Wild On

Writing (and investing) for a media A-list of fellow Harvard alumni, fund manager James Cramer has become one of Wall Street's hottest gurus. Now, poised to make up to $50 million in a public offering of his Web site,, he has been warring ﬁercely with his partner and mentor, New Republic owner Martin Peretz.

On March 16, James Cramer posted a long and rambling piece on Slate, the popular Internet magazine, which offered the first public hint at the immensity of his anger. In the article, entitled “A Message to My Enemies,” Cramer did not actually name his “enemies,” but he lashed out at members of the media who, he wrote, “sincerely want to see me fail.” He complained about “the distorted attacks” against him and wrote cryptically about unnamed people who "want to drive a wedge between my partners and me."

That Cramer would be angry at how he was being treated by the media is a stunning thing. The reason anyone with even a passing interest in the stock market has heard of Cramer is that the man is a master at making the media work for him. A regular guest on CNBC's hugely successful morning stock-market talk show, Squawk Box, Cramer has also appeared frequently on Good Morning America. He has been interviewed on Charlie Rose and may be the only Wall Street hedge-fund manager to have been a guest on Bill Maher's satirical late-night program, Politically Incorrect. Cramer's columns appear in Time magazine and The New York Observer. And his byline—on articles about such subjects as hedging strategies, the mysteries of short selling, the state of tech stocks, and what advice his wife, Karen, whom he refers to as "the Trading Goddess," is giving him—has appeared often in New York magazine, The New Republic, SmartMoney, Brill's Content, and GQ.

At 44, Cramer has become one of the hottest stock-market gurus in the country, and it isn't because he is a big player on Wall Street. Cramer, Berkowitz & Co., the $265 million hedge fund he manages, is dwarfed by far better-known funds, such as Paul Tudor Jones's Tudor Investments Corporation, which manages $3 billion in assets, Julian Robertson's $14 billion Tiger Management, and George Soros's $7.3 billion Quantum Fund. And while Cramer's reported record of beating the market pretty consistently in the last 10 years is impressive, Warren Buffett has done that for more than 40 years. What makes Cramer stand out is that he has been willing to talk and write prolifically about the stock market and that the media love what he has to say and how he says it.

"He's a better reporter and writer than any money manager, and he's a better money manager than any writer," says Jonathan Alter, a Newsweek columnist and a correspondent for NBC News, and also a friend of Cramer's since their days at Harvard. "Jim's by far the best; he really knows what he's talking about, and he can write," says Steve Brill, chairman and editor in chief of Brill's Content. "He's like the Martha Stewart of personal finance, a great doer and a great explainer," says Steven Swartz, the editor in chief of SmartMoney.

Like no other Wall Street personality today, Cramer has become something of a media star, celebrated in magazine and newspaper articles that have referred to his "irrepressible brilliance" and chronicled everything from his 40th-birthday party at Gallagher's steak house in Manhattan to his frenetic, 19-hour workdays. Nearly three years ago, when Cramer and his old friend and mentor, Martin Peretz, the owner and editor in chief of The New Republic, started, a financial Web site—for which Cramer also writes about six columns a day—the venture was given loving treatment in the media. "There has been a suspension of skepticism about which is surprising for the press," says an executive at an on-line competitor. "The reflexive 'built an enormous business' is bullshit. It's got less circulation than The New Republic." (The New Republic has a circulation of 94,500. claims to have 37,000 subscribers.)

Any day now is scheduled to sell shares to the public for the first time. Little matter that the company has never made a dime and last year lost $16.3 million. Cramer's own $1.5 million investment in the start-up and the options he holds could be worth a tidy fortune, $50 million by some estimates, in today's hyped-up, highly speculative market for Internet stocks.

So why would Jim Cramer be angry? The day before his Slate piece was posted, Barron's had published a witty, cutting article about Cramer by its well-known and highly respected columnist Alan Abelson, which was widely read and chuckled over on Wall Street. "On television," Abelson wrote, "Cramer is an unfailing and formidable threat to coherence. In print, he's a threat to objective journalism, since he's an unremitting practitioner of subjective journalism, with only one subject—himself."

But that wasn't what was really bothering Cramer. What had really enraged him, he says, leaning across the desk in his Wall Street office, his eyes ice-cold and his neck stiff with anger, was the person who leaked damaging information about his hedge fund to The New York Times in late February, the man who is leading "a jihad" against him. In a story published two days after the Times announced it would invest $15 million in and one day after the Web company's public offering was reported, it was revealed that Cramer's hedge fund had made a paltry 2 percent return in 1998—at a time when the S&P index had done 29 percent. The story also included the news that a large amount of money had been withdrawn from Cramer, Berkowitz by unnamed investors last fall. Cramer is convinced that only an investor in his fund could have leaked this type of information, which is considered private by many hedge funds.

And that investor, he believes, was Marty Peretz—the best man at his wedding, his closest friend for nearly 20 years, the man who set him up in business on Wall Street and who is still his partner in While Peretz, 59, roundly denies he betrayed Cramer—"That's complete bullshit," Peretz says—Cramer does not believe him. "If the goal is to create tremendous stress and to humiliate and embarrass me and then to deny that there was any involvement, he's forgotten that I quarterbacked his offense for a dozen years," Cramer says. "I understand the game of how to ruin people, and I don't play it. I am well schooled, and we can have a tutorial on what 'off the record' and 'for background' mean if you want to sabotage someone." The more Cramer talks about Peretz, the more he can't stop himself. He cannot understand what made Peretz yank all his money, millions of dollars, out of Cramer's hedge fund last fall, a massive withdrawal that forced Cramer to take heavy losses at the time. "I think that, whatever it is, I've tried to bury the hatchet so many times, and I keep finding it in the back of my head," says Cramer.

Those friends of Cramer's who are aware of his feud with Peretz are struck most by its timing, coming as it does on the eve of's public offering. "They've both made each other richer. It's amazing they're fighting now," says one prominent journalist and author. "They're both about to make millions. I thought that would salve over any differences," says Michael Kinsley, the editor of Slate, who is a friend of both men and who until recently had money invested, through Peretz, in Cramer's hedge fund.

Some friends wonder about the pressure—the publicity, the many jobs, and the public offering—on Cramer. "People are worried that he's so manic he's going to snap," says one journalist who has known him since college. Cramer has always had an edge of mania about him, as anyone who has seen him on television knows, but these days he seems unusually stressed. If Peretz was the source of the New York Times leak and if he "really wanted to hurt Jim," as one friend of Cramer's puts it, he did—bringing to a full boil the controversy over Cramer that has been simmering ever since he began his rise to media stardom. "You see how badly he did last year, it's pathetic. It's useful to have that benchmark," says one newspaper columnist. "Cramer has marketed himself very cleverly," says a top business writer. "But in reality there's very little there. Look at his returns—he's a bullshitter, the best around."

"There are a lot of people who dislike my views and me. All I ever ask," says Cramer, "is that there's a lot of 'on the one hand, on the other' when it comes to me, as opposed to black and white. In other words, I've thrust myself into a controversy where I have accumulated a series of people who are—as Kinsley [who wrote the "Message to My Enemies" headline on the Slate article] calls them without my say-so—my enemies."

Jim Cramer in person is very much the same as Jim Cramer on television. He has trouble sitting still. He's loud—he shouts and screams. He can be outrageously funny. He pouts when he's upset, and at odd moments he will burst into shrieks of laughter. Cramer's operatic behavior, says one friend, is "just this side of sane." "You wonder if it's medication he should be taking but isn't," says another, "but he is compelling."

With the country in the midst of the longest-running bull market in history, the media have scrambled to feed the American public's seemingly insatiable fascination with the stock market. And one only has to look at the parade of Wall Street commentators on television business shows today—gray-suited, gray-haired men and buttoned-to-the-neck, hair-sprayed women—to understand why Cramer is so successful, even as he defies easy categorization: He's an insider who plays the outsider. When he tells viewers of Squawk Box that "I own a smattering of tech but have cut back" or that he owns "a small amount of" Intel and Microsoft "but I'm not shorting these stocks, I'm not out of these stocks," he says it as if he were giving you information no one else will. He's colloquial and emotional. "I'm not in denial about Japan anymore, it's working," he confesses to his audience, sounding like a guest on the Sally Jessy Raphael show.

On television and in his writing, Cramer has exposed the inner world of Wall Street in a way few others have. His columns—on topics such as the "short squeeze" on AOL's stock in March, or how he's yearning to buy Internet stocks but sticking with bonds, or how he sold Citigroup and then had a heartstopping moment when the stock rose before it fell again—give all the flavor of the trading-room floor. Cramer will contradict himself from week to week, or, in the case of his columns for, daily, but his writing is a road map into a trader's head. He is, in some ways, a creature of the revolution that is taking place in the world of investing, which is loosening Wall Street's grip on the market. If the bull market has drawn millions of people into much more active investing, the Internet, with its growing number of electronic trading sites, has helped them to take control of their stock trading. "Check out the finance chat rooms [on the Internet]," says David Ignatius, the former business editor of The Washington Post, who is now a columnist for the paper's op-ed page. "They are unbelievable. It's like being in the midst of a giant electronic gossip mill; the information just whirls around and the market in some of these little stocks moves instantly. What Jim is doing taps into this in a more sophisticated way—the democratization of high-end trading."

"In terms of becoming a media figure, Jim's sort of the perfect person in the markets," says Richard Turner, a Newsweek senior editor who used to edit Cramer's column at New York magazine and who also went to Harvard with him. "He's reacting against a very stuffy business press and overly structured analysts with their charts. He just presents himself as a character, as a sportscaster about the markets." Whether he's relating a brilliant trade he's made, or a spectacularly stupid one, Cramer is always the star of his stories—the underdog telling people what others in the media or on Wall Street aren't honest or experienced enough to tell. This we-against-them approach is especially evident in Cramer's columns for, which often veer off into rants against unnamed Wall Street commentators who are more bearish about the markets than he is, and against the business press, which doesn't really understand what's happening. When people get offended, it is simply, in Cramer's mind, evidence of how wrong they are. On one of his recent Squawk Box appearances, for example, Cramer suddenly turned on another guest, the elderly commentator Joe Granville, who some say brought about the 1981 stock-market slide with his bearish forecasts. "What if you're wrong?" he barked at Granville. "Do you ever say you're wrong?" Cramer seemed not to notice how embarrassed Granville appeared to be before he finally lashed back at Cramer.

"Joe Granville right now is faxing to all of his people a memo saying, 'I hate Jim Cramer!,'" Cramer tells me later the same day. "What was the point of that? Well, the point was that he's wrong." Granville denies faxing anyone on the subject of Jim Cramer and says he received phone calls and faxes from people who couldn't believe the way Cramer attacked him. But in Cramer's view of that incident, he was most assuredly the victim. "I called my sister," he says, "and my sister said, 'Jim, it's, like, on the one hand you want to put a no hunting sign on you, and on the other hand, like, you're just a deer. They go right after your ass.' I mean, it's like a lot of times I feel like I'm an innocent where I just say, 'Well, I said it because I was right.' Like, my wife will say to me, 'Jim, why do you have all these problems with people?' I always say the same thing. 'Well, because I'm right. You see, I'm not wrong, I'm right.'"

Cramer stands up and locks his arms across his chest. I notice his cuff links, one red, one green, with the word "Buy" embossed in gold on one and "Sell" on the other. "There is a real truth," he continues. "I am trying to change business journalism. I've been trying to change it now for a decade. Accountability, trying to help people control their own money, trying to help people be more informed. Like, there was this scene in The Godfather II: They're in Cuba and there's this guy who blows himself up in a car for the revolution, and Michael Corleone turns and says, 'These guys are going to win. They're the true believers,'" Cramer says, cheerfully unaware that he's putting words in Corleone's mouth. "I've heard all the guys talk about The Godfather. I'm the guy with the bomb," he says, breaking into shrieks of wild laughter. "I am the true believer. I am a true believer."

"Jim's ego," says one longtime friend, "has gone completely out of control lately." It is no surprise that not everyone is as impressed with Cramer as he is with himself. On Wall Street, those who have heard of him (many have not) look on Cramer with raised eyebrows. "He's a lunatic," says one prominent investment banker, laughing. "A very, very good self-promoter, which doesn't mean you should take his views seriously. He's entertainment, he's not investment advice."

Although he has something of a cult following among readers of, a lot of what Cramer writes and says flirts with incoherence. He loves to write, though. ("It's a total turn-on," he screams, somehow managing to throw his entire body across his desk. "I love it, man! I love it!" he says, pounding the desk with his fists.) He writes on a laptop in his limousine on the way to work at 4:30 in the morning and on his ride home, during breaks in his trading day, and late at night from home. Increasingly, people say, it shows. "It used to be fun to read his columns," says a magazine writer. "But now he's writing so on-the-fly he's become a hack."

"His only redeeming feature is that he worships his wife," says another Wall Street banker, referring to Karen Cramer, a former trader who is now raising the couple's two young daughters. "You read his columns and you're thinking: What is this about? And then you realize, Oh, this is about this deep need to prove himself. The narcissism is so prevalent. How did this guy get to be so visible?"

'Harvard in the 70s, it is the new old-boy network," says one journalist. "It's sort of scary, all these media guys who were all there at the same time." The list does indeed read like some kind of yuppie media Trilateral Commission: Walter Isaacson, the managing editor of Time, was Harvard '74; Mark Whitaker, the editor of Newsweek, graduated in 1979; Peter Kaplan, editor of The New York Observer, Kurt Andersen, the former editor of New York magazine, and Nicholas Lemann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, all graduated in 1976; Michael Kinsley and James Fallows, former editor of U.S News & World Report, were the class of 1972 and 1970 respectively. "Call it the Trilateral Commission, it's fair," says New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss, who graduated from Harvard in 1976. "And for a time Jim Cramer ran it."

Cramer arrived at Harvard in 1973. Unlike most of the men who were to become his friends, he was a scholarship student from a middle-class suburb outside Philadelphia. "It was like Levittown," a Harvard friend says. Cramer's father helped run a package-making business; his mother was an artist. "Harvard was completely outside the realm Jim grew up in. He seemed completely shy and naïve and vulnerable," recalls Nicholas Lemann, who was in the class ahead of Cramer. "Jim, for example, would get a crush on a girl—a huge crush. And you'd say, 'Jim, where are you going to take her?' 'To the all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch at the Marriott,' he'd say with great pride. Harvard was a place where if you wanted to get laid you bought a pack of Gauloises and went to a Godard retrospective," Lemann says. "Jim wasn't Wall Streety at Harvard. He was a big opera and classical-music fan, and he was very interested in politics."

More than anything, Cramer was interested in journalism. In his freshman year, he passed the rigorous tryouts and was invited to become a reporter for The Harvard Crimson, Harvard's famed student newspaper. Intense, driven, needing only three hours of sleep a night, he turned out to be one of the paper's most prolific reporters. "He was a very good reporter, very much congruent with what he is today. He just worked so hard. He worked more hours than anyone else," recalls Lemann, who was president of the Crimson in 1975. "It was more that than the elegance of the prose or the quality of the investigative reporting. It was sheer productivity."

"He loved journalism," says Weiss, who in 1975 was among those who supported Cramer's candidacy for Crimson president. "It was a pitched battle," Weiss says, "between very different forces": Cramer, the scholarship boy, ran as a champion of the news side against the wealthy, politically connected, social-climbing Eric Breindel, who would become editorial-page editor of the New York Post before his death last year. Cramer won by one vote.

The 1975 election—which pitted such Cramer supporters as Lemann and Weiss against Breindel backers like Peter Kaplan—is remembered vividly 24 years later by the men involved as being as hard-fought as the one in which David Halberstam beat out J. Anthony Lukas for managing editor in 1953. Over the years, the story of the 1975 election has been told and retold, and it has taken the shape of a class struggle, which bothers Cramer. "My father had a good job," he says. "I don't mean this as a slur to people who live in trailer parks, but that's what my father says: 'What? Did you grow up in Cheltenham [an affluent area]?' I think there are some people who are overly willing to portray class conflict where I don't feel there was any."

After Harvard, Cramer got a job "operating the Xerox machine and photocopying things," he says, at the Congressional Quarterly in Washington. He then moved to Florida, where he was a reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. He covered the trial of the serial killer Ted Bundy. Cramer was, he says, the first reporter on the scene of the Chi Omega murders, involving the Florida State University sorority girls who were among Bundy's final victims. "I was next door to the sorority house, that's where I lived. I was there, everywhere, man," Cramer says. "I was there for the great Youngstown train wreck. I happened to be in a disco nearby. I had a series of national page-one stories in Tallahassee. That's why they wanted me at the [now defunct] Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Yeah, I was a good reporter, babe."

Cramer, by all accounts, was a very good reporter, but his life began to fall apart after he moved to Los Angeles. He was stalked, he says: "I couldn't go back to my place, because there was someone staying at my place by day. They were in my apartment every day. I came back and said, 'My little change pile is gone.' Then the next day I come back and there's a little open can of tuna.… I called the police three times. The police come out. Then everything starts disappearing, and my bathroom gets trashed. I get a gun. I had the cops come out about seven times. Lieutenant Springer finally said to me, 'What do you think this is, Kojak?'"

Penniless, and afraid, Cramer lived in his car for several months. When Steve Brill phoned him at the suggestion of several of Cramer's Harvard friends to offer him a job at The American Lawyer, Cramer was fighting off creditors. Brill, he says, paid for his plane ticket to New York. "I was a good reporter, but I couldn't make any money," Cramer says. "In the end, I really didn't have any money; it was like a major reclamation project to get my life together." Cramer worked for Brill at The American Lawyer until 1981, when he returned to Harvard for law school.

"It was very important to Jim's parents that he go to law school," Lemann recalls. "I think he makes journalism sound rougher as a field to be in than it really is. It's as though he was looking for an excuse to leave journalism." After law school, Cramer went to work on Wall Street, at Goldman, Sachs, where he became briefly infamous for telling The New York Times, "There isn't anything I see in a store that I can't buy." "When Jim interviewed at Goldman," says Phil Weiss, "they asked him, 'What stock do you like?' And he said Exxon, because it was gigantic, energetic, and undervalued. That's Jim. He has a little bit of a chip on his shoulder. Like his father, he's very, very smart, and he felt undervalued." Weiss remembers standing with Cramer at Nicholas Lemann's wedding 16 years ago as Cramer looked around the room, turned to Weiss, and said, "These are all $30,000-a-year men." Says Weiss today, "It was out of pride, a contemptuousness about journalists. I don't think it's a war for his soul, although it's a tormented soul, but there are things he loves about journalism."

"My mom always wanted me to be a writer," Cramer says, blinking back tears. "She wanted me to be a writer after I made some money. She wanted me to do something other than make rich people richer."

Cramer's friendship with Marty Peretz began when Cramer was at Harvard Law School. "All the silly little stories in the press about how we met are true," Peretz says today. The two men were introduced by Michael Kinsley, who then worked at The New Republic and was its editor from 1979 to 1981 and 1985 to 1989. Kinsley suggested that Peretz get Cramer to do a book review. By this time Cramer had become obsessed with the stock market, and he was putting stock tips on his answering machine. Peretz listened to those, followed up on a couple of them, and made a profit. After they became friends, Peretz gave Cramer $500,000 to invest on his behalf. Friends of both men say that their relationship was, at root, based on their mutual fascination with money and the markets. "Jim and I," Peretz says dryly, "used to provoke each other in stimulating ways."

It was Peretz, who is married to an heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, who set Cramer up in the hedge-fund business. He not only steered his wealthy friends, such as computer entrepreneur Max Palevsky, to Cramer, but also himself invested millions of dollars in Cramer's new company. Part of that money was a fund, Crimson Investments, in which Peretz had pooled small sums from friends of his, people who didn't have the $250,000 to $l million generally considered the minimum for high-risk, high-returns hedge-fund investing. Some of those in the Crimson fund were Cramer's friends from Harvard, including Michael Kinsley and Jonathan Alter. Others were New Republic editors such as Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Leon Wieseltier. "It was one of those little perks for working at The New Republic," says one man. "You got to invest with Cramer." Other journalists who have money invested with him include Kurt Andersen, Steve Brill, and the writer James Stewart, who became a close friend of Cramer's when they worked together at The American Lawyer. But these men weren't part of the pool Peretz put together. Cramer brought them in on his own later.

The relationship between Peretz and Cramer was "like a father-and-son thing," says one friend of Cramer's. "Marty paid all of Eric Breindel's psychiatry bills when he was dealing with his heroin addiction," says one friend of Peretz's. "The most important thing in Marty's life is loyalty. He is extremely loyal and generous to a small circle of younger people, and Cramer was one of those." At times Cramer and Peretz talked every day. "It was the kind of thing that's bound to cool off," says a mutual friend. "You can't sustain relationships that intense."

It was largely through Peretz that Cramer kept one foot in journalism. Cramer wrote book reviews, opinion pieces, and cover stories for The New Republic while he worked on Wall Street. In 1988, Cramer also returned to writing for Steve Brill, with a financial column for Brill's Manhattan Lawyer. In 1991, when Jim Stewart, then page-one editor at The Wall Street Journal, was helping to start SmartMoney, the personal-finance magazine that is a joint venture between Dow Jones and Hearst, he got Cramer involved in the project. "Jim was very much a part of the inspiration for SmartMoney," says Stewart. "He said all these magazines are about helping rich people keep their money, instead of for helping people make money." It was that editorial approach which eventually proved the key to SmartMoney's success.

In February 1995, The Washington Post ran a front-page story questioning Cramer's ethics. The article claimed that his hedge fund had made $2.5 million when a favorable mention in one of his columns for SmartMoney triggered a run-up in the stock prices of three small companies in his portfolio. The allegation was a serious one: by some oversight, SmartMoney's editors had not attached the usual disclosure line reminding readers that Cramer owned some of the stocks he was writing about—in this case, companies in which Cramer's fund was a major shareholder. Cramer was devastated, but also enraged, by the storm of criticism that followed in the press. "He called me up, and I've never heard such vitriol from anyone. It was unbelievable, he was really nasty," recalls James Glassman, the columnist and former New Republic publisher, after he wrote a scathing op-ed article in The Washington Post questioning whether Cramer should be allowed to play journalist, given the huge potential for conflicts of interest. Cramer insisted that he would not sell the stocks of the three companies right away, but that prompted more questions. Just who was benefiting from Cramer's compulsion to write? His readers? His investors (who forfeited the quick profit they could have taken with the rise in the prices of those stocks)? Or Cramer? "He contends he provides insights only a trader could do, that a journalist couldn't," says Glassman, "and maybe he's right, but it's problematic." A business reporter puts it more harshly: "He's a goddamn walking conflict of interest." Cramer, of course, disagrees. "I have the most strict disclosure rules of anyone in the business," he says. "I admit to wearing two hats. I am a commentator, not a journalist, who is trying to explain what he sees. I don't recommend stocks. I try to teach people the hows and whys of investing. One day of reading my columns will tell you that."

Over the years, Cramer has had some very influential defenders. Joe Nocera, a friend since Cramer's days in Washington, wrote a strongly worded article in Time magazine supporting Cramer in the SmartMoney controversy. Weiss contributed a moving piece for The New York Observer about Cramer's surprise 40th-birthday party, which took place the night the Washington Post article ran. Crushed by the allegations that had been made against him, Cramer was so overwhelmed when he arrived at Gallagher's steak house and found about 100 supporters and friends gathered that he sobbed and laughed and vomited the entire night. Cramer had made not just friends over the years, he had made very devoted friends. "A group of people came out of The Crimson and have been really competitive over the years. They've carried it into life," says Weiss, who insists that Cramer is different. Weiss was touched, for example, when Cramer bought 30 copies of Weiss's 1995 novel, Cock-a-doodle-doo, and handed them out to his employees. "If something good happens to a friend, Jim celebrates it. No one else did that for me."

"He's smart, he's loyal, and he's entertaining," says Kurt Andersen, a New Yorker columnist. "He says whatever he thinks, which is so refreshing."

"My wife asks me why I like Jim so much. It's a guy thing, but not in the traditional way; it's not 'We both love golf,'" says one prominent columnist. "It's about journalism. Journalists like characters that stick out, and Jim is the guy who sticks out. He's all elbows. You can dine out on Jim. And another part of it is 'Gee, somebody like us is worth all this money.' Jim sort of straddles two worlds that envy each other."

Like Nocera and Weiss, most of Cramer's friends were appalled that anyone would question his ethics. Some of them blamed the outcry on envy. "A lot of business journalists are very threatened by Jim," says one friend. Just why they would be, no one could really explain. Many feel Cramer should have known better than to write the SmartMoney article, disclosure or no disclosure. "I believe in Jim's ethics 1,000 percent," says SmartMoney's editor, Steve Swartz. "But we all made a mistake. We shouldn't have published the column, and Jim shouldn't have written it." An S.E.C. investigation into the SmartMoney episode eventually cleared Cramer of any wrongdoing. He left SmartMoney and was hired by Andersen to write a column for New York magazine, a job which gave Cramer mainstream visibility for the first time. When Andersen was forced out of New York in 1996, Cramer left with him out of loyalty. At Andersen's urging, Walter Isaacson hired Cramer to write a column for Time and Peter Kaplan gave him one at The New York Observer.

Despite his growing success, Cramer did not seem to get over his anger about what had happened to him at SmartMoney. And what he did about it—or what some people believe he did about it—once again raised suspicions about how he was using his unusual influence. In 1997, Cramer's hedge fund bought 1.1 million shares of Dow Jones, the company that co-owns SmartMoney. At that time, Dow Jones's management was under attack by prominent dissident shareholders—including some members of the company's founding family and the investor Michael Price—who wanted management to sell or shut down Telerate, Dow Jones's money-losing financial-information operation. Cramer told the press that he had bought into Dow Jones because he wanted to join the fight to save it from its management. With great flourish he announced to reporters that he was doing this because he cared deeply about journalism and about the survival and integrity of a newspaper as great as The Wall Street Journal, which Dow Jones owns. He criticized the company's management repeatedly in the media. Eventually, he sold his shares for a $4 million profit, claiming that if Dow Jones wasn't going to listen to his plan for saving the company, it wasn't worth his time to stick around.

But Cramer, some people believe, had no interest in how Dow Jones was being managed. He was angry, some say, because Dow Jones had not paid all the legal bills he'd incurred as a result of the S.E.C.'s investigation into his SmartMoney column. (Cramer denies this.) He "felt betrayed," as one friend puts it, and wanted revenge for the way Dow Jones's management had treated him. "He thought they [had acted] like he was a criminal. He was beside himself over that because of things that are deep-seated in his nature. He was upset they didn't trust him."

Did Cramer do it for the publicity, as some suggest? Did he merely see an opportunity to make a profit? No one but Cramer knows exactly why he stalked Dow Jones. Today he says, "I have to admit I was too harsh about Dow Jones. Screwed this one up."

'Jim can be a hard guy to be around. He's very mercurial. Every one of us has been on the other end of a screaming tirade from Jim," says one friend. It happens, says this friend, "whenever you disagree with him." When asked what makes Cramer angry, Nicholas Lemann pauses for a moment and then laughs. "Everything," he says. "I think I'm one of the few people that Jim hasn't gotten into a fight with at some point. He's a man who loves deeply and hurts easily. It's a roller-coaster ride to be his friend—he's like the diva in the dressing room. He lives life at a very high emotional pitch." Cramer, says another friend, "will kill for you and he will kill you."

According to his friends, Cramer began to have problems with Marty Peretz almost from the day that the two men went into business together on To finance the first phase of their new venture, each man agreed to put up $1.5 million. Within months, however, Cramer began to complain to friends that Peretz wasn't contributing his share of the money. "There was a structure of when they had to put money up," says a friend of Cramer's. "Jim said he had to put up Marty's share." Cramer, his friends say, also began to feel that he was doing all the work for—writing columns for it, trying to get publicity for it, managing it. He told people that he had asked Peretz for more equity in the company and that Peretz had refused. And he complained that Peretz would not provide additional funds needed for an ad campaign on the grounds that Cramer could use his visibility to get that publicity. On top of all that, says one friend of Cramer's, "Marty was, in Jim's view, meddling in a completely clueless, irritating, useless way."

The story from Peretz's friends, however, is dramatically different. Peretz, they say, not only came up with his money on time, but also agreed to advance money to "For about four or five months," says one friend, "Marty was carrying Jim." Although friends advised against it, Peretz, they say, also gave in to Cramer's demand for more stock, turning over to Cramer some 500,000 additional shares. "He did it because he was trying to salvage things. He really wanted TheStreet to succeed," says a friend of Peretz's.

What both sides agree on is that more than a year ago Peretz was sent some E-mails that Cramer had written to an employee at, who had just been fired by Cramer. Unhappy about the negotiations over his severance payment, this employee forwarded to Peretz messages in which Cramer had referred rudely to Peretz's role in "They were extremely unflattering," Peretz says. "I want to dilute [Peretz's share of TheStreet] without diluting me," Cramer wrote in one E-mail. "This will be a crucial break in our relationship, but without it, I will forever be blasting him behind his back." Peretz, Cramer wrote in a second E-mail, "has no standing" at TheStreet; "MP's judgment should not come into play." Cramer says that he was devastated, that he apologized repeatedly and profusely, but that Peretz rebuffed him.

According to Peretz, what really happened was quite different. He says he was eager to patch things up. "We had two or three meetings, always at my initiative, sometimes involving his tears," he recalls. "And we turned over a new leaf, but somehow the pages of the book got turned back in the space of a week each time."

By September, the tension had become unbearable. The two men spoke only at board meetings. It was around this time, Cramer believes, that Peretz began bad-mouthing him to investors in his hedge fund and urging them to pull their money out. Like many other hedge funds buffeted by the slide in tech stocks, Asia's and Russia's problems, and the near collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the $4.8 billion fund that had to be bailed out last year by a consortium of banks, Cramer's fund was having a rough third quarter. He was extremely upset. "For the first fucking time in my life, I don't do well," he says, his eyes tearing up again. Cramer's letter to his investors about the fund's performance was so "abject," one investor remembers, "that I was afraid he was going to kill himself. I called him up. I wanted to reassure him."

Cramer is convinced that Peretz saw how vulnerable he was and chose that moment to strike. In early October, Cramer received several letters from investors informing him that they were withdrawing from his fund, including a letter from Peretz which explained that he was also taking his money out. "They all pulled out at the same time," says Cramer, "and I have to sell [to raise the tens of millions of dollars needed to pay Peretz and other investors] into the worst market possible." And then, as if to pour salt on his open wound, Cramer believes, Peretz leaked the information about his fund's poor performance to The New York Times—although any of Cramer's many investors could have given the letter to the newspaper. "If I were single and alone, then this would be Mad Max in [1985's Mad Max Beyond] Thunderdome. But I'm not. I'm a guy with kids and a wife," says Cramer, his eyes frozen wide open with anger. "This man, Marty, was my best man at my wedding. Things haven't worked out. I would like very much for his acrimony to die down and for him not to speak to reporters about me. I want it to end."

"Jim's behavior," says Peretz, "is a sad story." Peretz says that he did not release to The New York Times any information about the performance of Cramer's hedge fund. He also insists that he did not urge anyone to pull out of the fund. "No one," he says, choosing his words carefully, "can say that Jim is other than a spectacular investor." Peretz says he withdrew his family's money (and Crimson Investments) from Cramer, Berkowitz in October because he had no other choice. Last August, says Peretz, without talking to him, Cramer abruptly resigned as a trustee from several Peretz-family trusts. As Peretz recalls, "Jim had his assistant call my accountant to tell him Jim had quit. Of course I take my family's money out," Peretz says. "People don't leave their money with managers who aren't talking to them." "Let me say this about this trust canard," says Cramer. "For a very, very long time I had not been included in any substantive discussions or decisions involving those trusts by the manager of that trust.… I didn't think I should be paid or continue to be a trustee of something where I was neither being consulted on nor involved in. I should have consulted with Marty about this, but my problem was not with Marty, as he was not the manager."

Who's right? Among their friends, among those who have not taken sides, there is bafflement. "I don't really know what went on between Marty and Jim," says Michael Kinsley. "It's an Oedipal thing, I assume, to some degree or another. Marty enjoys taking a paternal role, and Jim began to feel as though he'd outgrown that. But that's just speculation." Joseph Kahn, the New York Times reporter who wrote the crucial story about Cramer, and who holds at least one key to the mystery, will not comment on who his sources were.

"There isn't a chance in hell that our feud will end as long as I'm living on this planet, from the way I see things," Cramer said several weeks ago. He insisted that he was right, and he was sure that even if's initial public offering is as successful as people anticipate—and the company he and Peretz created together turns out to reap huge rewards for both—he and Peretz wouldn't be celebrating together. But then Cramer claimed to have had a change of heart and insisted that the feud was over. Whether the truce Cramer believes to exist will hold remains to be seen. As he readily admits, "I am fiery, abrasive, and indefatigable, and always will be."