John J. Mack (born John Makhoul on November 17, 1944) is the current CEO and Chairman of the Board of Morgan Stanley, one of two remaining “bulge bracket” investment banks. He worked for the company for nearly thirty years before leaving in 2001 after losing in a power struggle to Phil Purcell, only to return on June 30, 2005 to replace ousted Phil Purcell, who took over the CEO seat after the 1997 merger of Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter, of which Purcell was already CEO. The sixth son of Lebanese immigrants whose father ran a grocery store in Mooresville, N.C., Mack’s first job in finance was as a clerk at a small brokerage during his junior year at Duke, after a cracked vertebra made it impossible for him to continue on his football scholarship. Mack rose through Morgan Stanley’s ranks to become president in 1993. He earned the nickname Mack the Knife for his cost-cutting prowess while managing the fixed income division, and he lived up to his billing at CSFB, where he cut 10,000 jobs and returned the bank to profitability. (CSFB’s board didn’t renew Mack’s contract in 2004 after a dispute over the firm’s direction.) After a brief stint as chairman of Pequot Capital, a hedge fund, during 2004-05, he returned to Morgan Stanley as chief executive officer and chairman of the board, 2005.
