BOND JUNKIES

By the mid-1980s, corporate raiders like Carl Icahn, Ron Perelman and T. Boone Pickens had invaded Wall Street—fueled by junk bonds issued through Drexel Burnham Lambert’s Michael Milken. Forbes was first to shine a light on Milken’s money machine and the cast of “buccaneers” it bankrolled:

“Are there common threads among special Drexel customers? Only that all are aggressive, are outsiders to the conventional financial community, have a trading mentality and can make quick multimillion-dollar investments without going through a corporate bureaucracy. A conventional observer would say they tend to be buccaneers, much more interested in money than in running businesses. An admirer would call them financial entrepreneurs, redeployers of capital.”

—November 19, 1984