Jim Cramer

James Joseph Cramer was born on February 10, 1955, in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, to a family that ran a packaging business outside Philadelphia. He attended Springfield Township High School and went on to Harvard College, where he served as president of The Harvard Crimson and graduated magna cum laude in 1977. After early jobs as a newspaper reporter covering crime in Tallahassee and Los Angeles, he returned to Harvard for law school, financing his studies in part by trading stocks from a dormitory pay phone.

Rather than practice law, Cramer joined Goldman Sachs in 1984 as a sales and trading associate. In 1987 he left to launch his own hedge fund, Cramer & Co., which he ran for roughly fourteen years and reported strong annualized returns before retiring from active management in 2001. During the same stretch he co-founded TheStreet.com in 1996 with journalist Martin Peretz, building it into one of the earliest online financial-news outlets.

Cramer pivoted to broadcasting after leaving the buy side. CNBC gave him his own program, Mad Money with Jim Cramer, which premiered in March 2005 and has run ever since with its trademark sound effects, buy-and-sell calls, and the Lightning Round format. He also co-hosted Squawk on the Street for years and appeared as a regular guest across NBC News properties.

He has written several bestsellers, including Confessions of a Street Addict, Jim Cramer's Real Money, and Get Rich Carefully. Married twice, he has two daughters from his first marriage and lives in New Jersey, where he co-owns Bar San Miguel and other small Brooklyn-area restaurants with his wife Lisa Cadette Detwiler.

The name Jim is a short form of James, itself derived from the Hebrew Yaakov (Jacob), meaning supplanter or one who follows. As a masculine nickname it has carried associations of plainspoken approachability since the nineteenth century, suiting a man whose television persona thrives on direct, unvarnished speech.