The Rise and Fall of the Bond King

In an excerpt from her new book on Bill Gross, the co-host of NPR’s Planet Money shows how the billionaire genius came to have it all, but failed to keep it

- Mary Childs

I. TEAM BONDING

When Bill Gross started his career in investing in the fixed-income department of a sleepy life insurance company in the 1970s, bonds were just pieces of paper stored in vaults. Gross soon became the face of a revolution: actively trading those pieces of paper in pursuit of price appreciation. He was good at it—by most accounts, the best. He and Pacific Investment Management Co., the firm he co-founded, reigned over the bond market for decades, earning Gross the title of “Bond King.” From the outside, he seemed folksy, if a bit eccentric, and Pimco appeared polished and professional. The truth was more complicated.

The early crew had seemed to enjoy tormenting each other on the trade floor. They rotated who bore the brunt—though, more often than not, it landed on the same people. For much of the 1990s, that was Frank Rabinovitch, the portfolio manager and technology specialist. He arrived a sweet statistics nerd, and left twisted, broken, full of rage. They’d doused him with bug spray, saying he smelled bad. When he wore an expensive new tie to work, they cut off the bottom of it with scissors. It was an ugly tie; we’re helping you. They tackled him on the trade floor playing touch football, even after he instituted a rule that you had to count to three after snapping the ball. (“He was not real athletic,” partner Wes Burns recalled in Pimco’s self-published history book. “The guys would go and crush him anyway. It was their mindset. You had to make a really aggressive argument to win the day.”)