reuters, I made sure that I could work on a Mac before I accepted this job, and even though we’re standardized on PCs, you see Apples all over the company, up to and including the CEO’s office. None of that is going to change with Jobs’s departure as CEO. Does Apple still have an outsize personality who can slice away extraneous features on hardware, say no to the demands of the marketplace, and give us not what we think we want but what we never knew we wanted? I think it does: Jony Ive fits the bill quite nicely. And Apple’s amazing relations with its suppliers — the way that it can get chips and hardware into its devices that the rest of the world can’t get its hands on for any amount of money — is now baked in to the organization, rather than being reliant on a single man.

The formula, then, is clear. And with or without Jobs, Apple is, for the foreseeable future, going to coin simply astonishing amounts of money. It made $7.3 billion of profit just in the last quarter, on revenues of an almost unimaginable $28.6 billion. That makes Apple one of the most profitable companies the world has ever seen — and makes its stock look almost cheap, even at a market cap of $350 billion.

No one man can be responsible for all or even most of that kind of performance. Jobs has always been the exception who proves the rule as far as the cult of the CEO is concerned — he’s one of very, very few CEOs who really did make an enormous difference to their company. But even so, he’s just one guy, and he’s built around him a super-talented team who know exactly what’s expected of them. We’re not going to see Tim Cook coming out and talking about “one more thing” at a WWDC keynote presentation, but we don’t need to. Apple is a dominant company now, and is more than big enough to be able to withstand a leadership change at the top.

Today’s news, and tomorrow’s, will rightly be all about Jobs. But in a few years’ time, I look forward to the seeing the case studies showing how Apple, seeing an entirely predictable event coming down the road, set up an elegant and model handover from Jobs to Cook. Jobs knows that he will be judged on this — and I’m quietly confident that he’s done it perfectly.

The IMF has released a one-page factsheet on the selection process for its top job, which is not very easy to understand. But the main message is reasonably clear: we have a process for choosing the managing director which we’ve followed in the past, and we’re not going to make any indication that the process will be any different this time around.

There are basically two ways that the managing director can be chosen. There’s the smoke-filled-room approach which has always been used in the past, and which will, it seems, be used this time too. Here’s how the IMF describes it:

An Executive Director may submit a nomination for the position. When more than one candidate is nominated, as has been the case in recent years, the Executive Board aims to reach a decision by consensus.

Alternatively, there could be a more qualifications-driven approach, as suggested by Mohamed El-Erian, with “an internationally balanced committee” evaluating applicants based on qualifications alone (rather than nationality), and putting forward two or three finalists for the board to vote on, based on the same criteria.

The official criteria make no mention of nationality, of course — but they don’t need to. Since we’re now officially using the same process that was in place in 2007, it’s reasonable to assume that the same kind of candidate is going to win. In other words, Christine Lagarde — who has all of DSK’s qualifications, plus the added bonus of being a woman. Maybe next time we’ll have a transparent selection process. This time it’ll be business as usual.

How much are high-value employees worth in Silicon Valley? Quite astonishing amounts of money:

Dorsey came back to Twitter after the company had tried and failed to lure two senior product managers from Google. In both cases the company was fairly close to closing the deal when Google made counteroffers, showering them with restricted stock grants that are reported to be worth more than $50 million in each case. (Clearly, product people are in high demand in Silicon Valley.)

But then again, $100 million is just 1% of what Google was willing to pay for Twitter:

Last fall Microsoft, Google, and Facebook itself all considered buying the company. Microsoft never made an offer, according to sources, but Facebook is believed to have offered $2 billion for Twitter, and Google, by far the most serious, offered as much as $10 billion.

The offers last fall came just five years after Evan Williams bought back Twitter’s parent for $5 million. Going from $5 million to $10 billion in five years is pretty impressive even by Silicon Valley standards, and especially so in a company which never seems to have had a very good CEO or a helpful board.

There’s no shortage of drama at Twitter these days: Besides the CEO shuffles, there are secret board meetings, executive power struggles, a plethora of coaches and consultants, and disgruntled founders.

That kind of thing seems to have worked wonders so far. The main lesson here, I think, is that for all the talk of “leadership” and the like, the most successful CEOs are just the CEOs who happen to sit atop the most successful companies. Sometimes they’re good managers, sometimes they’re not. And there’s little non-circular evidence to suggest that good managers do measurably better than anybody else once they get the CEO job.

John Gapper isn’t letting the World Cup get to him: he knows that when it comes to Tony Hayward’s Congressional testimony today, the sports metaphor of choice has to come from cricket rather than football. “Tony Hayward plays a dead bat to Congress” is his headline, and he’s right: Hayward isn’t interested in winning anything, here, he’s just interested in letting the hearing time out by being infuriatingly passive and unhelpful. He’s simply letting the attacks come, refusing to show any spark of humanity or willingness to engage.

Here, then, are two masters of the dead bat. One of them epitomizes England across the Caribbean and the world; the other one is Geoffrey Boycott. I wonder whether Hayward was a cricket fan as a lad.

(Photo by Larry Downing for Reuters)

If you make it to CEO of a major public company, chances are you’re pretty competitive. And if you’re that competitive, chances are you’re not going to stop being competitive just because you’re CEO. And if you’re CEO, there’s a very good chance that you’re chairman of the board as well. Put that all together, and you get one of the biggest problems when it comes to principal-agent disconnect: a lack of succession planning.

A new report from Stanford Business School lays out the gory details:

More than half of companies today cannot immediately name a successor to their CEO should the need arise…

While 69% of respondents think that a CEO successor needs to be “ready now” to step into the shoes of the departing CEO, only 54% are grooming an executive for this position…

A full 39% of respondents cited that they have “zero” viable internal candidates…

The majority of firms – 65% – have not asked internal candidates whether they want the CEO job, or, if offered, whether they would accept.

One look at Citigroup is all that it takes to see how crucial succession planning is. (Talking of which, who is Pandit’s designated successor? There isn’t one, because he’s too weak to have one.) But we live in a world of celebrity CEOs, where boards would rather hire in some star from elsewhere after being placed in the lurch than elevate an internal candidate suffering from familiarity-breeds-contempt syndrome.

Personally, I like the idea of forcing the CEO to never be the highest-paid person in the company. But I doubt that one company in 1000 pays more than one or two employees more than it pays its CEO.

Nick Paumgarten’s 9,000-word profile of John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, obviously went to press too late to incorporate the news that he’s finally stepping down as chairman of the company.

The move comes a good two-and-a-half years after the sockpuppet scandal which should have cost Mackey both of his jobs but which instead ended in nothing but a narrow and pathetic amendment to the company code of conduct.

Mackey has built Whole Foods up largely by acquisition, which means that his personal stake in the company is tiny — less than 1%, and less than the average daily volume in the stock. All the same, Paumgarten describes Mackey as “not always an accidental accumulator or practitioner of power”, and it’s pretty clear that if there’s any threat to his complete control over the company, it’s going to come from his newest investors, rather than from any other executive. When Mackey buys a rival grocer, its executives often take on a senior role in Whole Foods — but after that, they rarely last long.

Still, Mackey stands out among founders of multi-billion-dollar companies for the relative modesty of his wealth and income. His 1.1 million shares are worth $31 million today, and have provided him with zero dividend income since August 2008. And yet he’s much more powerful, charismatic, and important than most other corporate founders and leaders — and has survived multiple episodes which would have cost virtually any other CEO their job. Could it be that somehow Mackey has swapped money for power, and that better-paid CEOs get held to a higher standard?

The WSJ has an interesting Ken Lewis profile today:

If there was a bank executive who seemed to have the mettle to withstand today’s regulatory and market pressures, it was Ken Lewis. The Mississippi native clawed to the top of Bank of America. After succeeding his mentor, Hugh McColl Jr., as chairman and CEO in 2001, Mr. Lewis kept up a blistering pace of acquisitions and tight control of operations at the bank, which expanded to $2.3 trillion in assets from some $620 billion.

But I think this misses a crucial point. Ken Lewis was always a momentum play, as most acquisitive CEOs are. So long as things are going well, they’re going great. But the minute their stock starts dropping and they lose that sense of inevitable global domination, things can fall apart very quickly indeed.

This is partly a function of scales dropping from the board’s eyes, as Carrick Mollenkamp and Dan Fitzpatrick explain. But it’s also a question of character: some CEOs are emboldened when their companies go through a rocky patch, while others are weakened — and Lewis is clearly one of the latter. (John Mack, who famously told Tim Geithner to “get fucked” at the height of the crisis, would be one of the former.)

In other words, Lewis never had the mettle to withstand regulatory pressure, should it ever arise. Other acquisitive CEOs like Sandy Weill are the same way. They’re like central banks intervening in currency markets: they can push regulators to move further in the direction they’re already moving, but they can’t push back once regulators become aggressive. That’s why Weill stepped down, and that’s why Lewis stepped down too.

John Reed wasn’t even on the list of people who I thought should apologize for their role in creating the bubble which led to the financial crisis. But good for him for doing so:

John S. Reed, who helped engineer the merger that created Citigroup Inc., apologized for his role in building a company that has taken $45 billion in direct U.S. aid and said banks that big should be divided into separate parts.

“I’m sorry,” Reed, 70, said in an interview yesterday. “These are people I love and care about. You could imagine emotionally it’s not easy to see what’s happened.”

Reed is a bit like Gerry Levin, looking back on a merger gone horribly wrong; it’s understandable that he has many regrets and might be more prone to apology. But still, it’s a start. Sandy? You’re up next!

Mark DeCambre is right: it seems that BofA is going to remain headless at least until Thanksgiving. No outsider seems to want the job — the list of people who have turned it down seems to include everybody who works or has ever worked at JP Morgan, plus former BofA executive Michael O’Neill, who went on to head up both Barclays and Bank of Hawaii. Meanwhile, the leading insider, Brian Moynihan, can’t conceivably be tapped until after his Congressional testimony on November 17.

It’s not as if Ken Lewis’s reputation needed to take another hit, but here it is anyway: he’s created a monster with no succession plan and no ability to hire a CEO. At least when Hugh McColl was building the monster it was always clear that Lewis would be there if he ever fell under a bus. Lewis, by contrast, made sure to throw any potential rivals out of their top-floor windows on a regular basis. And now the BofA board is struggling with the consequences of those decisions.

We’re less than two months from a New Year’s where a 9 ticks over into a 0, and so that means all manner of decade retrospectives. (And still we haven’t come up with a name for this decade!) Fortune is getting into the game early, naming Steve Jobs its CEO of the decade, for his work at Apple.

What’s more interesting to me is the list of 12 “also-rans” for the title: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett, Bernie Madoff, Carlos Slim, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Alan Greenspan, and Martha Stewart. Five of the 12 aren’t CEOs at all (Page, Brin, Skilling, Fastow, Greenspan); and not a single one of the 12 is a CEO who was hired to run a company by its board of directors.

Jobs, by contrast, is such a CEO, in a manner of speaking: although he did found Apple, he sold all his shares when he was ousted in the 80s, and was hired back by Apple’s board. (As a result, he’s made more money from Pixar than he has from Apple.)

It’s natural for company founders to give themselves the CEO job. But how come all of Fortune’s top CEOs seem to be founders, and none of them are in the much more common position of having been hired, by the board, to run the company?

The AP tallies Tim Geithner’s phone calls:

In the first seven months of Geithner’s tenure, his calendars reflect at least 80 contacts with Blankfein, Dimon, Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons or Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit…

Ken Lewis appears on Geithner’s calendars only three times. Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack also appears three times.

Why would Geithner speak to Paulson Blankfein so much more frequently than Mack? Well, there’s always this:

Mack was on the phone with Mitsubishi’s chief executive, Nobuo Kuroyanagi, and a translator trying to nail down the letter of intent. His assistant interrupted him, whispering, “Tim Geithner is on the phone—he has to talk to you.”

Cupping the receiver, Mack said, “Tell him I can’t speak now. I’ll call him back.”

Five minutes later, Paulson called. “I can’t. I’m on with the Japanese. I’ll call him when I’m off,” he told his assistant.

Two minutes later, Geithner was back on the line. “He says he has to talk to you and it’s important,” Mack’s assistant reported helplessly.

Mack was minutes away from reaching an agreement. He looked at Ji-Yeun Lee, who was standing in his office helping with the deal, and told her, “Cover your ears.”

“Tell him to get fucked,” Mack said of Geithner. “I’m trying to save my firm.”

Geithner should, in the interest of listening to the people who are going to tell him something he doesn’t already know, have made extra effort to talk to Mack after being told by him to get fucked. But the guy’s only human, and it’s understandable that he might not have.

Update: I thought “Blankfein” when I was posting this, but wrote “Paulson”. Wonder what that means. Many thanks to Justin Fox for noticing.

Why did Jamie Dimon fire Bill Winters as head of JP Morgan’s investment bank? According to Bloomberg, it’s because he felt Winters shouldn’t be CEO of the bank as a whole. And so, by the inexorable up-or-out logic of Wall Street, Winters was out.

Winters is one of the best risk managers on the street, and saved JP Morgan countless billions of dollars when he refused to let his group join the structured-product gold rush. But there’s much more to being a CEO than risk management, especially today, when you need to be able to charm not only institutional investors but also Washington regulators.

In a way it’s sad that no role could be found for Winters at JP Morgan — but he’s had a long and hugely successful run at the bank, and he’s surely happier dreaming of being CEO elsewhere than being stuck in JP Morgan without any hope of achieving the top job. This is how succession planning should work. For an example of how it shouldn’t work, of course, you just need to look at Bank of America.

If Winters had worked for Ken Lewis, not only would he never have been in line for the CEO job, but he would also have been fired years ago for being altogether too competent. Lewis didn’t like promoting potential rivals; Dimon, by contrast, loves surrounding himself by the smartest and best-qualified professionals he can find.

Tom Lindmark says I should give Ken Lewis a break:

Felix Salmon made a good point in a post yesterday when he said that running a mega bank was not something that any individual was capable of doing…

While Felix thinks that bank CEO’s cannot positively influence the outcome of their institutions, he seems perfectly willing to assert that they can destroy the bank. This makes no sense logically but it does typify the sort of disparagement that has been dealt out to Lewis and others.

I do think that the importance of CEOs is often overrated, but of course Ken Lewis is and was entirely capable of destroying shareholder value. One of the ways he did that was by growing Nationsbank, by acquisition, into a bank which is now too big to manage or effectively run. Another way he did that was by buying Countrywide and Merrill Lynch.

Conversely, there are ways for bank CEOs to protect shareholder value. In an interest-rate environment like the one we have right now, banks will be steadily and highly profitable on a week-to-week basis. The job of senior management is to keep an eye on the risk book, and make sure that no one is taking outsize risks which can’t be managed. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are both very good at this. Ken Lewis was always very bad at that aspect of the job: when things started heading south in the housing market, he decided the best thing to do was to redouble his housing bets by buying Countrywide.

Lindmark suggests that the disparagement of Lewis is snobbish NYC elitism:

Lewis’s real problem was never about his ability to run a bank but rather about his looks, demeanor, background and geographic location. He isn’t Jamie Dimon smooth and he looks like a man either in a permanent state of confusion or one about to rip out a subordinates throat. He never made any bones about his middle class background nor about his strong desire to succeed and running a bank based in Charlotte automatically knocks you down a lot of pegs in the viewpoint of the New York crowd.

Jamie Dimon bought Bear Stearns and got a sweetheart deal from the government to make it work. Ken Lewis bought Merrill Lynch and went back after the fact to get their backing. Little is said of Dimon’s deal while Lewis is vilified for everything connected with the Merrill acquisition.

This is ridiculous. People hate Lewis because he’s middle class? Er, no. Because he’s ambitious? (And Dimon isn’t?) Because he’s based in Charlotte? Come on. They hated on Stan O’Neal and Dick Fuld and Jimmy Cayne and Chuck Prince just as much, and they were based in New York.

As for Ken Lewis getting more grief for buying Merrill than Dimon has got for buying Bear, well, yes. Lewis overpaid massively for his failing investment bank, while Dimon got the Federal Reserve to subsidize his purchase to the tune of $29 billion. Both CEOs are ambitious, but only one let his ambition get the better of him. And he’s the one who just resigned.