Simon obtained the 1990 Forbes 400 data the day before the new issue of Forbes was released on September 2.
The next day was Monday, September 3. When the new issue officially hit stands, a large wave of North American media outlets, all closely watching this year's list, published related reports almost in unison. Clearly, they'd received the information in advance as well.
Twenty one billion dollars.
That was the personal net worth Forbes published for Simon on the 1990 Forbes 400.
First place, without suspense.
And Simon became the first person on the Forbes 400 to break ten billion in personal net worth. Sam Walton, who had once been expected to claim that title, had already distributed Walmart shares among his children.
After Simon, the number two spot this year was still last year's runner up, John Kluge, but his net worth had dropped straight down to 5.6 billion, miles behind Simon.
After that.
Third place: Warren Buffett, 3.3 billion.
Fourth: Ronald Perelman, 2.87 billion.
Fifth: Henry Hillman, 2.65 billion.
Outside the top five, places six through nine were a long tie: sisters Barbara Cox Anthony and Anne Cox Chambers, and brothers Samuel Newhouse and Donald Newhouse, all at 2.6 billion.
Places ten through seventeen were another extended tie: Sam Walton and his four children, who controlled the Walton family interests, the two brothers of the Pritzker family, who controlled the famous Hyatt hotel group, and finally Microsoft founder Bill Gates. All eight sat at 2.5 billion.
Hit by the recession triggered by America's debt crisis, this year's list saw massive reshuffling. Many fortunes shrank sharply. Three people who'd ranked high last year, Sumner Redstone, Ted Arison, and Ross Perot, fell straight out of the top ten.
A recession crushing the rich should have been one of the list's biggest storylines, yet once the new ranking was released, nearly every media outlet's attention was seized by one name that left everyone else in the dust.
Simon's 21 billion net worth had more than tripled from last year's 6 billion.
Yet after Forbes laid out and analyzed Simon's assets in detail, the 21 billion figure drew far less controversy than last year.
Among Simon's holdings, the most watched this year was the mountain of cash he'd piled up through Cersei Capital, first from Japan's financial markets, then from crude oil futures.
At the start of the year, the disclosed figure was already 4.5 billion. After the first half's oil futures trade, Forbes estimated Simon's overseas cash holdings at around 8 billion. That one line item alone exceeded his entire 6 billion net worth from last year.
Next, Forbes valued Daenerys Entertainment at 8 to 10 billion.
To avoid another round of valuation disputes like last year, Forbes claimed it had invited multiple Wall Street finance and accounting teams to participate, and ultimately arrived at the 8 to 10 billion range.
Was Daenerys Entertainment really worth that much?
To answer that question, Forbes published Daenerys Entertainment's financial statement for the first half of 1990. Just two quarters of after tax net profit totaling 573 million was already higher than any of the Hollywood Big Seven.
And with downstream revenue from videotape, television, and merchandise off the back of its blockbuster slate, as long as the next few years didn't bring catastrophic project failures, Daenerys Entertainment could maintain annual net profit on the order of one billion for the next two to three years.
Compared against Fortune magazine's first half list of America's 400 largest companies, among firms with net profit around one billion, the lowest market cap was Boeing at 15.6 billion. Two other consumer goods giants with similar profit levels, Procter and Gamble and Johnson and Johnson, sat at 21.8 billion and 18.6 billion respectively.
So by profit, an 8 to 10 billion valuation for Daenerys Entertainment was unquestionably conservative.
At the same time, Daenerys Entertainment held three film labels with large hit pipelines, Daenerys Television, a 35% stake in Blockbuster, Blizzard, a 35% stake in EA, Marvel Entertainment with its potential gold mine, rights to the DC film universe, and more. These concrete assets were more than enough to support a massive valuation.
Clearly, just Simon's cash holdings and Daenerys Entertainment alone already nearly added up to the net worth number Forbes published.
Beyond that, Westeros Company held a broad portfolio of listed and unlisted assets.
Of the publicly traded tech stocks bought during the 1987 crash, nineteen companies were still held, with a combined market cap exceeding 26 billion.
Among them, the two largest positions were Microsoft and Intel, with market caps of 6.3 billion and 7.6 billion. Just a 20% stake in Microsoft and a 15% stake in Intel brought Simon more than 2.5 billion in wealth.
Other holdings like Sun, Oracle, AMD, Silicon Graphics, Adobe, Autodesk, and more also carried about a billion in value for Westeros's stake.
All together, the nineteen listed tech stocks contributed about 3.5 billion to Simon's personal wealth.
In addition, unlisted Cisco, America Online, Ygritte, and others, plus overseas Nokia and the non tech Melisandre Company, even counting only Westeros's equity portions, were worth another 1.5 to 2 billion.
And in Simon's personal assets this year, there was also Cersei Capital itself.
This large private equity fund, which had officially based its headquarters in New York at the start of the year, had already earned huge industry respect from just its Japan trade and crude futures trade. Even with the most conservative valuation, it wouldn't be worth less than one billion.
Finally, there were Simon's personal real estate and land holdings, estimated at another 500 million.
Add everything up, subtract the Westeros system's less than 1.5 billion in debt, and Simon's assets landed somewhere between 21 and 23.5 billion. Forbes had simply taken the low end of that range.
But even that conservative 21 billion created a series of never before seen records.
Not only was Simon the first American with personal net worth over ten billion, but on the 1990 global rich list that Forbes would release next, he was destined to surpass Japan's real estate magnate Yoshiaki Tsutsumi and become the world's richest person.
The general public could only react to Simon's net worth number on the Forbes list with envy, awe, resentment, skepticism, or fantasies about what 21 billion dollars could possibly buy. But America's capital markets gave a very direct response the moment the list went public.
Publicly traded companies connected to the Westeros system, whether tech stocks like Microsoft and Intel, or other industries like Blockbuster and EA, all saw noticeable gains over the following week.
The famous "Westeros portfolio" from back then was frequently brought up by the media again.
Then, riding the wave of Simon's new record net worth, Oracle hurriedly released its quarterly report on September 6.
For the fiscal quarter from June to August 1990, Oracle reported revenue of 207 million and a loss of 36 million.
In the report, Oracle frankly admitted that its aggressive expansion strategy over the past two years, along with flawed sales methods, were the main causes of the loss. It said it would make major adjustments. Several executives in charge of sales would resign, and the company would carry out a large layoff of roughly four hundred people to reduce operating costs.
Not only that, in a handwritten letter to shareholders included with the report, Larry Ellison confidently declared everything was under control, and he specifically highlighted Westeros Company's recent share increase.
Without Westeros's buying, a massive quarterly loss of 36 million, plus Oracle only now finally admitting its strategic missteps, would have made countless furious shareholders want to grind Larry Ellison into the floor.
Yet the reality was that after Oracle released its quarter on Thursday, September 6, the stock didn't crash as analysts predicted over Thursday and Friday. It didn't surge either, but daily trading volume fell eighty percent compared to before the report.
Plainly, many shareholders stopped dumping Oracle shares rashly and chose to wait and see.
Some Oracle shareholders who could get in contact with the Westeros system even tried every possible way to find out Simon's real stance toward Oracle.
That Saturday, Oracle released another announcement. Besides Westeros Company president James Rebould, Carol Bartz, president of Westeros owned Ygritte, would also join Oracle's board. Shortly after, Westeros issued an official statement supporting Oracle's current chairman and CEO Larry Ellison to continue managing the company, and also stating that Westeros would keep holding Oracle shares long term.
Westeros's endorsement calmed the shareholders who'd lost patience over the past year as Oracle stock fell seventy percent. Some were still unhappy with Ellison, but they also understood that with Westeros and Ellison together, the chance of replacing current management was slim.
Still, dissenting voices existed.
The Wall Street Journal argued that Simon's continued buying of Oracle stock, and his support of a management team that had made serious operational mistakes, was foolish. If Westeros had sold at Oracle's peak last year, compared to its recent investment costs, Simon could have realized over a five hundred percent return.
And even if he insisted on holding the company, replacing current management was necessary.
The Journal even used Apple as an example.
After ousting founder Steve Jobs, whose unrealistic Macintosh project had once brought huge losses, Apple's revenue and profit had risen steadily in recent years. Even with the federal market sliding due to the war, Apple's market cap still exceeded six billion.
Simon could roughly guess the purpose of that article wasn't so pure.
Rumors about Oracle's internal problems had been circulating for a long time. Many Wall Street shorts had been betting against Oracle ahead of the quarterly release.
Now, because Simon backed the company, Oracle's stock didn't crash after the report as expected. It even rebounded somewhat. Those short sellers, naturally, weren't going to accept that quietly.
Aside from Oracle, starting with the September 3 release of Forbes, all kinds of invitations flooded toward Simon like a tide. Media attention locked onto him again, and his every move became headline material once more.
To keep the planned dual track acquisition from leaking too early, Simon had to shake off a swarm of chasing reporters and fly from New York to Chicago. Home Alone had already been completed. He could've had a cut sent to Los Angeles, but he still flew to Chicago to watch it personally, and to get some peace.
After watching the Home Alone cut and discussing some fine edits with John Hughes, Simon ditched another wave of reporters who caught wind and flew south to New Mexico to visit the Terminator 2 set.
Even after setting strict ground rules in advance, once Terminator 2 officially began filming, Cameron behaved for only a short while before his old habits returned.
After checking the production progress, Simon no longer had any expectations that Cameron would finish Terminator 2 within budget. Fortunately, after the failure of The Abyss, Cameron had at least restrained himself somewhat. Based on the producer's private estimate, the project should finish under seventy million.
Given Terminator 2's box office potential, seventy million, though twenty million over budget, was still within what Simon could tolerate. After leaving the Terminator 2 set, Simon even made another stop on the East Coast in North Carolina to visit the The Fugitive crew.
After looping across the U.S. like that, it seemed the media finally realized how costly it was to tail Simon Westeros. At last, things around him quieted down.
On Saturday, September 8, Simon quietly returned to New York.
Even though reporters couldn't track him in person, news about him never stopped.
Over this week, it wasn't just Oracle. Media stories about Simon's 21 billion net worth, what he was doing, what he might do next, popped up endlessly. On the day he returned to New York, aside from Oracle's board changes, the West Coast's The Hollywood Reporter suddenly broke news that Daenerys Entertainment was planning to acquire MCA.
Because it was Saturday, the impact couldn't immediately show up in MCA's stock price, but it wasn't something they could ignore.
And during the same week, controversy over Simon's 21 billion net worth flooded in from every direction.
No matter what, a twenty two year old young man surpassing countless entrenched old money dynasties in just a few years was simply too shocking. Even in countries that were extremely open about private wealth, it was still almost unbelievable.