Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

wasn’t worth it? A half dozen times easily, over five
decades, Bowie’s faith in the sheer beauty of some
thought changed the world. In the fall of 1996, a thirtyfour-year-old
Wharton-educated Wall Street trader
and investment banker named David Pullman had
an idea: why couldn’t someone invest in securitized
intellectual property? Anything that accrues royalties
has value. Why can’t you issue a bond against the
future earnings of a book or a film or a song, as you
would a painting or a classic car? “John Steinbeck is
ideal,” says Pullman. “Every seventh-grader in
America is reading it.”
At the time, Bowie’s business managers were
looking into their options as far as generating money
off of Bowie’s back catalog. Bowie owned his
master tapes and his publishing and had the option
of buying out Tony Defries’s share of the generated
royalties, provided he could get a large infusion of
cash. “The business manager was trying to sell
David’s catalog,” says Pullman today. “He
mentioned it to me. ‘You’re on Wall Street. What can
you do for this?’ They realized David wasn’t going to
sell his catalog. His songs were his babies. So they
said, ‘Can you help him?’ I asked them what they
were earning. They were earning millions of dollars a
year. A significant number. Sounded good to me. I
asked him if the numbers were audited. They said
yes. Are they audited by a big six accounting firm?
And he said yes. I asked him if he had three years’
worth of history. He had five years’ worth of history.
To which I said, ‘I can securitize that.’ He said,