A New York Times obituary details how Weitzman "was born Meyer Levinger on April 1, 1942, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Joseph and Helen (Tobias) Levenger.

His mother died before he was 1; his father, after returning from military service in World War II, was apparently unable to care for the child, and he was placed in an orphanage.

in Statistics and Operations Research from Stanford University in 1964, and then attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a Ph.D. in Economics in 1967.

In return for dismissal of the charges Weitzman agreed to pay the farmer $600 and to make an additional $300 charitable donation in lieu of performing community service.

[7] Weitzman's past research was focused on fixed versus profit sharing wages and their effect on unemployment.

Weitzman also derived the Gittins index – a celebrated result in the applied probability literature – independently from (and in parallel to) John C.

Weitzman served as a consultant to The World Bank, Stanford Research Institute, International Monetary Fund, Agency for International Development, Arthur D. Little Co., the Canadian Parliamentary Committee on Employment, Icelandic Committee on Natural Resources, and the National Academy Panel on Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting.

Weitzman wrote three books: The Share Economy: Conquering Stagflation;[9] Income, Wealth, and the Maximum Principle; and, most recently, Climate Shock,[1] jointly with Gernot Wagner.