When the news broke last week that Bill Gross was leaving fixed-income giant PIMCO to join Janus Capital, I couldn’t help but think of Derek Jeter. Less than 12 hours earlier, the future Hall of Fame shortstop had delivered the game-winning hit in his final appearance at Yankee Stadium. Jeter’s walk-off single in the ninth inning provided a Disney ending to the storybook career of the Yankee captain, who finished with 3,465 regular-season hits, five World Series championship rings and a totally unblemished reputation — a rarity among professional athletes these days.
The events leading up to Gross’s abrupt departure from PIMCO read like a Quentin Tarantino screenplay. As manager of the world’s largest bond fund, the $221.6 billion PIMCO Total Return Fund, Gross consistently outperformed his peers for decades. But the Bond King struggled in the past couple of years thanks in part to an ill-timed bet on Treasuries, and investors began pulling their money. In January, Gross was reportedly surprised — and hurt — when PIMCO CEO and co-CIO Mohamed El-Erian resigned after openly disagreeing with Gross over how to run the firm. Several months later, during his keynote speech at the annual Morningstar conference in Chicago, Gross took the stage wearing dark sunglasses and compared himself to George Patton, Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian. To be fair, Gross was at least half joking, but the image could not have sat well with the management of German insurer Allianz, which owns Newport Beach, California–based PIMCO.
In fact, Allianz had been attempting to orchestrate a Jeter-like send-off for Gross, according to bond manager Jeff Gundlach, who in 2009 started his own firm, DoubleLine Capital, after being fired from his previous job. “They wanted him to resign and say something like, ‘I’m leaving in six months,’” Gundlach told the New York Times. “Bill didn’t want to do that.”
I’m not surprised. Like Jeter, Gross is driven by a love of the game — in his case, any game. “I’m obsessively game-oriented,” he told me in 2011, when Institutional Investor awarded him a Money Management Lifetime Achievement Award, explaining why at 66 he had no interest in retiring. “It’s not a problem — it’s just a driver.”
At Janus, historically an equity shop, Gross will be managing the firm’s recently launched unconstrained bond fund and working with its investment team on global asset allocation. When he finally decides to retire, I hope he does it as gracefully as Derek Jeter did.
