She added, “There was a counterculture element to Oppenheimer. “The only way to get paid as an analyst at Oppenheimer was being right and making enough noise about it that people noticed it,” says Alice Schroeder, who covered insurance companies for Oppenheimer, moved to Morgan Stanley, and eventually wound up being Warren Buffett’s official biographer. Oppenheimer employed twenty-five or so analysts, most of whose analysis went ignored by the rest of Wall Street. He started in equity analysis, working for the people who shaped public opinion about public companies. Eisman’s parents, old-fashioned value investors at heart, had always told him that the best way to learn about Wall Street was to work as an equity analyst. Oppenheimer had a nepotism rule, however if Lillian and Elliot wanted to hire their son, they had to pay his salary for the first year, while others determined if he was worth paying at all. On his way to reporting to his mother and father, Eisman passed the woman who had once changed his diapers. Before rescuing their son from his legal career they’d installed his old nanny on the Oppenheimer trading floor. (Lillian had created their brokerage business inside of Oppenheimer, and Elliot, who had started out as a criminal attorney, had joined her after being spooked once too often by midlevel Mafia clients.) Beloved and respected by colleagues and clients alike, they could hire whomever they pleased. Lillian and Elliot Eisman had been giving financial advice to individual investors on behalf of Oppenheimer since the early 1960s. It felt less like a corporation than a family business. It’s not pretty but that’s what happened.” Oppenheimer was among the last of the old-fashioned Wall Street partnerships and survived on the scraps left behind by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer securities. In 1991 he was a thirty-year-old corporate lawyer wondering why he ever thought he’d enjoy being a lawyer. He’d grown up in New York City, gone to yeshiva schools, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania magna cum laude, and then with honors from Harvard Law School. A SecretOrigin Story Eisman entered finance about the time I exited it.