ABSTRACT
In researching the ironic hostility of many super-rich Americans toward Barack Obama in 2012, Chrystia Freeland interviewed a sixty-nine-year-old Bronx-born billionaire and hedge fund founder named Leon Cooperman. A leading figure behind the false charge of many plutocrats that the president was “anti-business” and “anti-wealth,” Cooperman told Freeland of how he had recently been visited by a “world-renowned cardiologist” seeking financial advice on the eve of his retirement. The elite heart surgeon and his wife (herself one of the country’s experts in women’s medicine) had what Cooperman considered an unimpressive net worth of “ just” $10 million. Cooperman was “shocked” at how “tight” this top-flight medical couple would have to be in their retirement. “You know,” Cooperman added, “I lost more money today than they spent a lifetime accumulating”2-a remarkable statement on the difference between a by no means impoverished couple who spent their careers at the highly skilled top of the healing profession and a man who dedicated his working life to the analysis and manipulation of financial securities on behalf of his own economic lust and that of other investors.
