Michael Klein; Internet entrepreneur and financier (plane crash with daughter)
Hyfler/Rosner
December 29, 2007
Michael Klein
Internet entrepreneur and financier who graduated from
university at 17 and went on to become a dot-com millionaire
While some dot-com millionaires simply chanced upon their
success, the serial accomplishments of Michael Klein showed
that the California entrepreneur and financier, who made
several fortunes from a handful of deals, was a most
talented and astute businessman. Most recently the owner and
chief executive of Pacificor, a hedge-fund manager, Klein,
who opted for bow-ties over the black polonecks of other
internet entrepreneurs, had a Midas touch.
As chief executive of eGroups, the world's most popular
group e-mail service, he sold the company to Yahoo! for
hundreds of millions of dollars at the height of the dot-com
boom, before moving into a career in wealth management.
Michael B. Klein was born in 1970. An exceptionally bright
student, he missed out high school and graduated from the
University of California in 1988, aged 17. He later earned
an MBA at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a
law degree at the Santa Barbara College of Law.
On leaving the University of California, Klein founded MIBEK
Corporation, a software company that developed financial
analysis tools, which was acquired in 1992. He then founded
Transoft Networks, a developer of network data storage
software, which was bought by Hewlett-Packard in 1999.
That year he was nominated the California State
Legislature's Entrepreneur of the Year as well as the
Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara's Technology &
Business Entrepreneur of the Year.
He joined ONElist, an e-mail list management company, in
1999, as president and chief executive. When that company
merged later that year with rival eGroups, Klein became
chief executive of the new entity. In 2000 he oversaw the
sale of the company, for $432 million, to Yahoo!, which
later renamed the service Yahoo! Groups. It now has more
than 100 million users worldwide.
In 1999 Klein had become the largest investor in the Santa
Barbara-based hedge fund company Pacificor, LLC. In 2001 he
became chief executive of the company, and in 2002 he bought
it out. Pacificor manages assets of about $600 million,
catering to institutional investors and high-net-worth
individuals with an investment of at least $1 million. As
chief executive, Klein was responsible for the strategy of
the companies' funds, which were mostly invested in
distressed debt - high-yield investments where there is
correspondingly high risk that payment will not come good.
In 2000 Klein bought a ranch of more than 1,000 acres in
Santa Barbara County, granting a conservation agreement that
protected most of the land from development. He also gave
$100,000 to the Land Trust for Santa Barbera County for
conservation.
In 2002 he bought the Islas Secas, an archipelago of 16
small islands in the Gulf of Chiriqui off Panama's Pacific
Coast. In 2004, he opened an eco-resort on Cavada, the
largest of the islands, limited to some 20 holidaymakers at
a time. It was on this tropical idyll that Klein was last
seen alive, last Sunday, when he set off in a Cessna with
his teenage daughter, Talia, a friend of hers and the pilot.
The group were heading for the remote Volcán Barú, the
tallest mountain in Panama, in what should have been a
45-minute flight to take aerial shots of the dormant volcano
285 miles west of Panama City. On the way to the Álvaro
Berroa airstrip nearby, the light aircraft lost radio
communication with the ground.
After a 52-hour search hampered by fog and rain, during
which Klein's ex-wife, Kim, put up a $25,000 reward for
anybody who found the aircraft as well as paying for extra
search vehicles, rescuers found the crash site. Klein, his
13-year-old daughter and the pilot were dead but Talia's
friend, Francesca Lewis, survived an impact that had
reportedly "smashed the aircraft to pieces". After a
three-and-half-hour trek down the side of the mountain she
was airlifted to hospital suffering a broken arm and
hypothermia.
Michael Klein, internet entrepreneur and financier, was born
on December 3, 1970. He died in an air crash on December 23,
aged 37
--
Visit www.aodeadpool.com
mack
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:gbCdnYm_7s3LVuja...@rcn.net...
> From The Times
> December 29, 2007
>
> Michael Klein
> Internet entrepreneur and financier who graduated from university at 17
> and went on to become a dot-com millionaire
> 3, 1970. He died in an air crash on December 23, aged 37
It's a shame that with all his brains and great wealth, he was such a
numbnuts to think that taking his daughter and her friend on a trip over
jungle in a single engine Cessna with a 23 year old pilot was not a
potentially risky venture. It cost him not only his own life but that of
two (and potentially three) other people. But when education and wealth
has come to someone so easily, perhaps there's a "nothing can go wrong"
philosophy at work. To his dismay, he learned better.
danny burstein
>It's a shame that with all his brains and great wealth, he was such a
>numbnuts to think that taking his daughter and her friend on a trip over
>jungle in a single engine Cessna with a 23 year old pilot was not a
>potentially risky venture. It cost him not only his own life but that of
>two (and potentially three) other people. But when education and wealth
>has come to someone so easily, perhaps there's a "nothing can go wrong"
>philosophy at work. To his dismay, he learned better.
You're JFK jr., and I claim my two-fifty.
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dan...@panix.com
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