BTW, Eddie never originally wanted to be CEO of SHC. He had several other people be CEO of it for years, until he had trouble finding a replacement after one of them left, so he made himself acting CEO intending it to be temporary, but then ended up just staying. I think he would prefer to delegate as much as possible, if he can find someone else willing to do it; he rarely even goes to Illinois in person, works remotely from Florida. If anyone is curious, I put together a little timeline of Sears CEOs a few weeks ago (intended to answer a question on the "layoff" forum, but it stopped letting me post there for no apparent reason):
Sears Tower was built 1970-1973.
Sears moved out of it to Hoffman Estates gradually 1992-1995.
Edward Telling was Sears CEO 1978-1984.
Edward Brennan was Sears CEO 1984-1995.
Arthur Martinez was Sears CEO 1995-2000.
Alan Lacy was Sears CEO 2000-2005.
Aylwin Lewis was Sears CEO 2005-2008.
W. Bruce Johnson was Sears CEO 2008-2011.
Louis D'Ambrosio was Sears CEO 2011-2013.
Eddie Lampert was Sears CEO 2013-2018.
Some other timeline points I put together several months ago for another question:
Kmart filed for bankruptcy in Jan 2002, and came out of it in May 2003:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22457-2003May6.html?noredirect=on
Eddie Lampert became Kmart chairman in May 2003:
https://searsholdings.com/press-releases/pr/1435
Sears credit cards sold to Citi in July 2003:
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/16/...ard-portfolio-to-citigroup-for-3-billion.html
Sears/Kmart merger announced in Nov 2004, with Eddie to become chairman of the combined company:
http://money.cnn.com/2004/11/17/news/newsmakers/lampert/
At the time of the merger, Eddie controlled 47% of Kmart and 15% of Sears:
http://adage.com/article/news/kmart-acquires-sears-11-billion/41557/
Sears CEO (brought over from Kmart) Aylwin Lewis quit in Jan 2008, and over a year later still hadn't been replaced:
https://consumerist.com/2009/02/27/...page-manifesto-about-um-everything/index.html
[hadn't been *officially* replaced, but the supposedly-interim guy Bruce served for several years in the meantime; I had also seen some misstatement in another 2009 article that made it look like Eddie started being CEO at that time, but when I later looked into the CEO timeline more specifically, I realized that wasn't right]
So Eddie spent 8-9 years being chairman but not CEO of Sears.