GREENE: Sitting pretty after hedging his bets.

Carl Juste/Miami Herald

Riffing off the famous opening lines of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, reporter John Dorschner set the stage in the Miami Herald (December 7, 2009) for the saga of Jeff Greene (MBA ’79): “Years later, as he faced the implications of his audacious $800 million bet against subprime mortgages, Jeff Greene was to remember that distant day when his father took him to discover vending machines.”

Indeed, Greene never forgot when he was 14 and living in Worcester, Massachusetts, and his father was forced to take a job filling vending machines after his textile-equipment business collapsed. The younger Greene ended up making a fortune in Southern California real estate; later, his success at subprime hedging earned him the title “The Meltdown Mogul” from the Wall Street Journal.

Once the host of star-studded parties at his Malibu home, Greene is now a married man (boxer Mike Tyson was his best man) and a father, living in South Florida, enjoying perks such as a 145-foot yacht. As for real estate, Greene is staying away from it; he predicts that “there will be a lot of foreclosures in 2010, especially in retail, office, hotels, and high-end homes.”

Post a Comment