Bill Perkins
speaker
1,205 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5 Jun
Bill Perkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah. So back when the World Trade Center was there, this was in for World Trade Center.
Yeah. That's when I decided to turn it on. I always tell people like, hey, I was pretty much a, can I say fuck up? I was pretty much the fuck up of fuck ups for giving what I had before college. But then I decided to turn it on. That poverty, that being a peon and that desire to make it forced me to be like, I'm going to learn every single thing there is about this business.
I was reading books at night about trading. about the oil business, about options, about whatever. I was a sponge. And I really turned it on and said, I'm going to be diligent. I'm not going to mess around as much as I possibly can as a 20-year-old, right? And really, really trying to make myself invaluable no matter where I was. So where were you living at the time? What part of the city?
Did you actually live in Manhattan? When I first got there, I had to live at home with my mom, which was completely cramping my style. And so I started driving a limo at night, the company limo at night to make ends meet. What were you getting paid in that first job? Oh, geez. I think it was sub $16,000 a year. I have to go look. Sub 16. Yeah.
I think it was like 16, 16,000, but I was getting raises very quickly because I made myself valuable and I would work at night. And I would make more money driving the limo on a daily basis because traders would take me here and they'd be drunk and they'd tip you. And you weren't there necessarily for your current income. You were there for your future income.
And so I had another clerk named Jason Ruffo who had a studio in the Upper West Side. And what he did was he put up a wall by the room in the studio. And I eventually got an apartment with him on the Upper West Side, living in like a pizza oven type space. But it was great because I was in New York City, out of my mom's house. I could have girls over.
And that pride that goes, well, I live on the Upper West Side. Everybody wants to say they live in New York City. And so as I was getting raises and kind of moving up, I gradually got into that life of, you know, what I call a buppy, black urban professional, you know, buppies and yuppies. And that was, you know, the beginning of my journey. Tell me, was your dad in the picture at this time?
So my dad is now older in poor health in Jersey City. So during this time, he'd had multiple strokes. And my dad is kind of like me. He's fairly stubborn, but he was stubborn to the extreme. Doctor says, don't do this. All the things you would tell him not to do and you need to be doing. He's like, ah, to hell with that. You know what I mean? I guess. And so he's in the picture.
My parents are divorced. He's in Jersey City. Had your parents gone to college? My dad did. So my dad got a scholarship to the University of Iowa. He was a real badass. He had no intentions of going to school. He walked by a football field when he was a kid in high school. He's like, I want to do that. And coach is like, you don't know anything about football.
And he says, it seems like it's about hitting people. I know how to hit people. So they gave him some raggedy uniforms. He comes out for a practice. And in the next practice, he has a brand new uniform. He's all everything, gets recruited to go to University of Iowa to go to college. And so there he is in college in 1959 at the University of Iowa, all badass from Jersey City.
So he had gone to college. And then my mom went to college. finished college while I think I was like preteen or late teens. But I had the benefit of two college educated parents.
They saw it later. I'm the kid that didn't take out the garbage. I always say, don't tell your parents your dreams because they'll just piss on them because they've seen you at your worst, at your failures as you're growing. They have this kind of image of you when you were the caterpillar, not the butterfly.
This is what I want to do. No. You know, they started seeing it. I remember the time when I finally made, I got a raise and I was like, I did the calculation. I'm just like, holy shit, I make more money than my mom. Like I've made it. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I'm like, I'm real. I'm legit. I'm a puppy. Me with my badge. You know, I used to wear around as a badge of honor.
Like I get onto the New York Mercantile Exchange, etc., But they'd see I'm going out or I'm flying here or I'm doing whatever. And it's like, oh, the kid must be doing okay. It wasn't until I got recruited to go to Houston started buying the assets that adults start buying. And I paid my mom back for something that I did when I was a teenager that she didn't know that they're like, okay.
What was that? When I was younger, I had a stick Toyota that my mom had. It was her car. I was driving it. And my friend Pete Theibel. It's like, I want to drive the car. I want to teach him how to drive the car. I want to drive the car. I'm not supposed to drive the car. So anyway, long story short, he hits a gas instead of a clutch, spins the car out.
The back of it spins around, hits a telephone pole. Trump pops up. It has this big, giant dent. I'm like, holy shit. What am I going to do? So I tell my mom the story that we went to go get pizza and parked it and a truck must have hit it on the side or bumped it and went on. And that was my lie to my mom about this car that I felt guilty about.
I said, one day I'm going to pay for this car in spades. That happened to my mom. And so one day I gave my mom $40,000 and I was like, mom, remember that time the car had that brown mark on it? We told you it was a truck. Well, this is what really happened. How did she react to that? She started laughing. She goes, I knew something was strange about that.
The story fit, but there was something strange about that. She just kind of laughed and was thankful that won. It was a great investment having that car beat up, but she just kind of laughed and we just reminisced about it.
That he did that was kind of bold. You're talking about when Jason took the trip. So Jason... I don't know if our views were very thought out or just wired in, but I was head down. I got to make it. I got to become a trader. I got to have my head down. I'm saving money.
I'm really, at this point in my life, super diligent, trying to convince my boss to get on the bus program to save money, writing down every single nickel that I bought, et cetera. I'm really focused on my career trajectory. And Jason is like- Does Jason work at the same firm? He works at another firm. If you look at the old pictures, all the phone booths are right next to each other.
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