[Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld's] failure to save Lehman, after rescuing it three times before, is a story about how the most indomitable man on Wall Street became addicted to leverage and intoxicated with the power it brought. It is a tale about the inability to repair a financial model wrecked by a lack of limits and transparency, a story pieced together from interviews with former Lehman executives and outsiders familiar with the firm. Isolated, surrounded by acolytes and unaware of the rivalries tearing his firm apart, Fuld was too prideful to accept the fast-eroding value of the empire he had built, too slow to cut a deal.