Who is gordon gekko modeled after

The character of Gordon Gekko was not based on any one person, but rather on a composite of real-life financiers. Stanley Weiser, who co-wrote the screenplay with Oliver Stone, claimed that Gekko was partially based on corporate raider Carl Icahn, disgraced stock trader Ivan Boesky, and investor Michael Ovitz. La Jolla says the times are ripe.

Over at Fortune there is a short insider-trading quiz that everyone should take. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. This was the coming philosophy. Too much money was tied up in ossifying old industries and companies where leaden managements and Luddite unions were standing in the way of change. Japan was rising.

The task was urgent. Corporate takeovers — funded by junk bonds, a new, cheap kind of debt — were the best way to speed the task, bringing in an aggressive new owner, who would bash workers into shape and strip the company to its competitive core.

Boesky was not a right sort. Outsiders might have spotted that through his creepy interviews. It would be like Jacob's ladder, wouldn't it? A Jacob's ladder of silver dollars. Imagine — wouldn't that be an aphrodisiac experience, climbing to the top of such a ladder?

Rudy Giuliani spotted it, as the then-US Attorney in New York pulled on the threads of his insider trading investigation, which centred on the investment bank Drexel Burnham and Michael Milken, the "junk bond king". Milken was the highest-paid banker on Wall Street.

There was hardly a single forthcoming takeover deal that he or his subordinates weren't working on, and an underling, Dennis Levine, and Boesky traded tips and bought shares, knowing that the announcement of a takeover bid would send shares flying.

Boesky would be jailed in the very week that Wall Street was released. Milken, too, would admit to securities and reporting violations and serve almost two years in prison.

Boesky has never resurfaced. Levine tried it, with a bleating apologia of a book, Inside Out, but he abandoned publicity for the widely panned project halfway through. When Boesky was arrested on 14 November , the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the gauge of the US stock market, fell 43 points, then the fourth-largest drop on record.

If all the corporate raiders were exposed in criminal dealing, investors reasoned, who would buy all these companies at their inflated prices? As Stone worked on Wall Street in — especially in the final weeks before its release, after the Black Monday stock-market crash — it appeared to one and all that an era was ending. It had been a period that everyone at the time liked to call an era of excess, and Wall Street, set two years earlier, already looked like a period piece. But we know now it was just a warm-up for the vast credit-funded blow-out that was to come.

Many of the real-life characters who went into Gekko were not only not cowed by the scandal and the crash, they were emboldened by them. As Irwin Jacobs, a prominent corporate raider from the period who reviewed it for the Chicago Tribune, said of the market manipulation depicted in the film: "This is not a form of business, this is a form of sickness. You don't have to do it that way. Most of the real-life raiders channelled by Stone to create Gekko were never involved in insider trading, and are still doing their thing today.

They have been rebranded, of course. They call themselves activist shareholders, but the impulses remain the same: a joy in the things and the influence that money brings, a thirst for battle and the thrill of outfoxing a rival, and the gripping certainty of the good of the market. If you win, it means you were right, and if you were right, that is because you are allocating capital most efficiently, which means the economy advances, prosperity increases for all.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Carl Icahn, whose hostile takeover of the airline TWA was the inspiration for Gekko's battle over Bluestar in the first movie, clashes with his rivals on the stock-market stage still, at the age of Over the years, Icahn has honed his "anti-Darwinian metaphor" for corporate management.

So you eventually work your way to CEO. Entirely contrary to the purpose of the director, Oliver Stone, and Mr. Douglas himself in making the first Wall Street , it inspired a generation of would-be One-Percenters.

As Mark R. Yzaguirre wrote on the Frum Forum site :. I can definitely attest to that fact. As a young person in the late 80s and early 90s, I don't know how many times I saw the original Wall Street with friends, and in most cases particularly among my friends who went to business school , the Gekko character wasn't seen as an example of an unethical culture, but as a role model to follow. One wonders how many times Stone or Michael Douglas have had investment bankers approach them to say how Wall Street inspired them to get into the finance business.

The Austrian filmmaker Thomas Fuerhaupter's documentary Michael Berger: A Hysteria , which I saw recently at Anthology Film Archives in New York, recalls that the young Berger, growing up in Austria, was so riveted by Douglas's performance that he dreamed of a Wall Street career and started to dress and comb his hair like the Gordon Gekko character.