He was paid $40,000 a year. He got married in 1995 and started a family. The O’Neills would have four children.
O’Neill loved his job and was promoted up through the ranks to be a lead engineer at Corpus Christi. By 1995, he was making about $60,000 a year and sometimes received bonuses of $10,000 or so.
But somehow, O’Neill’s paychecks never seemed to provide enough money to keep pace with America’s middle-class expectations. The O’Neills didn’t vacation extravagantly, but they did try to get away with the kids when they could. It turned out to be more expensive than they expected. They didn’t hire a nanny or drive expensive cars, but O’Neill’s income never seemed to quite cover expenses. Over time, they put a few thousand dollars on a credit card here and a few thousand there. They counted on O’Neill’s bonuses to help pay off the debt. But the debt seemed to grow with a life of its own. It seemed like one day they turned around and here was this horrible truth: they owed about $60,000 in credit card debt.
O’Neill knew that he needed to make some sort of change in his life—he needed a way to make more money. In 1996, the opportunity arrived when he heard that there was an opening in Koch’s commodities trading division in Houston. He had zero trading experience outside of some amateur forays into the stock market; he belonged to an investment club with some friends who made stock picks to see if they could outperform the market. But he decided to apply anyway. He discovered that Koch didn’t care all that much about prior trading experience. For example, Kyle Vann, the former Exxon engineer, had risen to a senior position over Koch’s trading operations. The company wasn’t looking for Wall Street swagger; it was looking for analytical engineers who approached the market in the same way they approached complex problems inside Koch’s pipeline and refinery divisions. O’Neill was hired and moved his family to Houston, first renting a home and then buying a four-bedroom house in the suburbs.
Trading wasn’t a path to instant riches. Koch hired former engineers, and it paid them like engineers—O’Neill started his new job at the same pay grade as before, about $60,000 a year. The bonuses got a little bigger, however, and the O’Neills were able to start digging themselves out of debt.
That morning, as O’Neill sat at his desk in early 2000, upper-middle-class comfort seemed like it might be within his reach. Or maybe even something greater than that. O’Neill’s computer was now fully alive. He opened his e-mail program and began to scroll through messages and reports that came in overnight and in the early morning hours. This information was starting to coalesce into a picture in O’Neill’s mind. He was beginning to see a trade taking shape, and a very large trade at that. He saw a strategy, in fact, that might very well lift him out of the financial strain that had defined his life up until that moment. He looked over the numbers as they scrolled and blinked on his screen, and as the Houston morning progressed, he began making phone calls.
Over the next year, O’Neill would execute a trade that was larger than any he’d ever done before. And it was a trade that was only possible, in all of its massive scope, because of the strange way that America’s financial markets had evolved over the previous decade, creating a small node within the economy that minted millionaires and billionaires.
If O’Neill could pull off his trade as he imagined it, he could become one of them. If he had confidence that he could do it, it was because he had been trained by the best in the business.
* * *
Koch’s trading office in Houston was overseen by a man named Sam Soliman. Like O’Neill, Soliman had cut his teeth in Koch’s Corpus Christi refinery. He was a graduate of Texas A&M and an engineer by training. Before working for Koch, Soliman was an officer on a US Navy nuclear submarine, and even years later, when overseeing Koch’s trading floor, Soliman carried with him the bearing and ethos of someone in a military chain of command. It seems that spending extended periods of time submerged in the ocean, confined next to a nuclear reactor, had impressed upon Soliman certain habits of discipline and risk assessment. He was tall and thin, with a head of thick, dark hair, and spoke with exacting