E dward "Eddie" Lampert is an American billionaire hedge fund manager who is the founder, chairman, and CEO of the investment firm ESL Investments. He gained fame and a massive fortune in the early 2000s for his highly concentrated, value-based investment strategy, which earned him comparisons to a young Warren Buffett. He began his career at Goldman Sachs before starting his own fund in 1988.

His reputation was cemented by his highly successful investments in companies like AutoZone and AutoNation. However, he is now best known for his ill-fated and disastrous attempt to turn around the iconic American retailers Sears and Kmart. In 2004, he engineered the merger of the two struggling chains to form Sears Holdings and became its chairman, CEO, and largest shareholder. Despite his efforts to implement his investment principles, he was unable to reverse the retailers' decline, and the company eventually collapsed into a protracted and contentious bankruptcy, a process that severely damaged his reputation as a great investor.