The guy who bankrolled stealing the Sonics from Seattle..well he's had a very bad day on Wall Street

[Robbien]

From the Seattlest blog:

Clay Bennett came to symbolize the greedy bastards who, along with the help of weasel-in-chief Howard Schultz, ran off with our NBA basketball team.

But make no mistake, Bennett wasn't the brains behind the Great Oklahoma Rip-off. Nope. Clay Bennett was simply the crew-cut sportin' bag man. The most influential person behind the deal was Aubrey McClendon, the Oklahoma City oilman who kept a low profile throughout the legal wranglings here in the Emerald City. McClendon is CEO of Chesapeake Energy, an oil and natural gas driller. You may have seen him on those "Pickens Plan" TV ads in recent weeks.

You see, as gas and oil prices rose this spring and summer, McClendon wasn't happy with just making boatloads of cash on hyper-inflated gas prices. No, he doubled-down, and took out sizable loans from his broker and bought huge chunks of CHK stock in his own company as the share price roared from $37 to almost $70 this summer.

Then, when oil prices began to unravel and soon after, the stock market got all black-hole-ish, those banks who loaned him the money came knocking, wanting it back, because they were, uh, going out of business. It's called a "margin call," and for it to happen to corporate CEO, it's really quite rare. CNBC talking-head Jim Cramer earlier today called the news of McClendon's margin call "the most shocking thing I've heard in this whole market." And that's saying a lot.

So, in the past few days, as the stock traded down in the teens, McClendon was forced by the Wall Street heavies to sell all of his CHK stock at a massive loss. Records show that McClendon owned over 33 million shares earlier this month.

http://seattlest.com/2008/10/10/mclendonthunder_story.php

McClendon was on the last Forbes 400 list at No. 134 on its list of the nation's 400 richest people, with a net worth of $3 billion. On this one deal alone, McClendon lost about two billion.

[Swamp Rat]

1. YAAAY!

:)

[Super62]

2. Living up here

in the NW, I can honestly say- Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy! Screw him and the "Thunder".

[aquart]

3. So the poor dear ain't starving yet.

Sorry, how wrong is it to wish that there are many more like him?

[Robbien]

5. I believe he may be, the margin call had to be more than the

half billion he received for selling this one stock. From trying to piece together the numbers from various stories, the margin call should have wiped out his Forbes reported cash balance. But, hey, who knows how much he has socked away in the Caymans.

[Schema Thing]

4. Greed is a funny thing. He could have used stop loss orders and

been out w/o being forced out.

[gopbuster]

6. I went to bible school with aubrey when I was kid and our fathers were friends,,,,,,,

He has done a lot for our community. He built Chesapeake Energy (CHK) from the ground up into the largest Natural Gas Producer in the US. He's a good man.

I too wonder why he didn't have stop losses in place, especially out on margin. I'm guessing we may not be getting the whole story, he could have ended up breaking even in relation to what he had into it.

[Greyhound]

7. This is one of the things that makes me crazy. Most people have no concept,

no sense of scale, of just how rich these assholes are. I was talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago and I pointed out to him that (at that time) Bill Gates could lose 90% of his money and he would still be a billionaire.

This lack of comprehension seems to be a major problem here. People talk about billions of dollars with absolutely no idea of how large a number that is. If you spent $1000 a day, every day since Jesus was born, with absolutely no income, you would (be the oldest person in the world) still not have spent a billion dollars.

A "mere" billion is not enough to get on the Forbes 400 list.

[Agent William]

8. YEEAAHH!!!

Fuck the "Blunder"

Could happen to a better person.