The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [119]
What had happened was that he had been right, the world had been wrong, and the world hated him for it. And so Michael Burry ended where he began--alone, and comforted by his solitude. He remained inside his office in Cupertino, California, big enough for a staff of twenty-five people, but the fund was shuttered and the office was empty. The last man out was Steve Druskin, and among Druskin's last acts was to figure out what to do about Michael Burry's credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. "Mike kept a couple of them, just for fun," he said. "Just a couple. To see if we could get paid off in full." And he had, though it wasn't for fun but vindication: to prove to the world that the investment-grade bonds he had bet against were indeed entirely without value. The two bets he had saved were against subprime bonds created back in 2005 by Lehman Brothers. They'd gone to zero at roughly the same time as their creator. Burry had wagered $100,000 or so on each, and made $5 million.
The problem, from the point of view of a lawyer closing an investment fund, was that these strange contracts did not expire until 2035. The brokers had long since paid them in full: 100 cents on the dollar. No Wall Street firm even bothered to send them quotes on the things anymore. "I don't get a statement from a broker saying we have an open position with them," says Druskin. "But we do. It's like no one wants to talk about this anymore. It's like, 'All right, you've got your ten million dollars. Don't keep haranguing me about it.'"
On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess. Thirty-year contracts that had some remote technical risk of repayment--exactly what that risk was he was still trying to determine--was the last of Michael Burry's mess. "It's possible the brokers have thrown the contracts away," Druskin said. "No one three years ago expected this to happen on the brokerage side. So no one's been trained to deal with this. We've pretty much said, 'We're going out of business.' And they said, 'Okay.'"
By the time Eisman got the call from Danny Moses saying that he might be having a heart attack, and that he and Vinny and Porter were sitting on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral, he was in the midst of a slow, almost menopausal, change. He'd been unprepared for his first hot flash, in the late fall of 2007. By then it was clear to many that he had been right and they had been wrong and that he had gotten rich to boot. He'd gone to a conference put on by Merrill Lynch, right after they'd fired their CEO, Stan O'Neal, and disclosed $20 billion or so of their $52 billion in subprime-related losses. There he had sidled up to Merrill's chief financial officer, Jeff Edwards, the same Jeff Edwards Eisman had taunted, some months earlier, about Merrill Lynch's risk models. "You remember what I said about those risk models of yours?" Eisman now said. "I guess I was right, huh?" Instantly, and amazingly, he regretted having said it. "I felt bad about it," said Eisman. "It was obnoxious. He was a lovely guy. He was just wrong. I was no longer the