Earnest Stanley O'Neal (born October 7, 1951[2]) is an American business executive who was chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch from 2003 through 2007, having served in numerous senior management positions at the company prior to this appointment.
[2] O'Neal's father moved his family from Wedowee, Alabama, to Atlanta, where he worked on a General Motors assembly line.
[5] Stan O'Neal also worked briefly on GM's assembly line as a teenager under a work-study program offered by the General Motors Institute (later known as Kettering University),[6] where he gained a degree in industrial administration in 1974.
[8] After spells as global head of capital markets[7] and co-head of the corporate and institutional client group,[7] he spent two years as CFO from 1998 to 2000.
[9] O'Neal became president of the firm in 2001 in a palace intrigue that eventually led to the early ouster of his predecessor and one-time mentor David Komansky.
[12][13] As CEO, O'Neal attempted to get rid of the 'Mother Merrill' culture of job security, arguing that it promoted cronyism instead of merit.
"[13] "At the same time Goldman executives were canceling vacations to deal with the burgeoning subprime crisis, O’Neal was often on the golf course, playing round after round by himself", in fact six months before Bear Stearns nearly collapsed Merrill added tens of billions of risky securities to its balance sheet while Goldman moved to reduce exposure.
[13] During August and September 2007, as the subprime mortgage crisis swept through the global financial market, Merrill Lynch announced losses of $8 billion.
O'Neal finally realized the huge exposure that Merrill had to subprime mortgage-backed CDOs, and that the firm would have to be sold in order to survive.
Thain was forced to merge Merrill with Bank of America in September 2008, the weekend before[20] Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
[16] When Thain arrived at Merrill he scrapped O'Neal's practice of having the security guards always hold an entire elevator bank open exclusively for him.