His idea was briefly the height of corporate fashion.
"It's the height of corporate moxie," said Michael Feinstein, an environmental activist who is the mayor of Santa Monica.
But a return to past glories looks far-fetched.The biggest fear on Wall Street is that finance, which accounted for a staggering 40% of corporate profits at the height of the credit bubble, faces decades of relative decline.
Being powerful and visionary, or at least thinking one is, can lead a corporate chieftain to great heights, but also to extreme narcissism.
Then there's the paradox of corporate earnings reaching new heights while the American job market is sluggish if not on stall, poverty is rising, food stamp use is at an all-time high, homelessness is increasing and home foreclosures continue to bring misery to vast numbers of Americans.
Brokers say that none of the parallels to the World Trade Center -- corporate symbol, twin towers, unusual height -- seem to be giving buyers pause.
In Devon, several companies that provide excursions aimed at the corporate market have set a height limit on jumps of seven metres, about 23 feet.
Indeed, the boffins at Goldman Sachs now reckon it is at its lowest for more than three years.Of course, there are good reasons why the markets' fears of price swings in general might be smaller now than in late 2002, when, among other things, fears about the fragility of corporate America were at their height.
Around 1988, when U.S. corporate restructuring was at its height, German companies began to invest abroad (see chart).
At the height of my corporate life, someone asked me "Aren't you just too busy to live?" Me, too busy to live?
