can someone with like interest timeline how in the hell the destroyer (Eddie Lambert) arrived on the scene? How? Was he a nephew or grandchild? How did he usurp and destroy us?
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Really what Eddie did is not unusual, he was looking out for his share holders. He has said as much in interviews that his job is to make money for the shareholders of SHC and his hedge fund. Warren Buffet made his money the same way. Buy a distressed company, use the money from the profits of that company to buy other companies, and use the profit from that company to buy other companies etc.
The difference is that Warren Buffet wants his companies to succeed to fund other acqusitions. Where Eddie has ruined a company to just have real estate. Welcome to the world of big business boys and girls.
Eddie Lampert is not related to any founder or previous president of Sears. He simply got involved by buying up the stock like any investor. Like the previous poster mentioned, he made a lot of money on Wall Street (Goldman Sachs, I believe), then when he quit working there, he founded his own hedge fund. Once a hedge fund has investors, then the manager goes out and buys whatever he can to make money for the fund. The can be stocks, bonds, classic cars, companies, gold/silver, bowling-shirts... basically anything. In a short version of this case, Eddie bought the debt of Kmart when they were in bankruptcy.
When a company like Kmart goes bankrupt, bond-holders get nervous that they will lose money, since there won't be enough assets to pay off their debts. So when someone comes along and offers to buy the debt, you can bet a lot of them jumped at the chance. But Eddie did look at the assets/debt ratio, and saw that there was enough assets to pay the bondholders enough to make it worth his while. And when a company does a simple restructuring bankruptcy (like Kmart did) instead of a liquidation, then once the company emerges from bankruptcy, then the bond-holders become the owners. So once Kmart came out of bankruptcy, then Eddie's hedge fund owned Kmart.
Eddie still had hedge fund money left, and he started to buy Sears stock, even before Kmart came out of bankruptcy. And when they did, he had Kmart assets to leverage, to make a big purchase of Sears stock. When his hedge-fund bought enough to become majority shareholder, then it was up to him as manager to decide to merge the two companies, which he did in 2005. And once you run the company, then you can make a lot of decisions to either grow and invest (like competent professionals), or use the money that the company generates to do stupid things like stock buybacks (like Eddie did, to temporarily make his hedge fund worth more money). But when you blow money on stock-buybacks, that money is gone, and your company has nothing to show for it. You don't get to make the investments to improve operations.
That, in a nutshell, is how Sears ended up where it is today.
Milk the cow then slaughter the cow for its meat.
The lifelong story of Eddie:
He made a ton of money with wall street investments and selling real estate
Now he makes a ton of money selling Sears and Kmart's.