In Wall Street (1987), written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone, Gordon Gekko tells the Teldar Paper shareholders that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good” — a hedge that the popular four-word version deletes. The compression also hands the film a phrase it did not coin: “Greed is good” was already in print before the movie opened.
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In context
Evoking the world of Stanley Weiser & Oliver Stone — Wall Street (1987), 20th Century Fox. Theme: "Greed is good". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Greed is good". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
What Gekko actually says
Work
Wall Street (1987)
Written by
Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone (shared screenplay credit); directed by Oliver Stone
Spoken by
Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) — a fictional character
Real-world seed
Ivan Boesky's commencement address, UC Berkeley School of Business Administration, 18 May 1986
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.
Teldar Paper shareholders' meeting
Quoted from Wikiquote's transcript of the film ↗, which carries the speech in full. Only the opening sentences are reproduced here — enough to show the hedge, “for lack of a better word,” that the popular version deletes.
The transcript. Wikiquote's page for the film carries Gekko's Teldar Paper speech in full. He says greed “for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works” — the bare four-word slogan is not in it. The same page gives the writing credit as Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone. Wikiquote: Wall Street (1987 film) ↗
Even AFI prints the hedge. When the American Film Institute ranked the line #57 on its 2005 list of the 100 greatest movie quotes, its own published list gave it as “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good” — not the popular compression. AFI, 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes (PDF) ↗
The phrase is older than the film. Quote researcher Barry Popik's file documents “Greed is good” in Mother Jones in October 1984 and a Michael Korda chapter headed “Greed Is Good for You” in Success! (1977) — plus Joe Biden attributing the compressed phrase to Boesky in a May 1987 Washington Post interview, seven months before release. Barry Popik: “Greed is good” ↗
Where Stone says it came from. In his 2000 DVD commentary, quoted on Wikiquote, Stone traces the idea to Boesky's speech. Boesky's sourced words — “Greed is all right, by the way. I think greed is healthy” — are recorded in James B. Stewart's Den of Thieves (1992). Wikiquote: Ivan Boesky ↗
Wall Street was released on 11 December 1987 by 20th Century Fox — long after 1930, the cutoff for US public domain — so the screenplay and its dialogue remain in copyright. Screen writing is work-for-hire: the rights sit with the studio, not with Weiser or Stone personally, even though they are the authors of the line. Only a short excerpt is reproduced above, the minimum needed to document the actual wording.
Fact-check
Who gets credited, and why it's wrong
Nobody is falsely credited here in the usual sense — the film is real, the speech is real, and the writers are correctly named. What went wrong is the wording, and then a second thing went wrong on top of it: the film got credit for coining a phrase that was already circulating.
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the wordingGordon Gekko / Michael Douglas never said it
The four words appear nowhere in the film. The transcript reads: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.” Even the American Film Institute, ranking it #57 on its 2005 list, printed the hedged version ↗. Douglas is also the actor, not the author — the words are Weiser and Stone's.
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the real person behind GekkoIvan Boesky said something else
The arbitrageur told UC Berkeley's business graduates on 18 May 1986: “Greed is all right, by the way… I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Stone credits that speech as the seed of Gekko's line in his DVD commentary. But Boesky never said “greed is good” — though he was already being quoted as saying it by May 1987 ↗, months before the film opened.
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coinageWall Street (1987) itself didn't coin it
The exact phrase was in print well before the screenplay. Barry Popik documents Mother Jones using it in October 1984 ↗ — “It's O.K. to grab. Greed is good. Rich is respectable” — and Michael Korda heading a chapter of Success! (1977) “Greed Is Good for You.” The film made the phrase famous; it did not invent it.
Gordon Gekko is not being glib when he reaches for the word. He is a corporate raider addressing a shareholders' meeting, and he is trying to relabel something — to sell asset-stripping as evolution. “For lack of a better word” is the sound of a man reaching for a euphemism, failing to find one, and brazening it out. Cut those five words and you remove the strain: what is left is a slogan, delivered without hesitation, that a certain kind of viewer could hang on a wall.
That is the misquote's real damage. The film convicts Gekko — he goes to jail — but the compressed line escaped the movie and became a creed, which is why Stanley Weiser eventually wrote a newspaper column titled “Repeat After Me: Greed is Not Good.” The flattening began almost immediately: Time's review, published three days after the film opened, already had Gekko proclaiming “greed is good, greed is right, greed works.”
“For lack of a better word” is the whole performance. Delete it and Gekko stops hesitating.
The phrase was loose in the culture before the film
Michael Korda titled a chapter of his 1977 bestseller Success! “Greed Is Good for You.” Mother Jones ran the bare four words in October 1984, on Reagan: “It's O.K. to grab. Greed is good. Rich is respectable.” Both predate the screenplay.
The misquote was attached to Ivan Boesky before Wall Street ever reached cinemas. In February 1987 Joe Biden was attacking Reagan for leading a “greed is good” decade, and by May 1987 — seven months before release — he was telling the Washington Post that Boesky “would be applauded by a California graduating class for saying ‘Greed is good.’” Boesky had not said it either.
In the 2010 sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (written by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff), Gekko misquotes himself: “Someone reminded me I once said ‘Greed is good’. Now it seems it's legal.” The character has absorbed the public's version of his own speech.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Credited screenwriters · Wall Street (1987), 20th Century Fox
Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone share the writing credit on Wall Street (1987), which Stone also directed. Gordon Gekko was assembled from several real 1980s financiers — Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn, Dennis Levine, Asher Edelman and others — rather than drawn from one man. Both writers have spent decades pointing out that the film's most-quoted sentiment belongs to its villain, who goes to prison in the last act; in 2008 Weiser published a Los Angeles Times op-ed under the title “Repeat After Me: Greed is Not Good.”
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone, written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone (20th Century Fox, released 11 December 1987). Dialogue as transcribed in Wikiquote, “Wall Street (1987 film).” Pre-film uses of the bare phrase documented in Barry Popik, “Greed is good,” BarryPopik.com, citing Mother Jones, October 1984, p. 30, and Michael Korda, Success! (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 66.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Greed is good’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/greed-is-good