William D. Cohan

Soon after the stunning news broke on June 7 that LIV Golf and the PGA were burying the hatchet, dropping the litigation between them and joining forces, my phone started blowing up. My Wall Street sources were nearly dumbstruck. The deal itself was a stunner, of course, conducted so secretly by the leaders of both the PGA and LIV that the professional golfers who make the two warring organizations possible had been clueless about what was happening. But that’s not what my people wanted to discuss. All they wanted to talk about was how Michael Klein — a longtime Wall Street investment banker with an eponymous advisory firm, M. Klein & Co. — had once again tapped into his deep relationships with Saudi leaders and was representing them in the LIV merger with the PGA.

Imagine for a moment you are Adam Neumann, the slick, smooth-talking Israeli-born entrepreneur who took the world by storm thirteen years ago with WeWork, his ultimately failed effort to rethink the way we office. After your start up took a tumble and your IPO failed, you nonetheless walk away with roughly $600 million in cash, plus another $400 million loan, and a new lease on life. You head underground, lick your wounds and claim to be trying to learn from what went wrong, including the relentless overhyping, the mismanagement and the enormous losses that your investors suffered. When you re-emerge, you decide to start again and persuade one of Silicon Valley’s most respected investors to back you. Whoa.

When Tesla, the electric-car company controlled by Elon Musk, went public in June 2010, pricing its IPO at $17 per share, Jim Cramer, the ubiquitous and highly confident American TV anchor, proclaimed on his show Mad Money that investors should avoid the stock at all costs. It was a 'Sell! Sell! Sell!' Cramer announced in his typical over-the-top, over-caffeinated style. But he wasn’t finished with his diatribe, not by a long shot. 'You don’t want to own this stock,' he continued. 'You don’t want to lease it. Heck, you shouldn’t even rent the darn thing.