Turn the clock back six months. In New York, London and Zurich the name on everyone's lips was Mary Meeker of Morgan. Internet stocks were on the boil. The undisputed queen of the internet was Mary Meeker. Here was the young woman who could claim to have picked more than half a dozen 'ten-baggers' - shares which rose by more than 1,000% - since her initial recommendation. Her influence was such that, in the bars on Wall Street and executive dining rooms of corporate America, the message was that Mary could wipe tens of billions off internet stocks overnight if she simply pulled her 'buy' recommendation on Amazon.com. The height of Meeker's fame was probably last November when she was listed by Fortune magazine as 'the third most powerful woman in American business'.
In those heady days Meeker could do no wrong. When it was reported that her 1999 earnings from Morgan Stanley would reach $15m (󌌿.75m), the immediate reaction was that she was being short-changed. However, if she had invested just $100,000 of her own money in each of her 'ten-bagger' stocks, it was easy to calculate that Meeker would never be found in a social security queue.
