Edward S. Lampert: More Info

When Lampert was 14 his father died of a heart attack at age 47. Even though he was a lawyer, he nonetheless left the family, which lived in the middle-class town of Roslyn, N.Y., with almost no savings. Lampert’s mother got a job as a clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue Store.

Eddie worked in several warehouses — stocking shelves, picking orders — after school and during the weekends to help support his mother and his younger sister, Tracey. ‘He was a child, and then suddenly he became a man,’ said his mother.

Eddie handled the pressure well. He earned good grades, found time for soccer and basketball and won the athlete scholar award at his high school. He received financial aid to help pay tuition for Yale, where he majored in economics and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and Skull & Bones.

‘Even back then Eddie was very intense,’ says Steven Mnuchin, his college roommate. Today, Mnuchin runs Dune Capital in Manhattan and also sits on the board of Sears Holdings. After college Lampert got a job at Goldman Sachs, persuading Robert Rubin to put him on the risk-arbitrage unit.

In 2004, his earnings were estimated to be $1.02 billion US Dollars; making Edward Lampert the first Wall Street financial manager to exceed an income of $1 billion in a single year. In 2006, Lampert was the richest person in Connecticut with a net worth of $3.8 billion.

His earnings in 2006 were estimated to be from $1.0 billion to $1.5 billion US Dollars.

He is #68 on the list of Forbes 400 Richest Americans.

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