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By/Jan. 10, 2019 9:58 am EDT/Updated: Jan. 28, 2021 2:25 pm EDT

Jim Cramer is the face of CNBC, and Mad Money — his daily look at what the financial markets did that day and where they might head in the future — is the cable news channel's signature show. That's because Cramer, in addition to being a savvy investor and veteran of different sectors of the complex financial world, is so good at explaining the ups and downs of the stock markets to viewers. He's also really entertaining, talking fast, pacing around his set, and expressing seemingly every emotion through the medium of yelling. Mad Money could legitimately be retitled Stock Screaming and people would still watch it.

Along with his work on his website TheStreet, his books, and appearances on other CNBC shows besides Mad Money (particularly the morning news show Squawk on the Street), Cramer has become a trusted guide for people who wanted to invest their hard earned money. He's become a public figure along the way, too, but there's a lot more to his story than fans may already know. Here's the untold truth of Jim Cramer.

He made a Harvard professor see crimson

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Financial news is a kind of journalism, and before he delved into that, Cramer was just a regular, old-fashioned newspaper journalist. He was apparently pretty good at it, too — as an undergraduate at Harvard in the '70s, he served as president of the institution's newspaper of record, the Harvard Crimson. Despite the long hours associated with such a job, Cramer graduated from the Yale of Massachusetts in 1977 with honors (magna cum laude), and yet he didn't get to walk across the stage and accept his diploma publicly.

At the tail end of his matriculation, Cramer wrote and published a criticism of a professor and administrator named Alan Heimert, who had publicly come out against expanding the History and Literature Department, arguing that such a move would damage the school's small student-to-faculty ratio. Another professor secretly came to Cramer and told him that Heimert spread that dubious info among faculty. As Heimert was head of the department in which Cramer would graduate, he could prevent Cramer from walking, and so he did. 'My parents were in tears,' Cramer later told the Crimson, adding that he eventually received apologies from the school, as well as Heimert.

Write on, Jim Cramer!

Jim Cramer Real Money Summary

Despite the decidedly negative lesson he learned about journalism at the Harvard Crimson, Cramer pressed on with writing. During a commencement speech he delivered at Bucknell University in 2018 (via CNBC), Cramer said that after graduation, he moved back in with his parents and immediately started searching for reporter jobs, especially important since his father said he'd have to start paying rent in a few months. Still, his parents encouraged him to find a 'real job,' or pretty much anything other than journalism. 'Pops didn't even believe that being a writer was a profession,' Cramer said. 'He wanted me to get an honest job.'

Cramer says he received nearly 50 rejection letters before the Tallahassee Democrat in Florida hired him on. In that capacity, he was among the first reporters to cover the 1978 murders by serial killer Ted Bundy at Florida State University. Having built up his experience and skills, Cramer then jumped over to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a newspaper which had previously turned him down for a job.

California broke him

While living in the famed City of Angels, Cramer's apartment was burglarized, and he says the thieves took basically everything, somehow even hacking into his finances. 'Everything was gone. They even looted my bank account, so I had no money,' Cramer told the Sacramento Bee.

No money meant he couldn't make rent, and so he was evicted, and had to live in his car for a while. That's when he says an editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner 'felt bad' for him and assigned him to the state government beat in Sacramento, which afforded him a nice expense account. Cramer covered the administration of Governor Jerry Brown (the first time he was governor of California), whom he says 'was very combative.' Unfortunately, the bad luck returned, and Cramer didn't get to accompany Brown (and the governor's girlfriend at the time, singer Linda Ronstadt) on a trip to Africa because he came down with mononucleosis and a case of jaundiced liver.

Jim Cramer Real Money Book

His feelings toward Barack Obama? They're complicated

The experience of suffering severe health problems in California 40 years ago stayed with Cramer. He told the Sacramento Bee that he didn't have health insurance while living in The Golden State, so he sought out low-cost care at a clinic 40 miles outside of Sacramento in Yuba City, California, one of the many that catered to farmworkers in the agriculture-heavy area. Knowing what it feels like to be poor and sick made Cramer 'sympathetic to the president's stance on health care,' Cramer told the Sacramento Bee in 2014, referring to then-president Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act (also known as 'Obamacare'). 'It's still frightening to remember what it's like to not have health care.'

But that doesn't mean Cramer 100 percent backed everything President Obama did and said. In 2009, Cramer called the president the 'greatest destroyer of wealth.' Why? 'The president came in with very little understanding of how the stock market worked,' stock market expert Cramer said. 'I felt he had it wrong with a failed stimulus plan to try and get the country back economically. I felt job creation was the No. 1 priority.'

Ultimately, Cramer seems to pride himself on his bipartisan digs at both sides of the political aisle, telling the publication, 'There are people who call me a tea partyer and there are people who call me a Trotskyite. So I must be doing something right.'

He hedged his bets

By 1981 Cramer said goodbye to journalism and went back to school — his old school, Harvard — to procure a law degree. But around the same time he first delved into legal affairs, he still harbored ambitions of trading stocks and other securities for a living, so he applied for a job at investment firm Goldman Sachs.

'I loved the stock market and while I wanted to be a prosecutor, I knew that the summer between your first and your second year at law school tended not to impact where you ultimately worked,' Cramer told writer Anne Kreamer. Unfortunately for him, the famous firm 'didn't want law school kids. They wanted business school students.' So, Cramer embarked on a 'two year odyssey to prove that I deserved a slot.' After ten interviews, he finally got hired in the Securities Sales department, but by 1987 he'd tired of the Goldman grind. 'So I made the most stupid and brilliant move of my life, I quit.' He went into business for himself, opening his own hedge fund.

His years on TheStreet

Cramer co-founded TheStreet in 1996, placing it among the first major consumer-level financial news and commentary sites. TheStreet went public in 1999, allowing consumers to buy stock in a company that tells them what other stocks to buy. It might not be such

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