Let Jason Barron, head of financing services at UBS, be a warning to anyone in banking (or elsewhere) who thinks that they can present themselves in a foolish way online and that the incident won’t stay with them forever.
When you search for Barron’s name on Google, several options come up:
The second option – ‘Jason Barron Ferrari’ – is the issue.
Jason Barron loves his Ferrari
Back in 2008, when it was acceptable to be a high-earning, high-spending, high-maintenance banker with a taste for fast cars and orange designer furniture, Barron gave a fateful interview to the Telegraph. This was the headline, and the photograph:
More dubious, however, than having an unnecessary photograph of your angelic young daughters next to your beloved car in a national paper, is the accompanying text, which reads like a parody of a banker lifestyle but clearly isn’t.
In it, we learn:
- That Barron so loves his car, that ‘he created a glass wall between the garage and the house so he could gaze at it any time of the day or night.’
- That Barron had the special car resprayed orange to match his sofa and that now a lot of things in his house are orange to match the sofa and the car. The kitchen chairs, ‘are cream and orange; the children’s plastic chairs are orange and even their wooden toy bricks are orange’.
- That Barron is very rich. – He doesn’t only have a Ferrari, he also has ‘a BMW M3, yellow Lancia Delta Integrale and a green Porsche GT3RS’. He doesn’t just have furniture, he has furniture from Purves & Purves. He doesn’t just have kitchen chairs, he has kitchen chairs ‘shipped from New York.’ He doesn’t just have a kitchen, he has, ‘white gloss wall cupboards and dark wood floor cupboards – both by Pedini.’
The lavish tone may have something to do with the Telegraph’s journalist, who is clearly in awe of Barron’s wealth. It may also have something to do with Barron’s attempt to sell his house through the article. In the current more sombre environment, however, the piece leaves Barron looking out of touch and out of place. Shame it’s still visible nearly six years later.
Related articles:
Six reasons why you might leave UBS’s thriving equities business
Did this upstart just poach the head of UBS’s equities business?
Why do so many super groomed men work for UBS?
The post The sorry tale of the senior UBS equities banker and the orange Ferrari appeared first on eFinancialCareers.