Eddie Lampert

Early life Lampert was born in 1962 to Dolores Lampert and Floyd M. Lampert. His mother was a housewife. His father was a senior partner in the law firm of Lampert & Lampert in New York City. His family is Jewish. He has a younger sister Tracey. Lampert's grandmother was a passive investor and a fan of Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street Week television program. She instilled in him an interest in investing. His mother would later recall that young Eddie would sit with his grandmother reviewing and evaluating the performance of her stock picks in the daily newspaper.

Lampert's father died in 1977, and his mother took a job as a clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue. His mother would later say: "Eddie really assumed the responsibility, knowing that life had changed and we had to accomplish something by ourselves now." and Phi Beta Kappa.

Career In July 1984, Lampert worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs, and then worked in the firm's risk arbitrage department from March 1985 to February 1988. While there, he worked directly with Robert Rubin. When Lampert decided to go out on his own, Rubin warned him it would be a bad career decision.

In April 1988, Lampert left the bank to form ESL Investments, based in Greenwich, Connecticut (the name derives from Lampert's initials). Richard Rainwater, whom Lampert had met on Nantucket Island, gave him $28 million in seed money and introduced him to clients, such as David Geffen.

A 2004 profile by Businessweek likened Lampert's investment style to that of financier Warren Buffett. In 2006, Lampert was featured on the Time 100 list for most influential people in the world for being one of the "brightest minds on Wall Street" and leading a new class of activist hedge funds. Lampert was the richest person in Connecticut in 2006 with a net worth of $3.8 billion.

In March 2012, Lampert was No. 367 on the Forbes world's wealthiest people list with a net worth of $3.1 billion. By August 2016, Lampert had fallen to No. 810 on the list, with a net worth of $2.2 billion.

Lampert restructured Sears into approximately 30 separate business units, which were evaluated based on individual profits, rather than any estimation of their effect on Sears' overall profit. These units were to buy and sell services among themselves through competitive bidding. Some sources say these policies were based upon the ideas of Ayn Rand. It is generally agreed that they failed to slow Sears' decline.

In July 2016 he held 28% of shares in Sears Holdings Corp, worth approximately $408 million.

In early 2017, Lampert – then president, chief executive officer, and top shareholder of Sears Holdings – was estimated to have personal assets of $2 billion, primarily in the hedge fund ESL Investments. Early in the year, he committed to providing an additional loan of $500 million to Sears and said he would provide letters of credit to Sears for additional amounts, reportedly totaling $200 million and possibly increasing to a half billion dollars in the future.

Lampert was criticized by employees and corporate staff for "shredding" his employees in meat grinders and "being out of touch with reality", as well as for failing to invest in the physical stores, as many of them were deteriorating. During his tenure as chief executive, Sears lost around half its value within five years, and closed more than half of its physical stores.

On October 15, 2018, Lampert stepped down as chief executive of Sears Holdings, while remaining chairman of the board, as part of Sears Holdings bankruptcy actions. On December 6, 2018, Lampert, through his company ESL Investments, offered to buy all of Sears for $4.6 billion in cash and stock. but no additional cash. In early 2019, five hundred stores remained in operation; the remainder were in liquidation.

In January 2019, a group of Sears' creditors, hoping to persuade a federal judge to force Sears to liquidate, alleged that Lampert had orchestrated a "multiyear and multifaceted scheme" to strip away the company's assets and benefit from its decline. In May 2019, Lampert, months after purchasing the remains of Sears from the holding company, threatened not to pay out the $43 million in pension payments owed to 90,000 former Sears and Kmart employees and retirees.

In December of 2024, a lawsuit for $177M was filed in bankruptcy court against Lampert and the companies he controls by a Trustee of Sears Hometown Stores.

Personal life In 2001, Lampert married Kinga Keh, an attorney with whom he has three children. Aspen, Colorado and Greenwich, Connecticut. The couple are active members of their local Chabad house.

Lampert is the owner of the Fountainhead, an motor luxury yacht named after the Ayn Rand novel of the same name.

In 2003, Lampert was kidnapped from the parking lot of his Greenwich office but persuaded his captors to let him go after two days of captivity by promising to pay them a ransom after the captors compromised themselves by ordering a pizza with his credit card.