Merrill Lynch's celebrated CEO for nearly six years, ending in 2007, he guided the firm from its familiar turf - fee businesses like asset management - into the lucrative game of creating collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which were largely made of subprime mortgage bonds. Beating the Hedge Funds at their own game was a challenge but O'Neal found a way to do it.

To provide a steady supply of the bonds -- the raw pork for his booming sausage business -- O'Neal allowed Merrill to load up on the bonds and keep them on its books, instead of selling them on to the Hedge Funds as was the common practice. By June 2006, Merrill had amassed $41 billion in subprime CDOs and mortgage bonds, according to Fortune. As the subprime market unwound, Merrill went into crisis, and Bank of America swooped in to buy it.