Jordan Belfort Biography

Jordan Belfort is an American author, motivational speaker, and former stockbroker who was a convicted felon. His full name is Jordan Ross Belfort and he was born on July 9, 1962. There have been only a few figures in the world of finance who have as much influence as the great Jordan Belfort. Everyone in the USA in the 90s knew him and as time passed and his crime of manipulating the stock figures broke he was known all around the world. Jordan Befort in Wall street is known as a greedy, heartless person who was able to sell anything to anyone even if that property’s value was in pennies. In the year 1999, Jordan Belfort pled guilty to fraud and related crimes with his connection with the stock market manipulation and also for running a boiler room as a part of a penny stock scam.

Jordan Belfort spent 22 months in prison as a part of his agreement against which he gave valuable information and also gave testimony against numerous partners and subordinates who helped in his fraud scheme. During his time in prison, Belfort wrote two memoirs, the first one being The Wolf of Wall Street which was later popularised by the 2013 movie of the same name directed by the great Martin Scorsese and starred the extraordinary Leonardo DiCaprio who played Jordan Belfort in the movie. 

In the year 2017, Jordan Belfort released another memoir which is usually a self-help book entitled Way of the Wolf. After the release of his book and also in the beginning Jordan was criticized by the masses for stealing money from the common people and making himself rich illegally. Even after he was caught manipulating the stock market in the 90s, his victims were not paid. 

After many scandals and a stint in the prison for securities fraud, Belfort has reinvented himself and is now a full-time author and a motivational speaker. His life, according to him and many other critics, is a prime example of what greed, over-ambition, and passion can destroy a person on Wall Street. 

In this article, we are going to discuss Jordan Belfort’s biography which would basically include his early life, his rise, and fall in the stock market, and also a few of the important and most frequently asked questions will also be answered.

Who is the Wolf of Wall Street?

The real wolf of wall street was Jordan Belfort who had this raw natural talent from the beginning as a salesman and was able to sell penny stocks at the highest bid. In the 1980s Jordan Belfort operated in the meat and seafood business and soon after that company had a major loss and he had to leave it. By the early 90s which was in 1987, Jordan Belfort began selling stocks and started making money out of them. Soon he gathered people who he could bestow his wisdom and the ones who had the ability to speak to the customers and by 1989 he started his own company called Stratton Oakmont. The company made millions illegally by defrauding the investors and the investors were the ones who were putting their hard-earned money in stocks that were manipulated and whose end result was only the one that was making Jordan and his company millionaires. 

By 1992, Jordan Belfort and his company Stratton Oakmont came into the radar of the Securities Exchange Commission who did their best to stop the company's illegal way of stealing money from the investors. The one thing about Jordan was that he made people believe that they could be millionaires like him one day and as a result of that youth started following him and working for him, amateur investors started investing the manipulative stocks until the year 1999 were Jordan and his company was stopped for the greater good. 

In the year 1999, Jordan Belfort pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering. Because of his crimes, he was then sentenced to 4 years of jail but served only 22 months in jail as an agreement he made with the investigative officers to reduce his sentence if he gives valuable information about his network all around the world and also his former partners. While he was in jail he wrote two books about his story and finally, he released his first memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street.

Early Life of Jordan Belfort

Jordan Belfort was born on July 9, 1962, in Queens, New York. He has been termed as the real wolf of wall street due to his role in manipulating people and making millions of dollars from investors in the 1990s through his investment firm. 

Jordan Belfort from a young age showed an understanding of the business world and according to his first memoir, The wolf of wall Street, Jordan Belfort, and his friends sold Italian water ice desserts out of inexpensive styrofoam coolers at a beach near his childhood home. During that time he sold more water ice than anyone on that beach and in the summer months between high school and college, Belfort and his friends earned more than twenty thousand dollars. This one example is enough to show that Jordan was very good at persuading people to buy things and that is the reason even after being released from jail he went on and became a motivational speaker. 

Jordan Belfort was the son of an accountant and he grew up in a modest apartment in Queens, New York. From the beginning, he was a natural salesman and then launched a business selling meat and seafood, but soon the company went into huge loss and he had to leave it. 

Belfort went to American University to study biology with the intention of enrolling in dentistry school with the money he had saved from his previous enterprise. Belfort dropped out of the University of Maryland School of Dentistry when the dean told students on the first day that dentistry was not a path to financial success.

After a brief stay in dentistry school, Belfort began his career as a door-to-door salesperson in Long Island. He said that the firm was a success and that he was able to expand it to the point where he had a staff of several employees capable of transporting more than two tonnes of merchandise which in this case, meat and seafood every week. Jordan filed for bankruptcy at the age of 25 after his business collapsed. Only then did he develop an interest in stockbroking, which he pursued with the aid of a family acquaintance.

After 1987, as Jordan reached the age of 30 he founded the financial firm Stratton Oakmont which was an over-the-counter brokerage house. Over the following few years, Stratton Oakmont did exceptionally well, and it was involved in the IPOs of over three dozen different firms.

Why Jordan is Called the Wolf of Wall Street? 

Jordan Belfort with his partner, Danny Porush developed a ‘pump and dump’ scheme which was a manipulative scheme that successfully helped in boosting the price of the stocks or security through fake recommendations. The brokers hired by Jordan would then push stocks to unexpected clients which would eventually help inflate the stock prices and then the company would manipulatively sell the holding in these stocks at a greater profit. In this way, the one who would be making money would be the broker and not the client. 

Belfort, flush with riches, lived a luxury life. He spent a lot of money on a mansion, sports cars, and other pricey possessions. He also gained a new drug addiction, with a preference for Quaaludes. Due to his drug usage, Belfort was involved in many mishaps, including crashing his helicopter into his own yard and drowning his boat, which previously belonged to designer Coco Chanel. His addiction was also a factor in the dissolution of his second marriage. If anyone has seen the 2013 movie The wolf of wall street where Jorden lands a helicopter in his backyard or drives and crashes his Lamborghini while being high is real and not a work of art.

Belfort also pushed his staff to engage in risky conduct. At Stratton Oakmont's Long Island, New York, headquarters, substance abuse, sex, and horseplay were the norm. An assistant at the firm was allegedly paid $5,000 to get her head shaved by some of the firm's traders. The motto which all the brokers at Stratton Oakmont was  "Don't hang up until the consumer buys or dies,". In the near term, their hard-sell techniques paid off. The real Wolf of Wall Street is Jordan Belfort and he is called so as he made millions by frauding people for a decade and still did not allow anyone to doubt him and his wor until the end.

Scams, Frauds, and Other Crimes 

• In 1992, the Securities and Exchange Commission attempted to shut down Stratton Oakmont's shady stock business, alleging that the firm had deceived investors and manipulated stock prices. Belfort was kicked out of the brokerage industry two years later. The SEC and Stratton Oakmont had struck an agreement, with Belfort receiving a lifetime ban from the securities business and the firm receiving a fine.

• Stratton Oakmont was involved in a variety of scams, including pump-and-dump operations to artificially raise penny stock prices. The company functioned as a boiler room, with the stockbrokers pressuring investors to buy in extremely speculative assets. The business is reported to have employed over 1,000 stockbrokers at its peak, who oversaw investments worth more than $1 billion.

• The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) has consistently taken legal action against Stratton Oakmont throughout its history. The company was closed down in 1996. Belfort and his business partner Danny Porush were charged with money laundering and securities fraud in 1999.

• What started a decade ago by a greedy and ambitious man came to an end in 1999 when Jordan Belfort pleaded guilty to fraud for the pump and dump scheme which he and his friend had invented that had caused the investors more than 200 million dollars. Jordan Belfort was sentenced to 4 years of jail and was fined 110 million dollars in the year 2003 but served only 22 months in prison. His cooperation with the authorities resulted in the shortening of his prison sentence. 

Life In and After Prison

Jordan Belfort when he was in jail started writing about his life and the lessons which he learned from them. When he was jailed he lost everything, even himself. He was addicted to gambling, drugs and also for separation from his wife and his kid custody went to his wife. In an interview, Jordan said that even though everybody around him saw him in a different manner after he pleaded guilty, his children were the only ones that saw him the same way which was as a father, and that led him to come back stronger and change his life completely. 

Jordan Belfort published his memoir The Wolf of Wall Street in 2008, naming it after one of his nicknames. The book chronicled his spectacular rise and subsequent financial downfall. The next year, Belfort published Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, a second book about his life after his imprisonment. The Wolf of Wall Street was adapted into a film in 2013, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort.

Jordan Belfort has his own business, which specializes in sales training and the marketing of wealth-building Straight Line training packages, as well as motivational speaking.  He stated in an interview with the Daily Mail. Belfort is said to have paid $14 million of the $110 million punishment.

Jordan Belfort started from the humble beginning and was from the street was a very good salesman who had his way of persuading people to buy things that meant less than their tag price. Jordan Belfort’s life could be a lesson to everyone and he truly did rise like a phoenix. In the beginning, Jordan and his friends made money out of the pump and dump scheme and lived the best life which had gambling, women, and drugs involved. He started his own downfall and when he was arrested and he pled guilty that stage could be categorized as realization. There is a lesson which everyone could learn from Jordan Belfort is that, ‘life is always about second chance and if you get one, do not mess it up’.