The Rise and Fall of the Conglomerate Kings is the behind-the-scenes story of the financial wizards and bare-knuckled businessmen who created the conglomerates, the glamorous multiform companies that marked the high noon of post-World War II American capitalism. Covering the period from the end of the war to 1983, Robert Sobel explains why and how the conglomerate movement originated, how it mushroomed, and what caused its startling and rapid decline. He chronicles how the era gave rise to a cadre of imaginative, bold, and often ruthless entrepreneurs who took advantage of a buoyant stock market to create giant enterprises, often through the exchange of overvalued paper for real assets. This authoritative and unprecedented books sheds light on the careers of the leading "conglomerateurs": Royal Little of Textron, Tex Thornton of Litton, James Ling of LTV, Charles Bluhdom of Gulf + Western and Harold Geneen of ITT. This is the behind-the-scenes story of the financial wizards and bare-knuckled businessmen who created the conglomerates, the glamorous multi-form companies that marked the high noon of post-World War II American capitalism. Covering the period from the end of the war to 1983, Robert Sobel explains why and how the conglomerate movement originated, how it mushroomed, and what caused its startling and rapid decline.