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GOLDSEA 100
No. 1: Charles Wang
Computer Associates
all him Genghis Wang, the software conqueror. Charles Wang's $4.8 billion-a-year Computer Associates -- with its awesome $25-billion market cap -- isn't the lifework of a patient farmer. It embodies 19 years of breakneck conquests of software rivals. Wang is no longer CEO and Computer Associates is no longer one of the world's leading software companies, but that doesn't change Wang's entrepreneurial feat in building it from two-man startup into a global software giant.
CA's origins in 1980 established its modus operandi for the next two decades. Rather than starting from scratch, Wang and a fellow employee named Russell Artzt -- now CA's EVP for R&D -- bought out a languishing piece of their employer's business which provided programming services to companies using IBM mainframes. CA's first product was a disc-operating system licensed from a Swiss company. His hard-edged Bronx-Jew accent delivered with the energy of a killer used-car salesman made Wang a natural to handle sales and client relations while Artzt took care of the technical end.
"I could write code," recalls Wang, "but I knew that wasn't my strength."
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The duo built a software company around hulking data-processing mainframes while, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a pair of nerds named Bill Gates and Paul Allen were struggling to write compilers for the practically useless microcomputers then being built around feeble first-generation processors. In those days the smart money would have been on Wang's team to emerge as the software kings.
As it turned out, Gates tenaciously and skillfully rode the PC boom to build the world's biggest software company while, despite frantic acquisitions, CA now finds itself number three behind Microsoft ($14.5 billion) and Oracle ($7.5 billion). The nearly two dozen companies that have fallen to Wang's conquering sword have cost him all but five percent of CA's stock. (By contrast, Gates retains almost 20% of his baby, even after a $3.5 billion stock giveaway to charity in February, 1999.)
Nevertheless his killer instincts and dominating style give Wang unquestioned control over every corner of the CA empire. Until recently, his older brother Tony, an ivy-league lawyer, served as COO. In May of 1998 Wang raised eyebrows when he exercised stock options that let him pocket a cool $700 million. Share prices took a tumble soon thereafter but have since recovered. CA now has 12,000 employees around the world. It generated a spectacular $1.2 billion net income for 1998, twice that of rival Oracle.
Charles Wang was born in 1944 in Shanghai where his father was a justice of the Supreme Court. The family moved to New York when Charles was 8. His first part-time job was sorting mail at a local post office. Graduating from Queens College in 1967, he picked a career out of the classifieds. "There were two and a half pages of programmer ads," he recalls. "So I told my mother, 'I think I'm going to be a programmer.' She says, 'What's that?' I said, 'I don't know, Mom, but boy, do they need 'em!'"
Wang has an adult daughter by his first wife whom he divorced about a decade ago. He remarried six years ago. His new family's primary spread is a spectacular Long Island estate which Wang leaves behind about half the year spreading his infectious energy throughout a farflung empire now spanning two dozen countries on five continents. His favorite pasttime remains pickup basketball games with old cohorts like Russ Artzt and big brother Tony.
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