By 2008, however, the word “modest” was seldom used in connection with AIG. In only a few decades it had grown into one of the world’s largest financial companies, with a market value of just under $80 billion (even after a steep slide in its share price earlier that year) and more than $1 trillion worth of assets on its books. That phenomenal expansion was primarily the result of the cunning and drive of one man: Maurice Raymond Greenberg, known to friends as “Hank,” after the Detroit Tigers slugger Hank Greenberg, and referred to within the company simply as “MRG.”
