About Stanley O’Neal

Stanley O'Neal is an American business executive who was formerly chairman and chief executive of Merrill Lynch having served in numerous senior management positions at the company prior to this appointment. O'Neal was criticized for his performance during his tenure as chief executive at Merrill Lynch, where he oversaw the deterioration of the firm's stability and capital position, which resulted in his ouster in September 2007, and the firm's eventual fire sale to Bank of America one year later. Prior to his tenure as chairman and CEO, Merrill Lynch had thrived as a stand-alone company since 1914. In 2002, O'Neal was named the “Most Powerful Black Executive in America” by Fortune magazine. Stanley O'Neal was a member of the board of directors of General Motors from 2001 through 2006. He also served on the board of Alcoa. Born into poverty in Roanoke, Alabama, Earnest Stanley O’Neal was the grandson of a former slave. He was the eldest child of Earnest O’Neal, a farmer, and Ann Scales, a domestic. In the first years of his life, O'Neal was surrounded by his extended family on his grandfather's farm, "picking cotton and corn in his grandfather’s fields." Stanley O'Neal also sold and delivered newspapers. Their family fortunes improved when Stanley's father landed a job at the General Motors (GM) factory. Stanley O'Neal's father moved his family from Wedowee, Alabama, to Atlanta, where he worked on a General Motors assembly line. Stan O'Neal also worked briefly on GM's assembly line as a teenager under a work-study program offered by the General Motors Institute (later known as Kettering University), where he gained a degree in industrial administration in 1974. GM later provided O'Neal a scholarship to attend Harvard Business School, where he attained his MBA in 1978 and later rejoined GM as a Treasury Analyst.