Photo: Bob Riha Jr/Getty Images
Those of you who've kept up with the saga of Bill Gross vs. Pimco will not at all be surprised to hear that in a recent interview with CNBC, the bond fund manager got in a couple digs at his former employer (who he is currently suing on the claim that he was fired, even though he left a handwritten note on someone's desk saying that he was quitting and then walked out of the building forever without telling anyone). It won't be surprising because, in addition to the lawsuit-- a hostile move in and of itself-- Gross:
- Told a reporter "I am fixated on proving that they were wrong. It’s like — no, you shouldn’t have done that and the numbers will prove it."
- Said that "My whole evening is dependent on whether I beat them...I have to prove it all over again. Every day."
- Thought it was within reason during his time at Pimco to have a policy wherein people couldn't make eye contact with him; tried to convince Pimco management to dock his co-CEO's pay "and provoke him into suing Pimco," an idea they rejected; tried to convince Pimco management to "lie to a newspaper reporter to present him in a better light," which they also rejected.
So, y'know, there's still some animus there. A tad unexpected, though, is that he's already started in on his new friends at Janus.
Gross left Pimco, the investment management giant he founded and ran for more than four decades, in 2014. He started working at Janus, a much smaller firm, about a week after leaving Pimco, but immediately recognized that it was "very different, and not entirely in positive ways." "The positive was fewer meetings, fewer exchanges with people that tend to clog up your day. I enjoy trading and watching markets," he said. "I did miss, almost immediately, the investment committee. Pimco has a brilliant investment committee, or had; probably (it's) still pretty functional. I missed the two-hour-a-day interplay, in terms of the committee with eight people jawing at each other back and forth, so there's trade-offs."
Way harsh, B.
Bill Gross: Here's why I started over at Janus Capital [CNBC]
