Billionaire money manager Ken Fisher has been banned from future Tiburon CEO Summits for his sexually charged remarks Tuesday during a fireside chat in San Francisco. In the past, Fisher had been a fixture at many of the Tiburon conferences.
Chip Roame, a Tiburon managing partner who moderated Fisher’s talk, took to the stage Wednesday at 7:45 a.m., before the start of the final day of the three-day conference and made the announcement. “The speaker who made these remarks will not ever be invited back to a Tiburon CEO Summit.”
“I was extremely disappointed by the comments that I heard in the way that I understood them. I can, in no way, condone or find acceptable what I heard in the way that I understood its intent. These comments lacked the dignity and respect that should be expected by any Tiburon CEO Summit speaker or attendee. These were unacceptable words at Tiburon, in the wealth and investments industry and in society generally,” Roame said in a statement.
Speaking on how he built his company, Fisher, whose firm manages more than $100 billion, compared the process of gaining a client’s trust to “trying to get into a girl’s pants,” said Rachel Robasciotti, a founder of wealth manager Robasciotti & Philipson.
"I was floored,” said Robasciotti, an attendee at the Tiburon event, in an interview with Bloomberg News. “For me and some of the women sitting nearby, we were kind of in shock. We were like: ‘Wait, did that really just happen?’”
She added that Fisher also said that executives who are not comfortable talking about genitalia should not be in the financial industry. And he made a reference to dropping acid and also likened his employees to cattle who need to be branded.
Roame pointed out that Fisher’s comments further the inclusion problem in the wealth and investment management industry.
“And on a related note, I am disgusted to be included in phrases referring to old boys clubs. Tiburon is the opposite. I have worked tirelessly to try to find women speakers and encourage women attendees at the Tiburon CEO Summits. Given that we target CEO attendees, finding title-qualified women (and minorities by the way) is a tremendous challenge in the wealth and investment management industry. We work endless hours every six months on this same issue,” he said.
For his part, Fisher told Bloomberg that he was surprised by how people reacted.
“I have given a lot of talks, a lot of times, in a lot of places and said stuff like this and never gotten that type of response,” Fisher said, adding he thought his comments were taken out of context. “Mostly the audience understands what I am saying.”