This essay originally published in the Sunday, July 7, 2024 edition of the Fortune Archives newsletter.
Sallie Krawcheck still has the gold earrings she wore on the cover of Fortune magazine 22 years ago. On a June 2002 cover, the Wall Street veteran was labeled one of the “last honest analysts,” with a photo that she now deems “weirdly up close” on her face.
Only 35 when she took the reins as CEO and chairman of the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein, Krawcheck went on to high-level roles at Fortune 500 giants Citigroup and Bank of America. She now boasts $2 billion in assets under management at Ellevest, an investment platform and financial literacy program primarily for women that she cofounded. And she graced the cover of Fortune not once but twice.
Now 59, Krawcheck flips through the 2002 magazine at Fortune’s New York City headquarters, reminiscing about that “watershed moment” in a recent video interview with me (above).
In 2002, Fortune reporter David Rynecki described Krawcheck as honest in contrast to other analysts with conflicts of interest, who were recently revealed to have hyped stocks publicly while privately trashing them. And Krawcheck herself appeared similarly skeptical of her peers: “How do you know when management is lying?” she quizzed Rynecki, before delivering the punch line: “Their lips are moving.”
Under her leadership, Bernstein survived the dotcom bubble burst of 2000. That was in part thanks to a controversial decision she made years prior as a Bernstein research director: shuttering the firm’s money-making investment banking business. While others had lamented the move, the lack of exposure eventually protected Bernstein as stocks fell and other investing giants suffered.
Some of her naysayers sniped anonymously to Rynecki for the next article that brought Krawcheck to Fortune’s cover, in June 2003. This one, seven months into Krawcheck’s tenure as CEO of the Citigroup-owned brokerage firm Smith Barney, asked “Can Sallie save Citi?” and also, rather pointedly, “Is she up to the job?”
Krawcheck’s own analysts told the Fortune writer that the challenge of rescuing the company’s wealth management business might prove to be “over her head.” And one “well-regarded” CEO of a large financial services company said, “Smith Barney is a massive management job, and I don’t know if she can handle it. It’s almost unfair.”
“Obviously I was doing my best to turn it around, but I was part of a team,” Krawcheck muses as she flips through the 2003 magazine. “I wasn’t the CEO at the time.”
Krawcheck went on to become CFO, and then to lead wealth management, at Citi—but was abruptly ousted in 2008 after she clashed with a new Citigroup CEO, Vikram Pandit. She later said she was fired “because I was a woman.” Still, she went on to other high-profile roles, and has solidified her legacy as a trailblazing woman in the leadership ranks of Wall Street’s titans.
While that second Fortune cover story was perhaps more “snarky” than she would have liked, Krawcheck now shrugs it off with another quip: “The picture is cute.”
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