A 2000 New York Times article pointed out that while Warren Buffett was getting the credit for his investing genius, AIG CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg was running quite a profitable operation at AIG. The article claimed a 1990 investment in AIG would have generated better returns than one in Berkshire for that ten-year period. While the text doesn't call Greenberg "the next Warren Buffett," it compares the way the two men ruled their respective insurance businesses and suggests that Greenberg sometimes made the better investments of the two moguls.
But Greenberg's status as on par with Buffett crashed five years later, when an investigation by then New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer turned up evidence that Greenberg had overseen fraudulent activities at AIG.
Greenberg resigned in the midst of the controversy, and now is CEO of financial services firm C.V. Starr and Co., named after AIG's founder, Cornelius Vander Starr. Greenberg has been reported to be building AIG 2 at Starr, presumably stopping short of the period when his old firm required an $85 billion bailout from the U.S. Treasury.
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