Surely we all know the story of Jordan Belfort from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. But after watching this movie, many will have divided opinions about who Jordan Belfort really is.
This article tries to provide a perspective on the identity of the real protagonist of the story, taking into account the complete story and its outcome.
In other words, we will not only look at what the film conveys but also at his book: “The Wolf of Wall Street” and the biographical data found on the web.
Table of Contents
Beginnings, religion and education of Jordan Belfort
Jordan Belfort was born on July 9, 1962 in New York, United States. He grew up in a Jewish family of humble origins in Bayside, New York, studied dentistry at American University and then went on to work as a stockbroker at LF Rothschild, a brokerage house that traded assets on the stock market and in which Belfort learned how financial markets work and how to profit from them.
Jordan Belfort’s professional career
When Belfort was working on Wall Street, on October 19, 1987, stock markets around the world crashed in a stampede known as Black Monday. The Dow Jones index fell 22.6%. The markets took a long time to recover and as a consequence LF Rothschild, the brokerage house where Belfort worked suffered severe financial difficulties, which led him to lay off many employees, including the young broker Jordan Belfort.
Jordan Belfort founds Stratton Oakmont
Belfort was not intimidated by failure and decided to venture into a business that would be much more profitable for him than Wall Street stocks, penny stocks; a loosely regulated off-exchange market in which brokers sold shares for less than a dollar, but which fluctuated wildly, and from which large commissions could be earned. In this endeavor, he founded Stratton Oakmont with his friend Danny Poroush.
Belfort and Poroush went on to sell shares above their face value, defrauding many clients and making large amounts of money. In the midst of the furor and success of Stratton Oakmont, Belfort falls into drug addiction and begins to lead a disorderly life with prostitutes and non-stop parties in the company he had founded. Stratton Oakmont once had 1,000 brokers and participated in initial public offerings of about 35 companies, including the most famous (and of course fraudulent) Steve Madden Ltd.
Following multiple complaints from the company’s clients to regulatory authorities, Belfort was charged with securities fraud, money laundering and stock market manipulation. The FBI launched a manhunt against him, leading to his arrest in 1998.
Specifically, the fraud methods that Belfort used in the stock market involved the Pump and Dump technique, buying cheap shares, manipulating the information about them to get many clients to buy them and they would appreciate quickly in the market and then selling the shares. stocks at their highest point to finally stop promoting them and allow them to free fall, causing the rest of the investors to lose their money.
Among the most famous companies that have used the fraudulent technique are Enron, Park Financial Group and Langbar international. As we have seen, the promoters of this type of scam create a financial bubble with advanced knowledge that they hide from investors and then sell their shares when they reach a point of high value. The same was done in the case of the three companies mentioned.
Capture and trial
After his capture in 1998, Jordan Belfort collaborated with the FBI and reached an agreement with the justice system, paying 22 months in prison and compensation of 110.4 million dollars to his former clients. Belfort is reportedly not yet fully compensated for his clients, but the settlement remains in place and various amounts have been paid out of properties seized from him, as well as funds from his book and movie copyrights. the wolf of Wall Street.
As a writer and business coach
After his release from prison, Jordan Belfort published the book The Wolf of Wall Street, an emotional and personal story in which he details his excesses with drugs, the way in which he defrauded his clients and how he finally recovered from his addictions, entered to collaborate with justice and definitively changed his business ethics.
Belfort is also a motivational speaker who teaches at talks and seminars how to sell effectively and how to overcome personal obstacles on the path to self-improvement and building solid financial independence. He travels around the world giving these talks, charging admission anywhere from $300 to $600.
He designed a personal and business development program called “The Straight Line”, with which he teaches his followers how to change their lives, sell more effectively and improve themselves every day, in the same way, that he gave up drugs, and learned to use his sales talents to help others instead of ripping off investors eager for the great new stock gold mine with their sales techniques.
You can learn more about this system in the Jordan Belfort twitter account that we put below:
Anyone who has read The Wolf of Wall Street will notice that Belfort was not an evil person, although he was aware of his actions. However, more than anything, his actions were due to a serious problem of immaturity that led him to excesses and to depend on fraud for a living.
Personal life
Jordan Belfort was married twice. The first time with Denise until 1991 and the second time with Nadine Caridi (from 1991 to 1998). Currently, Belfort does not have a partner.
Jordan Belfort Fortune
Jordan Belfort’s net worth of wealth is roughly estimated to be less than 100 million dollars as of 2020. He is currently 55 years old and working as a speaker and motivational speaker all over the world. He still has several outstanding debts with many of his victims, with whom he has a payment agreement (See: Wealthy Gorilla).
Life lessons and phrases
Now you know all about Jordan Belfort’s net worth and how he was able to achieve success; Let’s take a look at some of the lessons we can learn from it:
be a wolf
In the real world, opportunities are reserved for the hungriest candidates. Be hungry, be a wolf. The world really is dog-eat-dog.
Don’t just talk about business and success. Add success to your lifestyle
Talking is easy, so instead of talking about everything, show what you know to the people around you with your actions in life and make the success you want to happen. If you want to be rich, you have to program your mind to be rich.
perception is everything
Always dress for success. It’s always about presentation and your appearance reflects your work ethic and reputation.
23 Jordan Belfort Quotes
“The only thing standing between you and your goals is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself why you can’t make it.”
“Without action, the best intentions in the world are just that: intentions.”
“Winners use phrases that say “I must” and “I will”
“When you live your life by low standards, you inflict harm on everyone who crosses your path, especially those you love.” –
You don’t choose who you fall in love with, do you? And once you fall in love, that kind of obsessive love, that all-consuming love, where two people can’t bear to be apart from each other even for a moment, how are you supposed to let a love like that go by?»
“Successful people are 100% convinced that they are the masters of their own destiny, they are not creatures of circumstance, they create circumstances, if the circumstances around them suck, they change them.”
“If you want to be rich, never give up. People tend to give up. If you have persistence, you will get ahead of most people. More importantly, you will learn. When you do something, you can fail. But that’s not because you’re a failure. It’s because you haven’t learned enough. Do it differently each time. Someday you’ll get it right. Failure is your friend.”
“I want you to lie down in a corner. Give yourself no choice but to succeed. Let the consequences of failure become so dire and unthinkable that you will have no choice but to do whatever it takes to succeed.”
“Act as if you were a rich man, rich already, and surely you will become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence and people will surely have confidence in you. Act like you have unrivaled experience and people will follow your advice. And act like you are already tremendously successful, and as sure as I am here today, you will be successful.”
“Whether you say, ‘I can’ or ‘I can’t’, you’re right on both counts.”
“No matter what has happened to you in the past, you are not your past, you are the resources and capabilities you get from it. And that is the basis of all change.”
“The easiest way to make money is: create something of such value that everyone wants it and go out and give and create value, the money comes automatically.”
“I have the guts to die. What I want to know is, do you have the guts to live?
“If you give people a good enough ‘why,’ they will always figure out the how.”
“Everything that has happened to you up to this point is irrelevant. It’s your past.”
“If you try and fail, people will praise you for trying. If you don’t try, people will ignore you.”
“I want you to deal with your problems by getting rich.”
“The best way to sell something: don’t sell anything. Get awareness, respect and trust from those who might buy.”
“Those who tell you that you can’t are people who want to trample on your hopes and dreams. Forget their phone numbers.
“You need to see things as they are, not worse than they are, but see them better than they are and make them this way.”
“Average sucks.”
“Create a vision that makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning.”
“There are always patterns in everything, there are patterns in books, there are patterns in human behavior, there are patterns in success, there are patterns in everything in life. You just have to pay attention to them.”
The veracity of the book and the film
Martin Scorsese’s film is a very faithful adaptation of Jordan Belfort’s book, detailing very precisely the content of Belfort’s narration, although in my opinion the book is a little more scandalous and according to Jordan Belfort himself what is narrated in this it is totally true.
How faithful is the film to the facts
On the Disruptive Investors channel, they tell us in more detail the aspects of the film that correspond to reality and how Jordan chose the path that led him to financial success unthinkable for a person of his origins.
Before the movie, I have to recommend the book that inspired it, because honestly, it is the story of an unparalleled change of life, in which Jordan Belfort does not completely underestimate himself, but learns from his mistakes, and takes its successes to fit them into a new paradigm of action that serves others.
We cannot know for sure how sorry Belfort is for the frauds he committed, although in fact, his book does indicate conversion of life and a return to the roots of his Jewish faith, adopting – at least in the face of the people – a perspective much more ethical compared to business.