This story contains some plot details about season 3 of “Billions.”
Things have been busy recently for Anthony Scaramucci. Prior to serving as President Trump’s White House Communications Director for just 12 days, “The Mooch” founded hedge-fund investing firm SkyBridge Capital and a hedge-fund conference known as SALT.
So, he’s only now gotten around to watching “Billions,” Showtime’s hit TV series starring Damian Lewis as hedge-fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod and Paul Giamatti as an aggressive U.S. Attorney out to get him on charges of insider trading. The third season finishes this Sunday.
Scaramucci attended Tufts University with “Billons” co-creator Brian Koppelman (who created the show with David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin) and he’s a fan. “Brian and David know how to create a great drama that has a comedic flair and realness,” Scaramucci says.
Much attention has been paid to the perceived similarities between Lewis’s Axelrod and hedge-fund titan Steve Cohen (Dan Loeb and Bill Ackman are other figures cited as inspiration for the character). “The characters that I saw were not reminiscent of any one person but they appeared to be composites,” says Scaramucci. “I can see why the show is so popular. They have a real hit. It’s binge material.”
‘High-impact historical fiction’
Robert Wolf, former president and chief operating officer of UBS who now serves as founder & CEO of 32 Advisors, is another “Billions” junkie.
“I love the show,” he says. “It takes all the big events and the ‘larger than life’ stereotypes of Wall Street from the 1980s to today and creates a fast-paced, high-impact historical fiction.”
As to the authenticity of operations at Axelrod’s fictional hedge fund, Axe Capital, Wolf says, “I can identify with many of the stories from my trading days at Salomon Brothers to my weekend at the Fed for the Lehman crisis and to having regulators around on a non-stop basis.” (In 1991, while Wolf was at Salomon Brothers, the erstwhile investment bank was caught up in a bond-auction-market manipulation scandal which partly inspired season two of “Billions.”)
The second season of “Billions” ended with Axelrod out on bail after his arrest was orchestrated by Rhoades. The assets of Axe Capital have been frozen and the company is, according to an employee, “the most toxic shop on the street right now.”
“I think everyone in the industry is aware of ‘Billions,’ says Ben Axler, the founder and chief investment officer of Spruce Point Capital Management. He’s particularly impressed with the character of Bobby Axelrod.
“He displays a lot of the traits of a successful hedge fund manager,” Axler says. “He’s calm, cool and calculated about how he’s approaching the investigation of his firm and how he’s going to try to prevail to save it and his passion, which is trading.”
“That part of the series is very accurate. The people who have been in this industry a...