Ravi Desai is an American executive and

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

graduate accused by various companies, most notably

TheStreet.com ''TheStreet'' is a financial news and financial literacy website. It is a subsidiary of The Arena Group. The company provides both free content and subscription services such as Action Alerts Plus a stock recommendation portfolio co-managed by B ...

, of inappropriate and deceitful behaviour in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Desai is a native of

Ithaca, New York Ithaca is a city in the Finger Lakes region of New York, United States. Situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca is the seat of Tompkins County and the largest community in the Ithaca metropolitan statistical area. It is named a ...

Early career

In 1996, Desai was the founding Editor in Chief who became the

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

, a post he held for 4 months before being fired by

Jim Cramer James Joseph Cramer (born February 10, 1955) is an American television personality and author. He is the host of ''Mad Money'' on CNBC and an anchor on ''Squawk on the Street''. A former hedge fund manager, founder, and senior partner of Cramer ...

for myriad reasons, including drinking on the job, falsifying business agreements, and

blackmail Blackmail is an act of coercion using the threat of revealing or publicizing either substantially true or false information about a person or people unless certain demands are met. It is often damaging information, and it may be revealed to fa ...

. In November 1997, he wrote a series of diary entries for

Slate magazine ''Slate'' is an online magazine that covers current affairs, politics, and culture in the United States. It was created in 1996 by former '' New Republic'' editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. In 20 ...

discussing, among other topics, his purported position as a strategic analyst at

Quantum Corporation Quantum Corporation is a data storage, management, and protection company that provides technology to store, manage, archive, and protect video and unstructured data throughout the data lifecycle. Their products are used by enterprises, media and ...

Controversies

In February 1999, Desai started at

Scient Scient was a San Francisco-based Internet consulting company, founded in 1997, that was one of the large American consulting firms during the dot-com bubble. The company was founded by Eric Greenberg, who had previously founded its competitor, Via ...

, working out of its San Francisco office. While there, he told coworkers that his pregnant wife, Jennifer Call, was dying of cancer, and subsequently died. But Call was not pregnant, nor did she have cancer. That August, the couple filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. In 2000, Desai pledged $2 million to the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

and another $2 million to the

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...

, along with $1 million to the

University of New Hampshire The University of New Hampshire (UNH) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Durham, New Hampshire. It was founded and incorporated in 1866 as a land grant college in Hanover in connection with Dartmouth College, mo ...

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

programs. No university ever received more than a few thousand dollars of the pledge. Also in 2000, a handful of poets, including then U.S. poet laureate

Robert Pinsky Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of ...

, joined an advisory board for a national poetry foundation that Desai was starting. All the advisers subsequently resigned after Desai displayed erratic behavior. Desai later blamed his erratic behavior on having acquired a rare degenerative nerve disease. Capping off a busy year, Desai married his second wife, Christine Klingler, but was not yet divorced from his first wife, making him a

bigamist In cultures where monogamy is mandated, bigamy is the act of entering into a marriage with one person while still legally married to another. A legal or de facto separation of the couple does not alter their marital status as married persons. I ...

. In January 2001, Formulasys, a privately held tech consulting company, hired Desai as CEO. He was asked to resign five days after getting the top job. The firm claims he had been falsifying contracts with big-name companies like Vodafone. In March 2002, Slate began publishing diary entries for "Robert Klingler," who purported to be the CEO of BMW's North American division. Slate's readers informed the editorial staff that neither

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

's search engine nor

Nexis LexisNexis is a part of the RELX corporation that sells data analytics products and various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer informa ...

's database turned up any mention of a Robert Klingler in the automobile industry. Slate discovered no one with such a name worked for BMW, and inquiries into Klingler's life led them to name Desai as the actual author and a hoaxster.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Desai, Ravi Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Harvard University alumni