Pain Pills, a Red Ferrari and Henry Nicholas

Blaise Zerega goes down memory lane: As tales of rampant drug-use by Henry Nicholas get reported, it's time for another story about the fast times at Broadcom High....

In the late 1990s Red Herring magazine featured then Broadcom CEO Nicholas in "A Day in the Life" story package. (Disclosure: I worked at Red Herring "back in the day" and was the last Editor of that late, great publication.) Features editor Andrew Madden (now at Google) won the assignment to spend an afternoon with the hugely-successful Nicholas.

"He was very intent on showing off his high-octane lifestyle," Madden recalls. This included Nicholas walking the halls and urging Broadcom employees to tell Madden how rich he'd made them. It included the obligatory cruising around Southern California in Nicholas' candy-apple red Ferrari. And it included Nicholas popping pain killers because of a bizarre skiing injury to his rib cage. "The fact that he was on pain killers has taken on a whole new meaning," says Madden.

The highlight of the weird afternoon for Madden was working out with Nicholas at an on-site gym: "He was very intense and quite buffed." And to cap it off, Nicholas insisted on being photographed while lifting weights -- biceps curls, of course.
 
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