Sanford I. Weill
Sandy Weill (1933-) is a financier, philanthropist, and chairman of Citigroup. He is one of the richest men in the United States. His net worth is said to be $1.4 billion by Forbes Magazine. He holds 16,679,677 shares of Citigroup, Inc ([1]) to a value of $740 million.
He retired his position as CEO of Citigroup on October 1, 2003. He achieved his Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1955. Weill and his wife, the former Joan Mosher, who were married on June 20, 1955, live in Greenwich, Connecticut, and have two adult children (Marc Weill and Jessica Bibliowicz) and four grandchildren.
Weill was a party to the acquistion of Salomon Brothers by Citigroup.
History
Weill got his first job on Wall Street in 1955 at Bear Stearns. While working at Bear Stearns Weill became neigbour with Arthur Carter who was working at Lehman Brothers, they ended up riding the train to work together, and they frequently met for lunch. The conversation always concerned business and the Street, and how they would run the place if they were in charge.
In 1956 he became a licensed broker at Bear Stearns. Rather than making phone calls or personal visits to solicit clients, Sandy found he was far more comfortable sitting at his desk, poring through companies' financial statements and disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission. For weeks his only client was his mother, Etta. Joan, who knew very well Sandy's tendency to avoid public contact, managed to double his clientele one weekend when they ran across one of her old boyfriends, Michael Weinberg, at the beach and Joan persuaded him to let Sandy sign him up for a brokerage account. She began calling Sandy at the office each day, sometimes several times a day, to warn him to "get off your duff and make some calls."
In May 1960 Arthur Carter, Roger Berlind, Peter Potoma, and Sandy form Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill. In 1962 the firm becomes Carter, Berlind & Weill after the New York Stock Exchange brings disciplinary proceedings against Potoma. In 1968 the firm becomes Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt (Marshall Cogan, Arthur Levitt). Weill served as the firm’s Chairman from 1965 to 1984, a period in which it completed over 15 acquisitions to become the country’s second largest securities brokerage firm. The company became CBWL-Hayden, Stone, Inc. in 1970; Hayden Stone, Inc. in 1972; Shearson Hayden Stone in 1974, when it merged with Shearson Hammill & Co.; and Shearson Loeb Rhoades in 1979, when it merged with Loeb Rhoades Hornblower & Co. With capital totaling $250 million, Shearson Loeb Rhoades trailed only Merrill Lynch as the securities industry's largest firm.
In 1981 Weill sold Shearson Loeb Rhoades to American Express for about $930 million in stock. (Sources differ on the precise figure.) Weill began serving as president of American Express Co. in 1983 and as chairman and CEO of American Express's insurance subsidiary, Fireman's Fund Insurance, in 1984. Increasingly nettled by his forced subservience to the chairman of the company, James D. Robinson 3d, whose ideas about the business conflicted sharply with his, Weill realized that he would never be named CEO. He resigned in August 1985, at the age of 52.
After a failed attempt to buy out BankAmerica Corp., he set his sights a little lower and persuaded Minneapolis-based Control Data Corp. to spin off a troubled subsidiary, Commercial Credit, a consumer loan company. In 1986, with $7 million of his own money invested in the company, Weill took over as CEO of Commercial Credit. After a round of deep cost cuts and reorganization, the company performed a succesfull IPO. In 1987 he acquired Gulf Insurance. The next year, 1988, he paid $1.5 billion for Primerica Corp., the parent company of Smith Barney and the A. L. Williams insurance company. 1989 he acquired Drexel Burnham Lambert's retail brokerage outlets. In 1992, he paid $722 million to buy a 27 percent share of Travelers Insurance, which had gotten into trouble because of bad real-estate investments.
In 1993 he reacquired his old Shearson brokerage (now Shearson Lehman) from American Express for $1.2 billion. By the end of the year, he had completely taken over the Travelers Corp. in a $4 billion stock deal and officially began calling his corporation Travelers Group Inc. In 1996 he added to his holdings, at a cost of $4 billion, the property and casualty operations of Aetna Life & Casualty. In September 1997 Weill acquired Salomon Inc., the parent company of Salomon Brothers Inc for over $9 billion in stock.
In April 1998 Travelers Group announced an agreement to undertake the $76 billion merger between Travelers Citicorp, the merger was was completed on October 8, 1998. The possibility was that the merger will run into problems connected with federal law. Ever since the Glass-Steagall Act banking and insurance businesses have been kept separate. Weill and Reed were betting that Congress would soon pass legislation overturning those regulations, which Weill and Reed and many other businesspeople considered obsolete. (Many European countries, for instance, had already torn down the firewall between banking and insurance.) During a two-to-five-year grace period allowed by law, Citigroup can conduct business in its merged form; should that period elapse without a change in the law, Citigroup would have to spin off its insurance businesses.
In November 1998 Jamie Dimon was forced to resign from Citigroup.
In 2002 the company was hit by the wave of "scandals" that followed the ~$8 trillion "correction" in american share prices. Chuck Prince took the position of CEO of Citigroup on October 1, 2003.