The Man Who Killed (and Saved) Wall Street
by Joel Stein
June 26, 2006
Fortune magazine
Feb 21, 2033
It turns out Mike Derjerlain-Reet-Swenson-Chang doesn't much care about celebrities. "Five years ago, I knew nothing," he says. "Sure, I had a subscription to Star magazine, but that was only because I didn't have time to read the front page of the New York Times every day, and I didn't want to seem like an idiot."
Derjerlain's interest was simply saving his ass. He came up with Franklin Templeton's Celebrity Fund — a portfolio consisting solely of used celebrity items — because it couldn't be indexed. "We were getting slaughtered, us fund managers," he said over a plain foamy blended mixed organic. "You came up with the craziest portfolio you could think of [Derjerlain spent two years running Templeton's derivative of Venezuelan plastic surgery malpractice insurance], and, whatever it was, within two months Fidelity and Vanguard had an index fund that undercut your costs and kicked your ass. It's humiliating getting beaten by a computer program. Hell, it's why Kasparov killed himself. It was either that or figuring out that no matter how famous you are for playing chess, it ain't going to get you laid." For a guy who spends his days trying to coax Karate Lohan into selling the kiddie ballet shoes her mom bought her, Derjerlain still has the sense of humor of an old-school trader.
Though many see Derjerlain as the executioner of Wall Street — turning it from a number-crunching, testosterone-fueled Gordon Gekko den to just one more female-dominated, intuition-driven collaborative business — he sees himself as a savior from the place's indexing formulas. "The writing was on the wall, sensei. We were disappearing. Like the search engine guys of the '20s, the rappers of the '10s, the American car companies of the '00s. It was over."
He got the idea for the Celebrity Fund — which closed last November at $200 billion — from a Wall Street Journal story in January of 2029 which reported that intimate items from celebrities had risen in value more than the rupee in the previous five years: "Smart parents, including the Hanson-Hernandez-Wu-Stinkels of Woodside, have diversified part of their children's college fund, in items like the thong Dakota Fanning wore in her first accidentally released sex video (purchased in 2026 by Dave Hanson-Hernandez-Wu-Stinkel for $6,400, now valued at $20,000), and even the handcrafted, shogun-era reproduction sword Michael Jackson used to attempt seppuku (purchased by Mr. Hanson in October 2029 for $70,000 already worth $100,000) before Mr. Jackson's pet monkey stopped him, put the sword away in a safe place and then shot him with a gun (which Mr. Hanson got outbid on by the PETA party, which paid $180,000)."
"The first item I bought for the fund," Derjerlain says, "was the pair of sunglasses worn by that woman who was the first model on a billboard advertisement featuring a money shot. Remember when that was a controversy?" Within a year, Morningstar had given his fund five stars, and Harvard became a major investor — a full year before they started their Celebrity Culture department.
At the time Templeton partner James Voyles-Crane-Gorker-Oakaku thought Derjerlain was wasting his time with a obscure niche fund for risk takers, like real estate. "I knew he was onto something big when James Cameron decided to make Titanic 2 just so Mikey could buy up all the costumes. I mean, there was no other point to that movie. They spent the first hour explaining how an iceberg could still exist today. But the costumes were huge."
The real breakthrough came with Derjerlain figured out that every item needed DNA verfication. The buying and selling — which can amount to 1,200 transactions a day — is all done on eBay by a team of 100 specialists, mostly women in their late 40s who work at home. They can make up to $400,000 a year, depending on bonuses, which are often paid out in celebrity undergarments.
Derjerlain is sure the celebrity investment field will continue to grow. Fifty years ago, he points out, celebrities only did three things: act, sing and play sports. "Before Bob Vila, there wasn't a single celebrity handyman. Crazy, right? And before Julia Child, chefs weren't famous. Before Hsu Wang, no kid had a poster in her room of a computer-chip engineer. Before 2020, the average person couldn't name a single font maker, and those people used their names for the fonts. That generation had no information. People — educated people — didn't even know what a gaffer did, much less name one."
That was a time when a really enterprising celebrity didn't do more than write a children's book, open a restaurant, paint and run a used-car dealership. "Things have changed so much. Why can't a chef act? Why can't a multi-national CEO be on the karaoke circuit? Can an ultimate fighter knit on a professional level? I think Tank Boutros-Thant-Singer-Wishman answered that."
Investment potential was high because celebrity had infiltrated the culture on a deeply personal level. A 2029 Derjerlain poll showed that 62 percent of Americans had met at least one celebrity, and 97 percent had one as a MySpace friend they regularly messaged. "Think about this: Name a major American city without a washed-up celebrity mayor. That's because when they hit the E List and stop being able to get reservations at Wolfgang Puck's Tofuria, they have to move somewhere people still care about them. And if they weren't big-time, you can rule out the entire West and Northeast," Derjerlain said. "Right now Cincinnati has seven deputy mayors, six of whom were former American Idols. That place is a craphole."
By next year, Derjerlain predicts, you won't be doing anything that isn't celebrity branded. "Why are you buying hydrogen at Exxon when you could be filling up at Tom Hanks and Son? Why wouldn't you want your hydrogen choice to say something about who you are?"
For now, Derjerlain, famous for his playboy lifestyle, including a penthouse in Spanish Harlem and a mansion in Encino, is elusive about his next fund. "It's futures agenting," he explains. "I buy a toque from a hot chef in Ghana, I move him to New York and, if I got it right, that toque goes from $100 to $20,000. Only I have 400 of his toques. As long as I'm watching him, that guy doesn't use a toque twice."
And even if this kind of speculation backfires, Derjerlain doesn't seem worried about finding a way to make money. Now, he's famous.
©2006 Joel Stein and hooksexup.com