It’s a Thursday evening in spring, there’s a Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden and Anthony Scaramucci is psyched. The 55-year-old entrepreneur is coming to the end of a grueling week, having flown from New York to Boston to San Francisco to Washington, D.C., and back to New York meeting with financial advisors at several big banks to promote his firm, SkyBridge Capital. There’s just one more stop before he can let loose with the troubadour of working class Long Island—Scaramucci’s home turf.
Scaramucci is running late and rushes into the midtown Manhattan auditorium at Barclays Investment Bank. It’s full of young hedge fund types there for a Wharton School alumni networking event. Scaramucci, the featured speaker, puts aside his two cell phones and his sunglasses (which he is carrying despite the fact that it’s raining), and immediately starts talking—no microphone, no PowerPoint slides. He doesn’t stop for 74 minutes.
“Is this Trump 2020 campaign headquarters?” jokes Scaramucci, who wears his politics on his navy blue suit via a diamond, ruby and sapphire–encrusted flag pin. He’s already sized up the crowd of diverse young financiers—African Americans, Asian Americans and women among them—and figured that many are likely not fellow Trump supporters.
It doesn’t matter. They’ve come to see “the Mooch,” as he is both affectionately and derisively called.
Scaramucci, who founded hedge fund of funds SkyBridge Capital in 2005, is on a whirlwind comeback tour that began almost the day after he was famously fired from his job as communications director for the Trump White House after only 11 days in July 2017. Or as he puts it, “fired like an Austin Powers villain, getting ejected into the sky and dropped into the fire” for an expletive-laden conversation with New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza.
“I thought I would last longer than a carton of milk,” he quips to the crowd. Now, as he rags on his fellow White House denizens Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon and castigates Washington as more venal than Wall Street, he says, “I think you can tell, I really don’t give a shit.”
My profile, in Worth magazine, continues here:
And here’s a timeline of SALT through the years:
Michelle Celarier 