313- Bernie Madoff - Dead at 82

If you haven’t heard the news already, Bernard Madoff has just passed away at the age of 82 in a federal prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina. For more than 50 years, Bernie Madoff was renowned on Wall Street as a big money manager who founded his own firm at age 22 and became non-executive chairman of the Nasdaq in 1990.

Madoff was famously known for running the largest and possibly most devastating Ponzi scheme in financial history.

He defrauded thousands of investors out of tens of billions of dollars over the course of about 17 years. Madoff was busted on December 11, 2008 after his two sons turned him in. 

Victims included director Steven Spielberg, actor Kevin Bacon, former New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Weisel, as well as ordinary investors like Burt Ross who lost $5 million in the scheme. 

In a 2013 email to CNBC from prison, Madoff mentioned that the break in the market that started the Great Recession led to his scam.

“I thought this would be only a short-term trade which could be made up once the market became receptive. The rest is my tragic history of never being able to recover.”

In today’s podcast, Phil and Danielle discuss Bernie Madoff and his scheme that led to the nation’s largest financial fraud in history,

You can learn a lot from the history of financial figures and investors. Check out my guide where I discuss some of the best investors in the world: https://bit.ly/2P21xJs

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