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FOUNTAINHEAD Yacht – Majestic $130M Superyacht

She was delivered in 2011 from Feadship featuring an interior design from Sinot Yacht Design and Axel Vervoodt.

She features naval architecture by De Voogt Naval Architects. There are not many details known about the interior or amenities of the impressively sized yacht, but she is a close match to her near sister ship MUSASHI, which also features design from Sinot Yacht Design.

The incredible vessel turns heads on the water for her striking good looks and sheer size on the water.

FOUNTAINHEAD yacht interior

The interior of the FOUNTAINHEAD Yacht is designed by Sinot Yacht Design and Axel Vervoodt . She can comfortably accommodate 14 guests in 7 suites.

Although she is a famous superyacht, very few details are known about her interior, and there are no known interior images.

She closely resembles her near sister ship MUSASHI, owned by Larry Ellison, who also features interior design from Sinot with a minimalistic interior style and hints of art deco.

Sander Sinot has a background in industrial design and understands how to bring together amazing design elements down to every detail on the vessel.

FOUNTAINHEAD was designed to offer a family home on the water with an inviting interior, gym, contraflow swimming pool, and plenty of water toys and tenders for guests to enjoy a fun time.

The FOUNTAINHEAD yacht features exterior design and naval architecture by De Voogt Naval Architects .

She was built by Feadship and delivered from their Koninklijke De Vries shipyard at Makkumin in 2011.

She is an XL Feadship Superyacht and was one of the largest models the shipyard produced in 2011.

She has a steel hull, and aluminum superstructure all in white and teak decks. The exterior is defined by window panels all around the yacht.

Specifications

The FOUNTAINHEAD yacht is an 87.78m yacht with a 13.9m beam and a 4.1m draft. The vessel can reach a top speed of 21 knots, with her 2 MTU engines maintaining a cruising speed of 15 knots.

FOUNTAINHEAD has a displacement of 2463 gross tons and an estimated range of 6000 nautical miles.

She is valued at approximately $130 million with an annual running cost of $10 – $13 million. The vessel is built to Lloyds Register Classification Society Rules.

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Miami Yacht Watch: The glorious Fountainhead returns

Not owned by Mark Cuban but Sears CEO Eddie Lampert

A post shared by Buster Bark (@busterbark) on Jul 9, 2017 at 8:12am PDT

Miami is a common host for extravagant yachts at all times of the year. Track these magnificent vessels and their outlandish toys with Miami Yacht Watch , which typically runs weekly on Curbed Miami.

The 288-foot Fountainhead, which has been mistakingly tied to Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban as its proprietor, has returned to Miami from Port Everglades.

Currently docked at Island Gardens Deep Harbour Marina on Watson Island, the extravagant superyacht valued at an estimated $130 million actually belongs to billionaire Sears CEO Eddie Lampert, who apparently tells people — in jest — Cuban is the owner, according to the New York Post .

“The guy who owns the boat tells everyone that it’s mine,” Cuban told Page Six. “It’s so crazy . . . I don’t even own a boat.”

Heightening the false rumor is the fact Fountainhead features a basketball hoop on its aft. The yacht is somehow only the 72nd largest in the world, per Boat International . Fountainhead is equipped to house 14 guests and additionally includes a library, a recreation room, a full gym and health club, and a contra-flow swimming pool.

A post shared by Michael Lara (@surfhanalei) on Nov 4, 2017 at 11:53am PDT

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$130M megayacht owned by former Sears Holdings CEO visits Charleston Harbor

by Matt Dillane

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — A very luxurious vessel made a stop in Charleston Harbor over the weekend.

Fountainhead, a megayacht owned by former Sears Holdings CEO and chairman Eddie Lampert, was spotted in the Lowcountry.

The vessel, which has an estimated value of $130 million, measures in with an overall length of 87.78 meters (288 feet) and has been in service since 2011.

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According to Patrick Harwood, who provided pictures of the impressive vessel to ABC News 4, the yacht previously docked in Charleston back in 2017.

On the stern, the flag of the Cayman Islands, where the yacht is flagged, could be seen flying.

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Sears chairman Eddie Lampert has a net worth of $1 billion - from a $130 million yacht to a home on 'billionaire bunker' island, here's how he spends his fortune

Mark abadi   .

REUTERS/Peter Morgan PM

Sears chairman Eddie Lampert.

• Eddie Lampert , the chairman and former CEO of Sears , has an estimated net worth of $1 billion.
• Lampert owns three homes, including one on the wealthy "Billionaire Bunker" island in Florida, and also owns a $130 million yacht.
• Lampert is a member of the ultra-exclusive Skull and Bones society at Yale University.
• In 2003, he was kidnapped and held at gunpoint - only to negotiate his way free.

Eddie Lampert, the chairman and former CEO of Sears, has had an eventful career.

With an estimated net worth of $1 billion , Lampert was once hailed as a genius hedge-fund manager and the next Warren Buffett. He's a member of Yale's ultra-exclusive Skull and Bones secret society, along with three former presidents, and his college roommate was eventual US Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin.

He also managed to save Kmart from bankruptcy in the early 2000s, but not before he was kidnapped and held at gunpoint for 30 hours in a Connecticut hotel. He reportedly talked his captors into releasing him, then capped off the Kmart deal a week later.

Now, after Lampert merged Kmart with Sears, the department store is now on the brink of liquidation .

Lampert has garnered criticism for his management of Sears, which he reportedly runs from his sprawling, $38 million estate in a wealthy Florida community known as " billionaire bunker ." The wealthy executive also owns houses in Connecticut and Colorado, not to mention a $130 million yacht.

Read on to see how Sears' embattled chairman made - and spends - his $1 billion fortune.

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“They Could Have Made a Different Decision”: Inside the Strange Odyssey of Hedge-Fund King Eddie Lampert

Few people on Wall Street are as polarizing as Eddie Lampert, the billionaire majority shareholder of Sears and Kmart. His friends say he is reticent, while his critics find him aloof. His pals talk about his very high standards, while some observers say he is condescending, overly critical, and disengaged. Some people praise his determination and persistence, while others see only inexplicable stubbornness in sticking to failed ideas. “His critics will say he’s not really a team guy. He is a team guy,” insists Lampert’s close friend David “Tiger” Williams, a well-known Wall Street trader. “The Eddie I know works incessantly because he’s a ‘figure-it-out guy.’ ”

Williams believes that Lampert is a target for criticism because he is “a very shy person” and avoids the public eye. But Mark Cohen, who was C.E.O. of Sears Canada from 2001 to 2004, and now is a professor at Columbia Business School, says that Lampert is “the wizard behind the curtain, managing the business from Florida or Connecticut or aboard his yacht” via teleconference and taking from the company all he can. While admitting he runs the company primarily from Florida, Lampert counters that he has put a fortune of his own money into the business. Cohen responds that Lampert’s money is collateralized against hard assets, of which Lampert will take control if the company defaults on the loans. (A spokesperson for Lampert says that can happen only if Lampert is the highest bidder, and the purchase is approved by the bankruptcy court, “generally speaking.”)

Once a wunderkind, who at 25 established his own hedge fund, ESL, Lampert is 55 now and celebrating the silver anniversary of managing his own money and that of a few select billionaires, such as entertainment mogul David Geffen, Michael Dell, Thomas Tisch, and the Ziff publishing family. He has had legendary successes, such as his investment in AutoZone, the auto-parts retailer, in which he made a profit of around $750 million, at least 20 times his investment, and AutoNation, the car dealership, from which he has made $1.5 billion (and in which he still owns a large stake). He has also made winners out of Honeywell, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Liz Claiborne Inc.

But today those triumphs are largely obscured by his worst mistake: the 2005 merging of Sears, the iconic retailer whose doorstop mail-order catalogue was once a fixture in nearly every American home, with the downmarket Kmart chain, which he had brought out of bankruptcy in 2003. Twelve years on, this blundering into retail has made him a poster boy for what some people think is wrong with Wall Street and, in particular, hedge funds. Under his management the number of Sears and Kmart stores nationwide has shrunk to 1,207 from 5,670 at its peak, in the 2000s, and at least 200,000 Sears and Kmart employees have been thrown out of work. The pension fund, for retired Sears employees, is underfunded by around $1.6 billion, and both Lampert and Sears are being sued for investing employees’ retirement money in Sears stock, when the top brass allegedly knew it was a terrible investment. (Lampert’s spokesperson responds, “ESL never encouraged anybody to invest in Sears Holdings stock. The associate stock-purchase plan began in 2006. It was perceived to be an effective employee retention and incentive tool.”)

In 2013, Lampert, who was chairman of the board, had himself named C.E.O. of Sears Holdings, as the combined company is known. He’s had a rough four years since then. The company has suffered some $10.4 billion in losses and a revenue decline of 47 percent, to $22 billion. Those stores that remain open are often shabby, with minimal inventory and few customers. A year ago the company admitted, for the first time, that there was some risk of its ability to continue as “a going-concern,” a technical accounting term that sent shudders through the ranks of Sears’s employees, vendors, and creditors, because it is often a precursor to a bankruptcy filing.

On July 20, Lampert announced that Sears would allow its Kenmore appliances—one of the store’s most profitable brands, formerly sold exclusively in Kmart and Sears outlets—to be sold on Amazon. On his Sears blog, Lampert called it a “game-changing agreement.” But critics branded it as just the latest example of Lampert’s selling off the company’s assets in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable. “We suspect this is a move to beautify the Kenmore brand for divestiture and help alleviate some pressure, temporarily, of Sears as a going-concern,” Bill Dreher, an analyst at Susquehanna International Group, wrote his clients.

The vultures are circling, waiting for Lampert to throw in the towel so they can try to make money by buying Sears’s discounted debt. But Lampert continues to claim that’s not going to happen if he can help it.

The spate of negative media coverage and the dire predictions of Wall Street investors might explain why Lampert, generally regarded as reclusive, agreed to sit with me for an interview, in what his spokesperson calls his first “one-on-one first-person interview in several years,” which I calculate to be 15. (In May, Lampert did a short Q&A with Lauren Zumbach in the Chicago Tribune .) His desire to keep an unusually low profile may have something to do with the fact that he was kidnapped in 2003 and held for ransom by four young men over a long weekend.

Lampert’s Greenwich estate fits the image of how you’d expect a billionaire hedge-fund manager to live. Assessed at nearly $26 million, it consists of six acres on a spit of land that juts into Long Island Sound. The main house is around 10,000 square feet, with a lot of stone and glass. After I was buzzed through the security gate, a guard popped out of nowhere to usher me into a grand but sparely furnished room facing Long Island Sound. On the walls hung a few large, expensive-looking fine-art photographs. Suddenly, from a side door, Lampert emerged with two handlers from Teneo, the financial-advisory and public-relations firm, who would monitor our conversation.

Lampert looked fit, if a bit awkward, in a gray polo shirt buttoned to the top. He was shod in a pair of brand-new “pure platinum” Nike Air VaporMax Flyknit sneakers. He, his wife (Kinga, 43), and their three children spend most of their time in Florida, where the children go to school. He made the point to me that, in Florida anyway, he’s not the least bit reclusive. “I’m out there like a normal person, and I really enjoy that,” he says. (Perhaps it’s just coincidence that Florida, unlike Connecticut and New York, has no state income tax.) He also has a home in Aspen.

Lampert rarely visits Sears Holdings headquarters, outside of Chicago—some say only once a year, for the annual board meeting. Lampert dismisses any criticism of his long-distance management style, saying he’s a big believer in handing over power to his management team. “There are cultures where people work from home, and they still get things done,” he says. “The ability to trust people, the ability to empower people, that’s the model.”

Mark Cohen, for one, isn’t having it. “He’s had a puppet board who have never pushed back in any way that anybody has ever seen, and why would they?” he says. “They’re all handpicked Eddie acolytes, and people have asked me for over a decade, ‘How does he get away with this—it’s a public company and why isn’t the board in action [given] the continued failure of the business?’ To which I say, ‘The board is meaningless . . . There’s no governance here whatsoever.’ ”

Lampert’s spokesperson responds that the board “currently has six members . . . who are deeply committed to the maximization of stockholder value. . . . [They are] deeply informed and involved.”

Cohen points out that current Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin “has been a shareholder and a member of the board of directors of Sears Holdings from the day that the combined company was formed [until becoming Treasury secretary], so he spent 11 years at Eddie’s side. . . . [With] all of Trump’s focus on jobs, job preservation, job creation, somebody ought to ask his secretary of the Treasury what his involvement has been for 11 years in the destruction of well over 100,000 jobs at Sears.” (A spokesman for Mnuchin declined to comment.)

TURNING TABLES? Eddie Lampert, photographed at home, in Florida.

Lampert is no stranger to the plight of hourly workers, struggling to make ends meet, because he grew up as one. His early years were spent in Roslyn, New York, an affluent village on the North Shore of Long Island. His father was a successful attorney, his mother a stay-at-home mom, for him and his sister, Tracey, but when Lampert was 14 his father died of a heart attack. “That was the end of camp or going away to Europe like the other children,” his mother told The Wall Street Journal in 1991. She went to work as a salesclerk at Saks Fifth Avenue in Garden City for the next 20 years. “Eddie was very strong . . . trying to be the man of the family,” she recalled. During summer vacations he worked in a warehouse packing boxes.

“There were a lot of times,” Lampert says, “when [my mother] came home, and it’s like, ‘I’m going to lose my job. I don’t know what we’re going to do. We’ll have to sell the house.’ ”

At Yale, which Lampert attended with help from financial aid and student loans, he was the student who, at finals time, would move into the library and stay there. “He was very, very serious about doing the work,” says his friend Benjamin Bram, a founder of Watermill Trading. Lampert, Bram, and Steve Mnuchin (who was in the class behind the two of them) roomed together off campus.

At Yale, Lampert made connections that would be important to his future. His membership in the elite secretive fraternity Skull and Bones opened to him a rarefied world inhabited by the likes of George W. Bush and Stephen Schwarzman, now C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group. The holy grail among this set was Goldman Sachs, then, as now, Wall Street’s most prestigious firm. The summer after his junior year Lampert got a highly coveted Goldman Sachs internship. It probably hadn’t hurt his chances that Mnuchin’s father, Robert, was one of the firm’s senior partners, in charge of the equity division.

After graduation, Lampert ended up in the risk-arbitrage department at Goldman, reporting directly to Robert Freeman, the partner in charge of the firm’s business of buying and selling stocks involved in takeover transactions. “[Eddie] just had a drive and ambition amongst a group of pretty ambitious guys that I thought was unique,” Freeman says. “He was like a young bucking bronco . . . on a fast track to be successful.”

In February 1987, Freeman was led off the trading floor at Goldman by a U.S. marshal and arrested outside the firm’s Broad Street headquarters on charges of insider trading. “If you were at Goldman Sachs and you were a person working for Bob Freeman, you probably saw your career flashing before your eyes,” says a former Goldman colleague. Eventually, Freeman pleaded guilty to one felony count of insider trading and ended up serving four months in a minimum-security prison in Pensacola, Florida. Lampert gave a deposition in the case but was never implicated in any wrongdoing. “It was certainly an experience that [Lampert] wishes had never happened and one that he learned a great deal from,” says Lampert’s spokesperson.

After that experience, Lampert resolved to leave Goldman Sachs. During the summer of 1987, he met Texas billionaire investor Richard Rainwater on Nantucket. Over lunch Rainwater told Lampert, “There is life after Goldman.”

Lampert took the advice to heart. A year later he left the firm and started ESL with $28 million in seed money from Rainwater. The fund, Lampert explains, was dedicated to long-term investing—something, he claims, few others aside from his hero Warren Buffett were doing at the time. Rainwater also introduced Lampert to important future clients, such as Geffen. Within a year, though, Lampert and Rainwater had a falling-out. According to The Wall Street Journal, their dispute was about ego, strategy, and turf. “He’s so obsessed with moving in the direction he wants to move that sometimes people get burned, trampled on, bumped into,” Rainwater said of Lampert. “I think he has gone about alienating himself from almost everyone who he’s come into contact with.”

A former colleague agrees: “He’s really an extreme guy. There’s something odd about him, I think, his lack of emotional connection to people. . . . It’s so important, but some people just don’t have that. They’re off in their own little world.”

AutoZone was Lampert’s biggest coup. After acquiring 30 percent of the company, he orchestrated a series of aggressive stock buybacks that had the effect of driving up AutoZone’s earnings per share by reducing the shares outstanding. The stock price went through the roof. In 2012, he sold his stock for between $500 and $600 per share—for a total of around $1.5 billion. “For people to say he knows nothing about retail is a little tiresome, because in AutoZone he made a bundle of fucking money,” says Tiger Williams.

But there is a big difference between retailing auto parts and selling the thousands of diverse products—from pajamas to tractors to cosmetics—offered by Kmart and Sears. Nevertheless, Lampert’s success with AutoZone led him to believe he could handle rescuing Kmart, which had been fighting a losing battle with the big-box stores, such as Walmart.

In 2003 he bought the majority of Kmart’s debt before the company went into Chapter 11, after which he took control of it. He immediately set about reducing inventory in the stores, slashing expenses, and cutting back on advertising. “Lampert has a view, which he shares publicly, that he doesn’t believe in the traditional manner of how retailers run their business,” says Cohen. “He thinks investment in stores is not appropriate.”

“We were focused on getting each store profitable and running each store well,” Lampert explains. The plan, he says, was for the world to know that Kmart—which at this point was not in debt—had “undeniable financial strength. . . . Even people who didn’t think Kmart would last a year out of bankruptcy, they said, ‘Well, Kmart may still not be successful, but I get you’re not going out of business anytime soon with all that cash.’ ”

At 7:30 P.M., on January 10, 2003, the Friday before the week during which the finishing touches were to be put on the Kmart reorganization, Lampert went to get his car in the garage of his Greenwich office building. Suddenly he was shoved into the backseat of a rented black Ford Expedition sport-utility vehicle and driven, blindfolded and handcuffed, to a Days Inn, 55 miles away in Hamden, Connecticut. Four young men held him hostage for the next 28 hours in a $49-a-night room. They told him that unnamed AutoZone officials had offered to pay them $3 million to murder him, and they taunted him with a shotgun. On Saturday morning, two of the kidnappers used Lampert’s credit card to go on an $800 shopping spree for electronics equipment.

Lampert and two of the kidnappers, who had stayed behind at the Days Inn to guard him, settled on a $5 million payoff. On Sunday, at around two A.M., one of the kidnappers drove him back to Greenwich and let him out on a highway off-ramp to get the money, according to published reports. Why they would have made such a stupid move has not been answered until now.

Lampert, who had not slept in days, walked the half-mile to the Greenwich police station. Tracing the stolen-credit-card transactions (the kidnappers had also purchased a pizza with one), police arrested four local men soon thereafter: Renaldo Rose, a 24-year-old ex-Marine; Shemone Gordon, 23; Devon Harris, 19; and Lorenzo Jones, 17.

In the years since, Lampert has not talked publicly about the kidnapping, nor have the more puzzling aspects of the case been cleared up. When I asked him about it, he frowned. “You’re not going there, are you?” he says. “I don’t really want to talk a lot about it for a lot of reasons, but I know it’s not an unimportant event.” All he’ll say is that the experience was “not good” and “they could have made a different decision—let’s put it that way.” Did it change your life? I asked him. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “I’m just not comfortable talking about it.”

In 2004, Renaldo Rose, the ringleader, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was released early, in July 2016, and returned to his native Jamaica, where he now runs the Foreign Ink mobile tattoo studio, out of a van. Reached by phone, he willingly gave his version of the kidnapping. He recalls that, after serving in the Marines, he “hooked up with some friends and they were already doing jobs.” They encouraged him to focus on wealthy local targets, and he read about Lampert in a news article “that showed he was one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest, at the time.”

Rose says that after being abducted Lampert “freaked out and one of the guys started punching him in the head. So I had to yell at them: ‘Listen, you both calm down. Keep quiet and you’re gonna be all right.’ I made [Lampert] a promise, ‘Listen, you don’t give us no problem and we’ll let you go.’ And he did, so he never freaked out again after initially.”

It still haunts Rose today that he might not have gone to prison had he killed Lampert and the other kidnappers: “So it was either like, O.K., get rid of everybody. [But] with Shemone Gordon, [Lampert] was like family almost. He argued against all that. I still think we should have just got rid of everybody. But, I don’t know. I did have to consider that. Lampert . . . never gave any problems, so I kind of had to keep my word on that.”

Rose dismisses the idea of the AutoZone executives offering $3 million for Lampert’s murder as the fabrication of one of his cohorts. But he recalls an intriguing exchange that he says took place between Gordon and Lampert:

“I heard Eddie. I heard some of the discussions, because there was even a discussion when it came to him buying Kmart. He was asking questions such as ‘When I get out of here, do you think I should do it?’ . . . He said he felt that Kmart was tied up with something with the Mob or Mafia. They used it as a piggy bank. That was the first time I’d ever heard. I’m like, ‘Shit. The Mafia is still around?’ But he was really hesitant about doing it.” (Through his spokesperson Lampert denies he made such comments.)

In the end, Rose says, the main reason he decided to let Lampert go was that his partners were so inept. By using Lampert’s credit card, against Rose’s instructions, his partners in crime had alerted police to their whereabouts. Rose says they released Lampert not to get the ransom money but to call off what was by then a hopeless caper.

The next week Lampert completed the Kmart deal and soon set about his cost-cutting strategy. It yielded results. “His cash flow exploded, and he was being touted by the financial media as the next Warren Buffett,” remembers Cohen. In 2003, Lampert says, operating profit was around $400 million; the next year it was $900 million. In 2005 he decided that Kmart should buy Sears. “Kmart was a turnaround,” he says. “Putting Kmart and Sears together was a transformation.”

Lampert explained his strategy for the combined company: “When we put Sears and Kmart together, part of the idea was we had all of these Kmart stores that were off-mall,” he says. “Sears was sort of stuck in the mall, and Sears, before we made the acquisition, was starting to move off-mall.” Lampert’s vision was to keep Kmart and Sears stores as close to Walmart as he could get them. “That’s where all the people in town are going,” he says. He believed that Sears and Kmart were differentiated enough from Walmart to be complementary, not competitive. He says he invested a lot of capital in Kmart stores but didn’t get a return on his investment.

“I’m not sure Kmart on its own could ever be a great retailer,” he says. “But you put Kmart and Sears together, in combination they had a chance . . . Kmart had the locations and Sears had the brands.”

Lampert also says that starting in 2006 he began making “countercultural investments in online commerce.”

“I’m told, for about two years, Lampert actually attempted to run the business,” says Cohen. “So for about a year and a half or two years the financial performance of Sears Holdings looked pretty good, but in fact all that he was doing was completely cutting capital expenditures and operating expenses.”

Lampert’s spokesperson responds, “Managing capital expenditures and expenses tightly has been required, not optional, to improve the company’s operating performance and financial flexibility in order to achieve its long-term transformation.”

The combined company never really found its niche—which was supposed to be somewhere between Walmart, on the low end, and Macy’s, on the high. And then came the 2008 financial crisis, when, according to Cohen, “Lampert stopped appearing to support the business in any conventional way and started to invest free cash flow in derivatives. He hived off Sears Roebuck’s three consequential brands—Kenmore, Craftsman, and DieHard—into a Caribbean-based wholly owned sub of ESL so the company was paying royalties to Eddie Lampert for the use of its own trademarks.” (Lampert’s spokesperson calls this “completely false . . . There is no Caribbean-based wholly owned subsidiary of ESL nor any subsidiary nor any payments to ESL or a subsidiary of ESL for any of the trademarks.”)

The company has been in steep decline ever since. “There are a lot of decisions made over a long period of time, including by me, that may not have been always the best decisions,” Lampert admits. “But I did have a point of view in terms of how shopping habits were going to change. I could have put a lot of capital in a Kmart or Sears store and it could look like Bloomingdale’s or it could look like Saks, but we didn’t have access to products that would be consistent with that. In other words, if I built an equivalent of Nordstrom’s, it’s not like all of a sudden Nike would be selling to us.” Or that Nordstrom’s customers would be coming through his doors. Instead, he says, he targeted his capital on improving his customers’ online experience. “I did believe that people are going to be one click away from the best possible experience, the cheapest price, and whatever product they want,” he says. “And I could have a better Web site than Nordstrom’s. I could have a better Web site than Bloomingdale’s. In other words, I don’t need to invest in fixtures, but I do need to invest in the features and the experiences.”

But Lampert was evidently ahead of his time in trying to get Sears buyers to shop online. At the time they were just not comfortable enough with the technology to do so. Whatever the reason, Sears’s Web site never remotely rivaled the sales in the stores. Or on Amazon.

Now that Amazon is eating Sears’s lunch, Lampert is faced with his latest challenge: staving off a Sears Holdings bankruptcy, and he is using every corporate-finance strategy in the book.

In addition to making billions of dollars in loans to the company to provide Sears Holdings with more cash, he has announced the closing of some 300 more stores since the beginning of 2017. He sold Sears’s Craftsman line of tools to Stanley Black & Decker for around $900 million. He is considering the sale, or monetization, of the DieHard battery and auto-center brands. “Most of the big transactions that he’s been into, like the sale of Sears Canada stock or the sale of Lands’ End, have involved or are caught up in special dividends where he’s taken the cash out and returned it to shareholders,” argues Cohen, “and of course he’s the principal shareholder.”

Lampert has spun off Lands’ End, Sears Hometown & Outlet Stores, Sears Canada, and Orchard Supply, each into its own public company. “We’re fighting to survive—that’s pretty clear,” Lampert says.

His critics see things differently. Robert Chapman, a California-based hedge-fund manager, calls Sears Holdings “a total shit show” that is in “secret liquidation” mode. He says he recently came out of a Kmart in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that offered so many bargains he couldn’t believe his eyes. “He’s not calling it a liquidation sale,” he says of Lampert, “but if you’ve gone into one of the stores, it’s a liquidation deal.”

Cohen says, “[Lampert] is a guy who may have harbored some notion of running this business, but if he did he’s pivoted to just simply manipulating it, if you will, for his own benefit. . . . This is the creative destruction of a very weak brand [Kmart] and a perfectly viable brand [Sears], both of which together were doing something like $50 billion when he took over, and he’s getting away with it because he’s been able to treat this like a private company. No public company would ever allow a chief executive officer to remain in their seat who was so intimately tied to these manipulations and presiding over the failure of a business like this. This is not normal, if anything is normal these days. This is certainly not normal.”

Cohen believes that a bankruptcy filing is inevitable, and that Lampert will end up benefiting from it because he will be able to “walk away” from onerous store leases and other liabilities, such as the underfunded pension plan, and get rid of those assets that he hasn’t been able to sell. Since he’s the largest Sears Holdings creditor, Cohen says, “he’ll then bring this thing right back out as a new company, and he’ll become the new shareholder, and he’ll start this process all over again because Sears still has a substantial inventory of at least theoretically valuable real estate, and as long as there’s any plus value to any consequential outcome it’s all to his benefit.”

For his part, Lampert says he is going to keep fighting for as long as it makes sense: “I believe in what’s possible, and we’re doing things that are necessary to keep the company going. . . . It’s definitely not just humbled me, but it’s expanded my awareness of real issues that exist in our society. . . . I feel like I can make a contribution by being involved, O.K.?”

Cohen takes a more cynical view. “This is all just a perversion of our free-market system,” he says. “This is the actions of a controlling shareholder treating a company as if it is truly private, with no oversights, no constructive oversight whatsoever, with no intent to protect any of the requisite constituencies other than essentially himself.”

Lampert’s spokesperson says, “There is no merit to the speculation that Mr. Lampert is working to benefit from the ‘liquidation’, ‘failure’ or ‘bankruptcy’ of Sears Holdings . . . All shareholders—and the Board of Directors that represents them—ensure there is oversight of their interest in the Sears Holdings, as do several other stakeholders (lending partners, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, vendors, employees, members, etc.) who have their own different interests in the Company. So, it is untrue and unfair to allege that the company is being manipulated to only serve the interests of Mr. Lampert.”

Despite Lampert’s optimism, Sears continues to decline. Many other big-box retailers had a surprisingly robust 2017 holiday sales season, but sales at Sears suffered mightily, down around 17 percent. Lampert once again tried to reassure the company’s suppliers and equity holders that it had enough cash to pay its bills as they became due. On January 10, he announced that he had arranged an additional $300 million of new loans to ease the terms on other loans that Sears already has, in order to buy more time. He also announced that Sears would find another $200 million in cost savings not related to already announced store closings. Nevertheless, the fourth-quarter 2017 loss could be as much as $320 million, and Lampert announced he is going to close another 103 Sears and Kmart stores by this month.

Despite everything, the Sears Holdings stock price has slumped to $2 a share, down considerably from the high of $134 per share some 11 years ago. Sears Holdings now has a market value of around $250 million, making Lampert’s nearly 60 percent stake worth $150 million.

At the end of our interview, Lampert made it clear he’s not done yet. “Put it this way, if I consider all the other alternatives, they’re not great for a lot of people and I just want to be responsible. If I didn’t believe that this company could be transformed still—the window is definitely shrinking—but if I didn’t believe that, I would try to take a different path. But I don’t know what that path exactly would be. It’s not a question of giving up or not giving up.”

William D. Cohan

William d. cohan is a special correspondent at *vanity fair.*.

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The Fountainhead yacht is docked in Boston Harbor, Monday, August 14, 2017. Staff photo by Angela Rowlings.

The Fountainhead, a megayacht owned by billionaire Sears and Kmart tycoon Edward Lampert, is currently docked in Boston Harbor.

Having come up from Cape Cod Canal, the luxe ship is parked right off the coast hard by Joe’s American Bar and Grill and the Boston Sail Loft yesterday morning. And if you take a look, you can tell this isn’t your dad’s summer sailboat.

Fountainhead, as in the famous Ayn Rand novel, measures a whopping 288 feet long — that’s bigger than a Coast Guard Famous-class cutter. The super-yacht has enough space to accommodate 14 guests, as well as 20 crew members, and it’s valued at $130 million.

That price tag might induce sticker shock among us plebeians, but its chump change for Lampert, whose net worth is reportedly in the one-percenter neighborhood of $1.89 billion.

The yacht has visited the Hub before: It was spotted floating in the harbor last summer, as well. At that point, it was widely believed that the ship belonged to investor, businessman and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Lampert thought it would be fun to get the rumor mill spinning about Fountainhead’s ownership.

After Page Six took the bait and ran with the Cuban rumor, the “Shark Tank” star wrote an email explaining how he had nothing to do with the ship.

“I don’t own a yacht,” Cuban wrote to the Page Sixers. “Never have . . . The guy who owns the boat tells EVERYONE that it’s mine.”

Although Sears and Kmart have been shuttering about 250 of their brick-and-mortar stores, Lampert’s lifestyle can be categorized as luxurious. In addition to his home in Greenwich, Conn., he bought a $40 million, Italian-style villa on the exclusive Indian Creek Island in Miami, Fla., and has a place in Aspen, Colo.

Sounds like smooth sailing to us.

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Sears' reclusive CEO explains why he rarely visits the office — and instead lives at his sprawling $38 million estate that's 1,400 miles away

• Sears CEO Eddie Lampert lives at a $38 million estate in Florida and is rarely seen at Sears' Illinois headquarters, only visiting about once a year. 
• In a new interview, Lampert addressed critics of his long-distance management style.
• "T here are cultures where people work from home, and they still get things done," he told Vanity Fair.  "The ability to trust people, the ability to empower people, that's the model." 
• Lampert also owns a $26 million property in Connecticut, a $14.5 million home in Colorado, and a 288-foot yacht.

Sears CEO Eddie Lampert has opened up in a rare interview about his decision to manage the embattled retailer from afar.

Critics — including some former Sears executives — have blasted Lampert for rarely visiting Sears' headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.

Instead, Lampert prefers to stay at his $38 million estate on Indian Creek Island, off the coast of Miami, and communicate with employees primarily through teleconference meetings. He only visits Sears' headquarters about once a year for the annual shareholder meeting.

In response to his critics, Lampert told Vanity Fair that he believes in empowering his management team.  

"T here are cultures where people work from home, and they still get things done," he said. " The ability to trust people, the ability to empower people, that's the model."

The interview marks the first time that Lampert, who rarely talks to the press, has publicly addressed critics of his long-distance management style.

While the Indian Creek estate is Lampert's primary home, he also owns a $26 million property in Greenwich, Connecticut, a $14.5 million home in Aspen, Colorado, and a 288-foot yacht, which he named The Fountainhead . 

Den här kastade just ankare utanför Visby. Om jag sparar halva mitt studiebidrag varje månad så kan jag köpa den här om 18 200 år! #feadship #fountainhead #fountainheadyacht @theyachtguy A post shared by Buster Bark (@busterbark) on Jul 9, 2017 at 8:12am PDT Jul 9, 2017 at 8:12am PDT

Sears, which also owns Kmart, has been selling off brands and real estate to stay afloat amid years of falling sales. The company's sales have dropped  from $53 billion in 2006 to $16.7 billion in 2017 .

Same-store sales, or sales at stores open at least a year, dropped 15.6% during the fourth quarter, including a 12% drop at Kmart and an 18% drop at Sears.

Lampert has been criticized for not investing enough in Sears and Kmart stores.

In the Vanity Fair interview, Lampert said he chose to invest in Sears' online business over its stores because he believed the company had a better chance of competing with retailers like Nordstrom and Saks online than in stores.

"I could have a better website than Nordstrom's. I could have a better website than Bloomingdale's," he said. "In other words, I don't need to invest in fixtures, but I do need to invest in the features and the experiences."

Watch: How Tesla CEO Elon Musk makes and spends his $19.2 billion

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Hedge fund whiz Eddie Lampert rode the worst trade of his life with Sears all the way down

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Bit by bit, the smart money deserted Edward Lampert.

Michael Dell, David Geffen, George Soros, the Ziff brothers — by 2012, all of them, and many more, had peeled away.

Not even Lampert’s friends could understand why the hedge fund manager, once hailed as a young Warren Buffett, clung to his spectacularly bad investment in Sears, a dying department store chain.

Granted, other hedge fund titans have blown it, such as Julian Robertson with US Airways and Bill Ackman with Herbalife. But few have ridden a disaster so publicly, over so many years, with such an iconic brand. It was hubris, many now say, and a failure to follow the investor commandment: Get out in time.

Lampert, who lost many millions as Sears Holdings Corp. shares ground down to pennies, kept throwing the company lifelines. From the moment he bought into what was then called Sears, Roebuck & Co., he also maneuvered to protect his financial interests. At times, he even made money.

He closed stores, laid off employees and, in what will surely be long remembered as the most unseemly element of the saga, carved out some choice assets for himself.

Until, at last, the reckoning. After 13 years under Lampert’s stewardship, Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late Sunday night. And, once again, Wall Street is wondering what Edward Lampert will salvage for himself and his $1.3-billion fund, ESL Investments Inc., whose future may now be in doubt.

“He’s been doing a lot of financial engineering, but he’s just been moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Van Conway, a restructuring expert who worked on Detroit’s bankruptcy. “It looks like he’s played almost a full deck of cards by now.”

For years, Bankruptcy Court had been accepted by most everyone except Lampert as unavoidable. He refused to give in, proposing a plug-the-holes maneuver just two weeks ago, after years of machinations that kept the basic gears going even as the company was bleeding out.

At 56, he’s still a billionaire. A Sears bankruptcy isn’t likely to change that for Lampert, who agreed to step down as CEO as part of the reorganization but will retain his chairmanship.

Lampert has maneuvered out of tight spots before, most famously when he persuaded four men who kidnapped him in January 2003 to let him go after holding him for 30 hours, blindfolded and handcuffed, in a motel bathroom. But saving sinking Sears required more than fast talk.

His last idea was a debt restructuring that received little or no support from other creditors, who saw it as a scheme to allow ESL to be paid for Sears’ real estate, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. Part of this Lampert plan was to have unsecured creditors swap their debt for equity, a fool’s trade in the view of most analysts.

There’s no question Sears has cost him, and not only in reputation: He saw about $240 million worth of stock that he personally purchased evaporate as the shares tumbled. An additional $287 million that he received in compensation has all but disappeared. ESL has lost $65 million just this year.

The hedge fund’s assets plummeted to about $1 billion from $15 billion in 2006 as the portfolio shrank from half a dozen to the one massive crapshoot on Sears. The big-name investors exited, and so did Goldman Sachs Group Inc. clients who had come into ESL as part of a $3.5-billion capital raise in late 2007 and early 2008.

Still, as Sears’ major debt holder, with about half of the company’s $5.3-billion total, ESL saw a bit of upside, extracting more than $200 million in interest payments a year. And Lampert carved out what looked like — and in some cases might yet be — saves for himself, with spinoffs that gave him chunks of equity in new companies.

One was Seritage Growth Properties, the real estate investment trust that counts Sears as its biggest tenant and of which Lampert is the largest shareholder; he created it in 2015 to hold stores that were leased back to Sears — cordoning those off from any bankruptcy proceeding. He and ESL got a majority stake in Land’s End Inc., the apparel and accessories maker he split from Sears in 2014.

The Sears Canada Inc. gamble was a fumble; that spinoff began liquidating a year ago. Lampert and ESL together had almost $300 million in that stock and both rode it to zero, though they did pocket $25 million in special dividends.

The spinoffs robbed Sears of assets when it needed them, said Mark Cohen, a former CEO of Sears Canada and frequent Lampert critic who’s an adjunct professor of retail studies at Columbia University.

“This completely unconventional way of managing a business might have been an interesting alternative operating strategy were it not for the fact that it has been a colossal failure,” Cohen said.

Over the years of propping Sears up, Lampert threw his own money into the effort, and his friends and supporters said this wasn’t only in self-interest: He wanted to keep the lights on and people employed. He and ESL were willing to lend at much lower rates than others were demanding. He had Sears pay almost $2 billion into the unfunded pension plan in the last five years.

Nothing Lampert won out of Sears’ spinoffs was the result of special treatment, said Paul Holmes, a spokesman for ESL. “As we have said previously, the Land’s End and Seritage transactions were carried out on transparent terms that delivered value to all Sears shareholders, and every shareholder had the same opportunity to participate.”

The defeat of a bankruptcy filing won’t dull Lampert’s passion, according to people close to him. He’ll continue to lead his low-key billionaire life, reading, riding his racing bicycles and spending time on his 288-foot yacht. (Lampert named it the Fountainhead, after the 1943 novel by Ayn Rand, whose books glorify individualism and the pursuit of riches.)

Lampert started ESL — for Edward Scott Lampert — in 1988 after three years at Goldman. Richard Rainwater, who oversaw the Bass brothers fortune, staked him $28 million to get going.

By the time he was 43, he was a billionaire three times over. He hit home runs, the most impressive with the auto-parts retailer AutoZone Inc. and the car seller AutoNation Inc. Even with the Sears fiasco, an investor who has been with Lampert from the beginning would now still be enjoying an annualized return of about 12%.

He had what looked like another success on his hands in 2002, when he bought Kmart’s unsecured debt for about $700 million. Within two weeks, he’d orchestrated the retailer’s exit from bankruptcy and emerged as its biggest shareholder.

Kmart was throwing off cash back then, and Lampert masterminded the merger with Sears. It wasn’t immediately a disaster, but losses started piling up.

Sears rolled through four CEOs in eight years, and Lampert took over in January 2013. But he shows up at the headquarters outside Chicago only a few times a year. He prefers to beam in from his office in Florida; while he still owns a home in Connecticut, he lives most of the time in a $40-million estate on Indian Creek, an island near Key Biscayne that’s home to two dozen or so of Miami’s uber wealthy.

As he cut costs to the bone, he pitted executives against one another in a battle for scarce resources in a sort of retail Hunger Games, people who worked for him said. He ruffled feathers by being a micro-manager with little interest in heeding the advice of top executives, according to one former high-ranking employee, who like others interviewed for this story asked not to be named for fear of angering Lampert.

Perhaps his biggest misstep was thinking he could power through the recession. He had the opportunity to cancel a massive number of leases on Sears stores in the aftermath of the financial crisis, according to people familiar with the company. Instead, he renewed them.

Rainwater, who died in 2015, had pulled his money out of the fund when Lampert decided to move beyond picking stocks to takeovers and buyouts, thinking the young man wasn’t ready. Part of it, Rainwater told the Wall Street Journal in 1991, was what he saw as the downside to Lampert’s exceptional drive: “He’s so obsessed with moving in the direction he wants to move that people get burned, trampled on, run into.”

Those words now seem prophetic.

10:55 p.m.: This article was updated with Sears’ filing for bankruptcy protection.

This article was originally published at 2:25 p.m., Oct. 12.

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Networth Mirror

Eddie lampert.

Eddie Lampert is an American investor and businessman who has served as chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings. ESL Investments is his company, and he is the founder and chairman. He formed Transform Holdco LLC and was a director of AutoZone, Inc. Lampert is a multibillionaire who makes his living as a hedge fund manager. He began his career at Goldman Sachs as an intern.

So, how familiar are you with Eddie Lampert? If not much, we’ve assembled everything you need to know about Eddie Lampert’s net worth in 2021, including his age, height, weight, wife, children, biography, and personal information. Thus, if you’re ready, here’s all we know about Eddie Lampert so far.

How much is Eddie Lampert’s Net Worth, Salary, and Earnings in 2021

Eddie Lampert’s estimated net worth is $2 billion as of 2021 . His enormous riches stems from his successful business career. His net worth, on the other hand, has fluctuated a lot throughout the years. He has stock in a number of firms and has served as chairman or CEO of a number of them. He is a highly successful businessman who has worked hard since he was a child. He also has homes in a variety of locales across the United States. Eddie Lampert also has a fancy yacht and a collection of high-end automobiles. Many people look up to Eddie Lampert because of his enormous achievement in his work. When he was still in high school, he helped support his family. He is a gifted individual who has remained focused on his career throughout his life. Lampert is a proponent of free markets, and he is still enthusiastic and capable of expanding his company to new heights.

What kind of lifestyle does Eddie Lampert  have ?

On July 19, 1962, Edward Scott Lampert was born in New York City,  Floyd M. Lampert and Dolores Lampert are his parents. Tracey, his younger sister, is his only sibling. Lampert’s grandfather was a passive investor and his father was a partner in a law company. His grandma fostered in him an interest in investment and served as an inspiration to him. His mother used to work as a clerk after his father passed away.

What is the Age, Height, Weight, and Body Dimensions of Eddie Lampert ?

So, how old is Eddie Lampert in 2021, and how tall and how heavy is he? Eddie Lampert, who was born on July 19, 1962, is 59 years old as of today’s date, September 5, 2021. Despite his height of 5′ 8′′ in feet and inches and 173 cm in centimetres, he weighs 161 pounds and 73 kilograms.

Education Background

During his scholastic years, Eddie Lampert was a bright student. During his high school years, he participated in basketball and soccer. He used to work while still in high school when his father died. His outstanding accomplishment earned him financial aid for college. He went on to Yale University, where he received his BA in economics. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society at Yale.

Personal life: Dating, girlfriends, wife, and kids

Eddie Lampert and his wife Kinga Keh have been happily married since 2001. His wife is an attorney, and they have three children together. In 2003, he was kidnapped and held captive for two days before being released. He promised not to close K-Mart after the incident.

Is Eddie Lampert a homosexual?

Eddie Lampert is a self-made billionaire who has put his family and profession first. Because he is happily married to his wife, he has a straight sexual orientation. He is the father of three children and is neither bisexual nor gay.

Professional Life of Eddie Lampert

Eddie Lampert began his career at Goldman Sachs as an intern in 1984. He worked in the risk arbitrage section from 1985 until 1988. In 1988, he joined ESL Investments. Richard Rainwater gave him $28 million during that time. He has been investing for a long time. He was named Chief Executive Officer of Sears Holdings in 2013. He had a 28 percent stake in Sears Holdings Corp within three years. He was then appointed president of Sear Holdings. In 2018, he resigned down as the company’s CEO.

Aside from that, in 1988, he formed ESL Investments. Eddie Lampert’s management of Sears was a colossal failure. In 2019, however, he won the auction to keep the company after bidding over $5 billion. He owns stock in a number of firms and is connected to a number of others.Seritage Growth Properties LP is chaired by Lampert. Transform Holdco LLC was his company, and he was the CEO. He has been on the boards of Kmart Operations LLC, StarWest LLC, MyGolfer LLC, California Builder Appliances, and KLC, Inc., among others.

Awards and Achievements

Eddie Lampert’s success as a businessman is one of his greatest achievements. He was named to Time magazine’s list of the “most important persons in the world” in 2006. He was also named on the list of “Wall Street’s Brightest Minds.” Lampert was a scholar-athlete during his high school years.

Facts of Eddie Lampert

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