Brad Jacobs

Ludwig Jesselson was the head of Philip Brothers, which was, before there were hedge funds, the word didn't exist back then, but he was the largest hedge fund.

I would call him a hedge fund because they were a commodity trader.

They traded oil, they traded metals.

and a global business.

And Mr. Jesselson, I never heard anyone call him Ludwig.

Mr. Jesselson, I was called sometimes Mr. J. Mr. Jesselson was an amazing individual.

And he was my first big business mentor.

And anytime I met someone in my business career who was older than I was and was very successful,

I tried to glom onto them and I just picked their brain and just asked them, so how'd you get so successful?

How did you accomplish all this?

What are your secrets?

What did you achieve?

And I found that every time I did that, they're very generous with doing that.

Mr. Jesselman was my first big business mentor.

And he was a customer of mine, Philip Brothers, because I had Amorex, which is a oil brokerage firm.

And Philip Brothers is a big trading firm.

So I was getting oil from them and matching them together with Exxon and Shell and BP and Texaco and

Gulf and all the different major oil companies and independent refiners.

And I started doing a lot of business with them because we came out of nowhere.

And suddenly we were, after a relatively short period of time, we were doing billions of dollars of brokerage volume.