The New York Times ran a great story on Tuesday about former AIG chief Maurice Greenberg’s latest venture, the C.V. Starr empire. Reporter Mary Williams Walsh links Greenberg’s new success to the Treasury Department capping executive pay at AIG last week: “That may hasten the exodus of A.I.G.’s talent, sending more refugees into Mr. Greenberg’s arms, since C. V. Starr is free to pay whatever it wants.”
Cornelius Vander Starr, a California-born entrepreneur, was the first American businessperson to sell insurance to the Chinese. The blanket company C.V. Starr International was established in 1919 in Shanghai and AIG would eventually grow out of it. Starr would eventually give Maurice Greenberg his first job in the insurance industry at AIG in 1962. Starr became Greenberg’s mentor and was handed the company after Starr died in 1968. After President Nixon opened up relations with China, Greenberg visited China for the first time in 1975. He would run AIG until 2005, when he resigned amid fraud allegations. Good thing he had the Starr empire to fall back on.
