In this interview with Carnegie Mellon University, billionaire David Tepper discusses his habits for success and advice on making it in finance.
Billionaire David Tepper Habits For Success And Advice On Making It In Finance 2018
Q3 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
David by any definition you had a very successful career. What were some of the things that you think you did early on. What habits that you set. What priorities that you cite in your early college years or your early years of career. How do you think have been contributing to that success.
I didn't get that drunk I guess I don't know in my early college years.
I think listen I think that probably this is probably this was talking about I don't have anything written for this commencement speech so a lot of trouble. So but I think there's you know just through life I think it's how you bounce back from disappointment of failures. So I think you know how you recover and how you move on. So for instance when I came here Bob said I you know I took a job at Republic Steel. I came out of here well Republic Steel was on its way to bankruptcy. But you know you know I could have gone down the LTV down to Dallas but I chose to go to Boston for mutual fund. So there's always those challenges of things going on and I was when I was a republic still I was there for maybe three months. And they gave a 7 percent across the board pay cut and everybody my graduate school decide to call me up and say Hey great choice TAPPER You know it actually was a pretty good choice because they didn't more financing and the next you know next year or two years than they did the 100 year history of the company.
So being up in the Treasury Department that company was on its way to bankruptcy. Eventually you went bankrupt with LTV. There was a lot of things to learn a lot of opportunities there. And if I go through my career it was a lot a lot of disappointments there's a lot of things that didn't go right. But those aren't the things that make you how you bounce back and we move on from there and how you what you'll learn from those things. And you know it's kind of the river flows you know the river flows. There should be some there should be some somebodies culture. The river flows but you know you have to make choices on where your life goes but you never stop flowing. You never stop riding the river you never stop dancing you know. So I just think you kind of keep pushing forward because you're going to have disappointments you're going to have problems you life. You're going to have different things that go wrong. But that's not what's going to define you. We're going to define you as how you recover from those things and how you move on so that that should be the commencement speech right.
Well we got a sneak peek. Thank you. So with that would now like to open it up the audience so as you can see there's Mike set up on the left and the right to up any questions they can start lining up now.
We'll start with questions said and again we would like to remind students to say their name year school as well.
Their program has no brushes and Gordon the son read the audience with a second to think we have a question.
So you know we talk a lot about the school but I think it's a great opportunity to learn more insights about your career and your approach to business. So as business students here what are some lessons that we need to learn in addition to what you just said that are not covered in the textbooks. There's a lot of opportunities to learn here on Carnegie Mellon and Oxus a lot of resources.
Yeah listen I was just I was actually out with the spring spring fling spring. By the way no one was housefly with the hamburgers and hotdogs her spirit. I you get the hotdogs because I was afraid of slopping mustard on myself. So. But anyways I was telling somebody out there that no one of the things I think you have to do when you're in business is always try to be ethical and honest. I was telling them a story about when I was a Goldman Sachs.
