rankings

The New Yorkiest of tech VCs knows in his soul that second is the first loser.

It makes the tension around Pershing Square so thick you could cut it with a bottle of Herbalife's Formula 1 Instant Healthy Meal Nutritional Shake Mix Vanilla Dream 22, sure, but it doesn't kill him.

Morgan Stanely > Bain > Apple.

BofA smokes all you fools (at laying off employees).

...did pretty well for themselves this last go around, particularly compared to their counterparts at JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, BofA, and Citigroup.

And who the Marriott School of Business needs to screw to make the Top 25.

What motivates a hedge fund manager to continue busting his ass to churn out profits year after year, once he's already amassed a fortune most people can't even fathom, when he could easily pack it all in and live more than comfortably without ever working another day? For some, it's the thrill. For others, it's the trophy's wife's shoe habit. For Crispin Odey, it's the chickens. The Odey Asset Management founder (and sausage brand ambassador)'s got a mess of high-maintenance ones and earlier this year, had architects draft blueprints of a "Palladian-style" mansion he intended to build them (seen at left), replete with a grey zinc roof, "pediments, cornice, architrave, and frieze in English oak," and columns "hewn from the finest grey Forest of Dean standstone." After finishing 2011 down 20.3%, things were no doubt more than a little tense over in Herefordshire, where questions of whether or not construction would have to be halted, or if they'd have to make the switch to [whispers] generic-brand feed. Certainly a moment of panic swept over Odey each day when he returned home, wondering as he turned the knob if he'd be entering an empty house, the chickens gone and a note explaining they couldn't do this anymore on the fridge. Ran off with the general contractor because what was the point of shacking up with a money manger if the money wasn't there? Luckily for all parties involved, it won't have to come to that; according to Bloomberg Markets' annual ranking of the top performing hedge funds, performing under pressure is one of Odey's specialities.