Meet CNBC's Mad Money Man
"I used to think, 'Ugh, I've got to take them to this damned concert,' " he says. "Now I feel like, 'What an opportunity! Don't mess it up!' "
Friends say they notice a difference, too. "One might not know it from watching his show, but Jim is better at being in balance," says journalist Kurt Andersen, a college friend. "You have dinner out with him, and he's not throwing things."
Jokes aside, Cramer still starts his workday at 4 a.m. and admits he continues to struggle with workaholism that pushes him to author as many as five stories a day for his financial website, TheStreet.com, and spend as many as 12 hours preparing each of the more than 250 Mad Money episodes he's committed to yearly, not to mention the long list of charity auctions, book tours, and TV appearances he's asked to do.
"I have a difficult personal life," he says, alluding to his separation from his wife after 19 years of marriage. "I spend too much time at work, and I let people down."
He jokes on Mad Moneythat he unwinds by sitting on the kitchen floor and drinking bad scotch. In truth, he says he doesn't drink at all and instead uses the antidepressant Lamictal, which he began taking after a test suggested that his manic, sometimes violent mood swings may be linked to bipolar depression.
"It's something that cuts off the highs," he recently told radio host Don Imus of the drug. "Candidly, my mind races, and I need to slow it down. I needed to go 65 [miles per hour] and not 90."
Cramer's impatience dates back to the fourth grade, when he began skipping over the comics in his Philadelphia newspaper in favor of the stock tables. He became so addicted to following his fantasy portfolio that he begged his father to stay late at work so he would come home with the final edition of the afternoon paper that had the closing stock market prices.
"How else could I measure how right I was about my predictions?" he writes in his memoir, Confessions of a Street Addict, which details his subsequent turns as college newspaper editor, police beat reporter, and reluctant Harvard law school student.
He never lost his fascination, though, with the stock market. While law schoolmates crammed for exams, Cramer kept his eyes glued to the Financial News Network ticker on his dorm room TV. He penned a newsletter called Mr. Bullish and left stock tips on the telephone answering machine.
Usually spot on, his missives soon caught the ear of Martin Peretz, a wealthy Harvard professor and editor of the New Republic magazine, who was so taken with Cramer's stock-picking that he handed the then 26-year-old law student a $500,000 check to invest on his behalf. "There was just something so contagious about his enthusiasm," Peretz recalls. "It wasn't just stocks, but politics, movies, books ... he had something to say about everything."
Peretz later helped bankroll Cramer's hedge fund, along with a cadre of soon-to-be-powerful backers, including future New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (a Harvard classmate) and publisher Steven Brill, who had once hired Cramer as a reporter for American Lawyer.
advertisement
