Formula 1: The GOAT

”We are still tallying our accounts and settling all our credits before we have our final accounting of the total amount, but this is the ballpark of what our total earnings from this round are,” Gabriel, the Chief Investment Officer of the family office, said as he turned the laptop he had carried into the office and slid it toward Rümeysa.

It was March 17th, a day after they finally finished exiting all the short positions and bets that the market would go down, securing the previously hypothetical gains ahead of time. This was despite the market still falling even further; had they remained, they could have earned more money.

However, despite that, no one in the family office or the SPV who was in the know about their investments felt even a smidge of regret. They knew that gains are just hypothetical until they are realized and could disappear in a moment.

They all knew the best time to sell is when everyone is hungry to buy what you have, not at the peak. Waiting for the peak to sell means there are only a few people willing to buy at that price, and you might be the cause of the subsequent fall, losing more money than if you had sold while things were still going up.

”Are you sure?” Rüme-ysa asked after looking at the spreadsheet in front of her, detailing in rounded-off numbers how much each Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) had earned. It wasn’t the accurate accounting to the last decimal place because some accounting was still underway, and verifications were needed before the final number could be given.

”Yes, this is with us undercounting it for possible mistakes or things we might have missed,” Gabriel said with confidence in his voice.

Rümeysa trusted Gabriel. She had specifically recruited him due to the many technical and character aspects he had shown during the investigation she had run on him before recruiting him. She needed to do it because the position was that important, acting as the connecting point of control between the family office and the SPVs.

But despite that trust, she found herself having a hard time believing what she was seeing: 35 billion dollars. That was how much they had earned from their heavily leveraged ten-billion-dollar gamble that, had it failed, would have put them tens of billions of dollars in debt.

When she saw the number, she immediately forgot all the stress she had gone through for the past three months. She now even looked at the weight loss due to that stress as a free diet plan, as she was fully experiencing the relief of forgetting the difficult time she went through due to this bet that had now paid off massively.

”35 billion dollars,” she said, trying to make herself come to terms with the fact. She was still having a hard time accepting reality; after all, it was only written on a spreadsheet and not the full cash equivalent.

”Had we been more aggressive, we could have earned about twenty percent more, but since you wanted to keep things under wraps to avoid any possible future legal problems, this is the final amount. We need your go-ahead to reinvest it to defer the taxes,” Gabriel said.

Fatih’s investment document had gone very in-depth on how the market crash would affect certain sectors, but it hadn’t stopped there. It also highlighted that this fall was not going to go on forever, so while the market was down, it was the best time to put the large amount of cash they now had to use.

”Go ahead with it,” Rümeysa said, giving her green light. She had already read everything in that document more than fifty times, to the point she had memorized it, as she kept going back to it to reassure herself that her decision hadn’t just erased all of the fortune her son had worked hard to create and put them all into generational debt.

”We will have everything ready within three days,” Gabriel said as he reached for the laptop she had slid to Rümeysa.

”That fast?” she asked, quite surprised that 35 billion was going to be invested within just three days.

”The programs have already been set ahead of time and are awaiting the go signal. Our bank relationship has improved thanks to our previous trades, so the Total Default Swap agreements are going to be granted even faster, with even more leverage,” Gabriel said, but inside, he had always been wondering if he had been living in a dream.

Although there were people who had made fortunes in past crashes, this was the first time he was bearing witness to someone amassing this level of wealth within just three months, and it was not the end. They were now going to be betting on the opposite: that the market, currently falling like there’s no tomorrow, is going to rise. This time, unlike the previous one, where the investment was only about 10 billion dollars with leverage included, they were going to use the 35 billion dollars along with leverage, a second all-in bet which, if it worked, would dwarf their current earnings.

He was watching with his own eyes how a family that had less than a billion dollars at the start of the year could 30x it in three months and then bet even more to try and multiply the already multiplied wealth.

”Is there anything else on my schedule for the day?” Rümeysa pressed the intercom and asked her secretary.

”There is none at the moment.”

”Good,” she said before she picked up her handbag and left her office, clocking off from work. She needed to go and have a conversation with her son to update him on how things were going. Since he was the one who had caused all of this, he needed to be in the know and celebrate with her.

As she waited for the elevator to take her to the basement, she wondered again about what her son would have been if he had not been obsessed with motorsport, considering all the things he had managed to do as side tasks when he was still fifteen years old.