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Are His 15 Minutes Up Yet?
Jim Cramer, Overexposed
by Melanie Warner
Back in May 1997, Jim Cramer seemed to
be everywhere. When FORTUNE profiled the
curly-haired 43-year-old hedge-fund manager,
he was appearing regularly on CNBC's
Squawk Box, writing for New York and Worth
magazines (he was negotiating with many
others, including this one), and co-founding
TheStreet.com, a new online financial
magazine. This guy, we observed, was
ubiquitous. Little did we know he was just
warming up.
By the end of last year, His Downess was
popping up on TV more than Jerry
Springer--CNN, The Charlie Rose Show, Good
Morning America, the Canadian Broadcasting
Corp., you name it. Cramer probably would
have appeared on Sesame Street if they'd
asked. The Street.com became just one of the
many places you could read his columns
about the stock market. He assumed new
writing gigs for Time and GQ, and other
publications reprinted part of his twice-daily
rantings, as did Yahoo and AOL. He even
posed as a "financial guru" in ads for Rockport
shoes. If you could get through 24 hours
without a Cramer sighting, you were lucky. His
workday, he says, regularly stretched from
4:30 a.m. till 11 p.m.
Then one night, it hit him. After a disastrous
appearance in February on ABC's sardonic
celebrity talkfest Politically Incorrect, when
host Bill Maher, he says, called him "stupid"
and "an idiot," Cramer returned home
exhausted. His wife chided him, "If you ever do
anything like that again ..." Cramer had
realized what was obvious to everyone else:
He was overextended and overexposed. But
Cramer says that every time he mugged for
the camera, it was for The Street.com, not to
promote himself. Each appearance he made
resulted in sizable increases in the number of
visits to the site and ultimately helped ramp it
up to its current 18,400 paying subscribers.
Cramer, who has personally sunk $5.5 million
into the venture, confesses, "I became in my
own eyes a self-promoter, and I was very
uncomfortable with that."
Cramer reports that he has since been scaling
back, turning down 70% of the flood of
requests he gets for TV appearances, giving
up his Worth contract, and pruning his regular
stint on Good Morning America from weekly to
biweekly. He even took a rare two-week
vacation recently with his family in
Amagansett, Long Island, during which he
claims to actually have done no work. "My life
has returned to some semblance of normalcy.
I'm usually home by six and don't work
weekends anymore," says Cramer.
It may not seem very scaled back to the rest of
us. He's planning a new weekly The
Street.com talk show on CNBC--he calls it "a
Wall Street Week for this age." A recent issue
of Newsweek crowned him one of the "top
buzzmakers of the moment," whatever that
means. And when Cramer spoke with this
writer about his new, allegedly low-impact life,
he'd written five columns for TheStreet.com in
48 hours, appeared on Good Morning
America, and was about to dash over to CNN's
MoneyLine to talk to host Lou Dobbs about
accounting shenanigans at Cendant. Oh, and
he'd spent the whole day trading stocks and
options. "Sell 25 Intel with an 80 low," he
bellowed at one of his traders.
Fundamentally, Cramer may just not be wired
for normality. First of all, there's the sleep
thing. Then, he says that he can't stop
thinking about the market and that he has a
paranormal, photographic memory for stock
prices. Plus, he's obsessive about answering
the hundreds of E-mails he gets each day
from fans. How does he manage? It helps, he
says, that he types 165 words a minute. Which
is pretty paranormal itself. The current
Guinness world record for typing on a PC?
158. |
