The price of experience

the long version

This is an epic account of the Billionaire Boys Club case, in which Joe Hunt organized a cadre of former classmates and other gifted young men for the purpose of turning large profits in financial markets. Hunt was charisma incarnate, capable of selling his schemes to naive investors and his ideas (in the form of his amoral Paradox philosophy) to ingenuous followers. He played fast and loose with other people's money, lost much of it, turned to increasingly more desperate measures, got deeper in debt, and ultimately participated in at least two murders in an effort to save himself. This chronicle follows Hunt's story from his days at the prestigious Harvard School in California to his meteoric rise in investment circles and in Los Angeles high society. Sullivan's book tracks Hunt's history with Dreiserian specificity, piling up the details to present a picture of startling clarity and brilliance.