Meet the self-made billionaire who bought a nearly bankrupt company off Warren Buffett for $1,000 and turned it into a $85 billion giant

Jeffrey Sprecher, founder and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), says he built the company with a $1,000 investment after buying a nearly bankrupt power trading business from Warren Buffett’s circle for $1 a share. Sprecher had the idea to trade electric power on an exchange but “had no idea how to do that,” recalling he had never worked on Wall Street or traded. In the late 1990s, he bought Continental Power Exchange as it struggled despite $35 million in support from MidAmerican Energy. ICE launched in 1997, later grew to more than 12,000 employees, and now has a market cap of $85 billion after owning the NYSE for over a decade.