Stephen A. Cohen has always been interested in baseball.

In 2012, the hedge fund manager purchased a small stake in the New York Mets,

and in a separate transaction, he nearly bought the Los Angeles Dodgers.

But ever since he was young, Cohen has been more interested in something else.

He really wanted to be rich, and he thought he was

smarter than everyone else. That's Sheila Cole Hatcar. She's a staff writer for the New Yorker,

and the author of a book about how Steve Cohen became one of the richest men on Wall Street.

You know, he didn't seem like someone who agonized about what he was going to do with his life or what his calling was or what gift he had for the world.

He just wanted to go out and make a lot of money.

Cohen founded his own investment firm in 1992 with around $23 million in seed money.

He called it SAC Capital Advisors in honor of his own initials.

And he didn't just hire Wall Street

regulars to work for him.

Dozens of Ivy League educated, mostly young men, computer programmers, people with MBAs,

people with PhDs and microbiology, and they spend their days trying to figure out what a company's earnings report is going to say within a penny.

As Cole Hatcar learned, Cohen's firm wasn't exactly a friendly place.

The first time I interviewed someone who had worked for him there, this gentleman told me that every Sunday night he would cry about the thought of going back to the office the next day.

It was a very intense, high-pressure sink or swim environment.

Those who swam were richly rewarded, even by Wall Street standards.

By the mid-2000, some of Cohen's top employees earned $100 million a year.

Some years, Cohen himself reportedly took home more than a billion dollars.

And Cohen's spending habits became as legendary as his earnings.

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