Henry Blodget

Henry Blodget was one of the most prominent internet stock analysts during the dot-com bubble, working at Merrill Lynch where his enthusiastic buy ratings on internet companies drove significant retail investor interest. He became famous for his $400 price target on Amazon in 1998. However, subsequent investigations revealed that in private emails he was disparaging about stocks he publicly recommended — a classic conflict of interest between research and investment banking. He was banned from the securities industry for life in 2003. He subsequently reinvented himself as a journalist and digital media entrepreneur, founding Business Insider in 2007, which became one of the most successful digital business news publications and was acquired by Axel Springer. His personal experience with the conflicts inherent in sell-side research gave him an unusually candid perspective on Wall Street's incentive structures when writing about the financial industry as a journalist.