Ivan Boesky Dies: Disgraced Financier Who Inspired ‘Wall Street’s Cutthroat Gordon Gekko Was 87
deadline.comIvan F. Boesky, the disgraced 1980s financier who inspired the cutthroat corporate raider Gordon Gekko character of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, died in his sleep today at his home in San Diego.
He was 87. His death was announced to The New York Times by his daughter Marianne Boesky. Even before Michael Douglas’ indelible portrayal of Gekko made “Greed Is Good” a mantra of the Reagan Era, Boesky had already become a Wall Street evangelist of amoral, me-first philosophy.
According to The Times, Boesky said in a 1986 commencement speech at the University of California, Berkeley, “Greed is all right, by the way.
I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” (Boesky would later say he didn’t recall making the statement.) By the end of the decade, however, Boesky, once ranked among the richest Americans, would become a prison inmate: Implicated in the insider trading scandals that rocked Wall Street in the mid-’80s, Boesky cooperated with then-U.S.
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