Turn of the Century (99 page)

The woman from CNBC is standing in Times Square. Like all her colleagues, she is forcing a frown, repeating the words “tragic” and “tragedy” as frequently as possible, doing her best to conceal her extreme excitement over the news they’re reporting live and continuously.
“The best guess here right now, Mark Franklin, is that so many concerned investors and traders and ordinary citizens were trying to log into the Reuters system that it simply crashed from the overload. And Reuters executives say that so far they remain unable to reach their reporter Carlos Petersen by phone. Mark?”

CNBC cuts back to the studio in New Jersey. Off-camera shouts are audible.
“Thank you, Cordelia Jessup, outside the headquarters of the Reuters news service, which is still the only journalistic organization reporting, once again, that Bill Gates and his top lieutenant, Steve Ballmer, have both died in a scuba-diving mishap in the Pacific Ocean off a remote stretch of Costa Rica, where the men were vacationing. At Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, outside Seattle, company spokesmen say they have no confirmation of the tragic deaths of their top management team, although they do confirm that Gates and Ballmer are on a so-called ‘adventure’ scuba-diving trip together near the Costa Rican town of Selvapesta.”

The CNBC camera moves back to a two-shot of Mark Franklin and an older man, who has a dazed, close-encounter expression.
“Felix Cooper of Merrill Lynch, we’ve seen Microsoft fall thirty-eight dollars in fourteen minutes on the basis of this unconfirmed report. Won’t NASDAQ have to halt trading?”

Felix Cooper, looking at a computer screen, nods but doesn’t speak.

“Felix Cooper, doesn’t NASDAQ have to act quickly to stabilize this market? And what were you telling me a moment ago about the tremendous market implications of two estate sales of how many hundreds of millions of shares of Microsoft stock … ?”

Felix Cooper continues scrolling through his computer screen and only nods.

“We’ve got Daniel Wesselman standing by now, by satellite, from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Dan Wesselman, can you hear me?”
The picture switches to a young man standing in a gray mist in front of flagpole and a squat building.

“Mark, as you see, the Microsoft flag is not yet at half-staff here at the Redmond headquarters of the software giant, and I don’t think we can repeat enough, Mark, that Gates is a devoted father and husband as well as the leader of thirty thousand employees and the richest man on earth …”

No one in the Big Room is paying enough attention to the television to notice that Felix Cooper went AWOL live on CNBC, or the news from Redmond that Bill Gates is a human being who bleeds if he is pricked.

Cheryl Berger is trolling from wire service to wire service, looking for someone else to confirm the deaths, reporting what she fails to find in a kind of monotonic chant as she fails to find it. “Nothing but Reuters reports on Bloomberg … same with Dow-Jones … AP expects to have its reporter in the area within the half hour … UPI’s treating it like it’s been confirmed, but totally based on Reuters … Bloomberg not confirming …”

Microsoft is down to $87 a share. The company has lost $130 billion of its value since 2:22
P.M
. It is now 2:36. And Ben has told the Big Room that he does not believe the Reuters story. He thinks it’s a mistake. There will be a retraction. Gates and Ballmer are alive. And even if they are dead, those guys aren’t the company. The Windows and Word monopolies are the company. The stock’s going to rebound like a motherfucker.

Frank Melucci is on the wire to Sam Zyberk at Morgan (and only Sam Zyberk at Morgan), buying every share of Microsoft common stock he can get.

Ben seems weirdly calm, facing Melucci, waving toward himself again as the signal to Melucci to keep bidding, keep bidding, keep bidding, take the offerings. He wants more Microsoft. It’s going to come back up.

Melucci puts his hand over the mouthpiece. “You want to talk to Zyberk yourself? He wants to talk to you.”

Ben seldom makes trades personally these days. He pops forward as if he’s spring-operated, and bams a button on his turret. “Hey! Sam, no time, where can you show me a million shares of Microsoft?”

“Are you fucking crazy, Ben, what? It’s for fucking sale everywhere!”

“I don’t want a discussion, Sam, it’s the fucking buying opportunity of my lifetime. I don’t care if Gates and Ballmer are dead.”

“You know this market’ll bury you,” says Zyberk, obliged to warn, like the downside boilerplate on every prospectus, but desperate to do the trade. “You’re nuts.”

“Maybe,” Ben says, “but I want the merchandise, bid wanted
now
, every share you got.”

“You fucking know something.”

“Microsoft is going to come back strong, that’s what I think I know.” He pauses and adds confidentially, verging on a whisper, “Don’t short this to me, Sam. Go long.”

“All right,” Sam Zyberk says, “the stock’s at 87, I got guys willing to sell as low as 81.”

Fifteen minutes ago, no one in the world was shorter Microsoft than Bennett Gould Partners. But Heffernan had gotten rid of most of the puts in the eight minutes between 2:22 and 2:30, and now Ben is on his way to being longer Microsoft than any trader on earth. Ben Gould is a wild man, and his world expects him to swim extravagantly upstream, but this is
beyond
. He is way off by himself on this one.

“Make an 80
⁵
⁄
₈
bid for 400,000 Microsoft,” he says into his phone. “I want to do it on the line, right now.” He pauses for an instant. “Is this customers, or you, Sam? Because if it’s you, I don’t want to hurt—”

“It’s all customers.”

“Done,”
Ben tells him.

“Size to go, Microsoft, you’re good on your 400,000. Done. And I’m working another 400,000, because I think it goes lower.”

Ben Gould just paid $32 million for 400,000 shares at $80⅝ a share.

Fifteen seconds later, the Morgan button on Ben’s turret display is blinking again. Sam Zyberk is back, offering the 400,000, and still more. Ben takes the offer, buying 550,000 at $79½.

Ben waits twenty seconds. Sam returns with another offer. Ben takes it.

“Done,”
Sam Zyberk says.

Ben has bought another 320,000 shares of Microsoft for $78.

Sam Zyberk comes back with a parcel of stock “from a multiple seven-figure seller. Big guy up north, Ben.” No broker will ever tell a buyer who the seller is, but up north means Boston, and the big guy is the gargantuan mutual fund company Fidelity.

“What’s he got?” Ben asks, playing along with the personal pronoun.

“Ten million.”

“I don’t have
that
much appetite, but I could use a million.”

“Where could you take down a million shares, Ben?”

“Seventy-five.”

“Done.”
Sam Zyberk thinks he is killing Ben Gould, knows it, but this is business. Of course, the way he’s buying this stock, with this fucking
binge
, Gould may be out of business day after tomorrow. But everyone here’s a grownup. Everybody’s got free will. “You’re wearing ‘em,” Zyberk says.

Over at Merrill and Goldman Sachs and Smith Barney, the traders are saying,
“Morgan’s got a buyer,”
awestruck, as if some mad Arab billionaire were buying a mansion at the San Andreas epicenter during a 7.1 Richter quake.
“Morgan’s working a piece of Microsoft as big as a battleship,”
they’re sputtering, one to the next, over their hundreds of perpetually open lines to other traders and other clients,
“There’s a blowout bid-wanted situation at Morgan, and they’re getting a chunk of it unloaded.”
Minutes ago there were only sellers, but Ben Gould has single-handedly corrected the order imbalance in the market, going long Microsoft, longer, longest.

Sam Zyberk comes back one last time, offering 300,000 more shares. Ben bids 73.

“Done,”
Zyberk tells him.

It has been nineteen minutes since the Reuters story appeared. The laissez-faire macho pride of the men who run the NASDAQ stock exchange make them loath to halt trading in any stock. They’re not the fuddy-duddy New York Stock Exchange, they’re
NASDAQ
, man, and they live for the fast, mad brawl and bloodiness; this is how people get rich nowadays. Besides, even when they stop trading, Instinet and the other unofficial online exchanges will let people go on buying and selling. The ambiguity of this moment has kept the market open for at least ten extra minutes. Right now, the deaths are unconfirmed, and at NASDAQ that’s being argued both ways
—“Let the trading go on until we know they’re dead,”
and
“Let the trading go on in case they’re alive.”
But Redmond is screaming and screaming that they’ve got to halt trading now. And so they do, at 2:40
P.M
. Eastern Time.

“They’ve halted,” Cheryl Berger announces to the Big Room. People shift their weight, or kick away from their desks a foot, or take a deep breath; but no one relaxes.

Two minutes later, Reuters announces on the Associated Press that their computer system has been the victim of a deep and vast trespass, a hack, and the stories filed on the Reuters wire at 2:22 and 2:24 reporting the deaths of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were false. (Their stringer, Carlos Petersen, however, is still unaccounted for, and has not disavowed the bylined report personally.)

At 2:46, after the brief trading halt—a halt that will forever gall the roughest and readiest cowboys at NASDAQ—the market in Microsoft stock is declared open again.

Now everyone is a buyer of Microsoft, as panicky about getting back in as they were six minutes ago about getting out. Instantly, the price climbs to $138, $6 higher than it was before the hackers’ fake Reuters story hit the wire.

And Bennett Gould Partners owns 2.77 million shares, accumulated in the last fifteen minutes for a total price of $214 million and change.

No one in the Big Room has ever seen Ben so quiet and still. No one has ever seen him so
content
.

Melucci’s phone display is blinking like mad, every one of his big common stock brokers, his
old pals
, trying to get his attention, desperate to buy back pieces of Microsoft.

“Whoa, Frankie,” Ben says, nodding at Melucci’s turret, “I think you’ve got some motivated bidders there.”

“You want to take Zyberk?” Melucci asks Ben.

Ben picks up. “Hey! Z-man!”

“
Ben
. Ben, I—that last 300,000 of ’Soft, the one that you bought at 73? I—I’m afraid that one I don’t have in hand.”

Ben wants to taste this delectable moment, to breathe the sweet aroma, to let it roll around his tongue. “You said ‘Done,’ Sam. ‘Done’ means done.”

“But, Ben, that’s—it’s—I’m out nineteen million dollars with that, the customer’s not selling the merchandise. The customer says the trade wasn’t fair.”

“Fair, Sam? Fair? Fair?
Fair?
Since when is anything we do fucking fair, Sam?”

Sam Zyberk says nothing for a long time. “You’re going to make me eat nineteen million dollars, aren’t you, Gould?”

Ben prepares to delivers his aria.

“The
whole way down here
, Sam, from 130 to 73, did you have that picture the whole way? You were
fucking
me, weren’t you, Sam?”

“Well, you know, I had to protect the other—”

“You fucking guy, you’re willing to bury Ben Gould for Fidelity—”

“No names, no names,” Zyberk says. Then he takes a breath; Ben can hear him exhale. “You’re not going to cut me an adjustment, are you? I’m going to eat the fucking nineteen million, aren’t I?”

“You know what, Sam? It’s the holiday season. And we’ve had a good day together. So, no. Take an out on that last 300,000, Z-man. Nothing done on the $73 stock.” And with that stroke of magnanimity, crazy Ben Gould is about to become a legend, the ultimate Wall Street good guy, the unbelievably great guy, the guy who shared the wealth when he had Morgan by the balls, the guy who doesn’t just talk the talk but he walked the fucking walk, $19 million worth.

“Henry,” Cissy says on the intercom, “Mr. Mose is calling from the plane, shall I put him through?”

“
Not right now
, tell him I’m at a mission-critical moment.”

All right. Okay. They may think they’ve made a fool of Henry Saddler. First the WinWin.com report flashed back that he’d shorted the 14,000 shares at $87, and then his Personal Privileges Representative pulled some condescending mumbo jumbo about “a fast market.” All Henry Saddler knows is that he couldn’t cover
any
of his short positions where he wanted to, at the bottom, at $79. If they’d let him get out at $79, why, he’d have made $700,000 or something!
“Fast market!” …