Blodget was born and raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the son of a commercial banker. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Yale University, where he was a member of The Society of Orpheus and Bacchus. After college, he taught English in Japan, then moved to San Francisco to try to be a writer while supporting himself by giving tennis lessons. He was also a freelance journalist and a proofreader for Harper's Magazine. In 1994, Blodget joined the corporate finance training program at Prudential Securities, and, two years later, moved to Oppenheimer & Co. in equity research. In October 1998 he predicted that Amazon, then trading at $240, would trade for $400 within a year. This was thought highly unlikely by many traders at the time; however, just three weeks later Amazon's stock passed that mark. This call received significant media attention. Two months later, he accepted a position at Merrill Lynch, and frequently appeared on CNBC and other similar shows. In early 2000, days before the dot-com bubble burst, Blodget personally invested $700,000 in tech stocks, only to lose most of it in the years that followed. In 2001, he accepted a buyout offer from Merrill Lynch and left the firm.
Fraud allegation and settlement
In 2002, then New York State Attorney GeneralEliot Spitzer published Merrill Lynch e-mails in which Blodget gave assessments about stocks which conflicted with what was publicly published. In 2003, he was charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement.
Writing
He became the CEO, co-Founder, and editor-in-chief of Silicon Alley Insider, where he was a frequent contributor to the Seeking Alpha website. Prior to co-founding Silicon Alley Insider, Blodget served as CEO of Cherry Hill Research, a research and consulting firm, and contributed to Slate, Newsweek International, The New York Times, Fortune, Forbes Online, Business 2.0, Euromoney, New York, The Financial Times, and other publications. As of 2017, he is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, a news website. He is a frequent contributor to the magazines Slate, Newsweek, and New York magazine. Blodget's later articles for the magazine have focused on the return-limiting actions of individual investors, including listening to analysts and the financial media, and relying on active management such as mutual and hedge funds. His Slate articles about investing carry a seven-paragraph disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. He published The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual: A Consumer's Guide to Intelligent Investing in January 2007. He currently lives in Brooklyn.
