Warren Buffett

????In sports, they talk about the Sports Illustrated jinx: the mysterious slump that happens when an athlete makes it onto the magazine's cover. In business, the curse is summoned with four magic words: "the next Warren Buffett." Whether the up-and-comer is trading like the great investor, a potential successor at Berkshire Hathaway or just has Buffett's bearing, each one has failed to live up to the hype -- several of them disastrously so.

????A few years back, SI went looking forstatistical proof or disproof of the jinx. One naysayer pointed out that these athletes were simply reverting to the mean. In other words, making the cover is not the media predicting future success -- it's calling the top.

????That's something worth remembering for would-be-Buffetts: Statistically speaking, the Oracle of Omaha is unlikely to ever be matched.

David Sokol

????Before his resignation from his roles at Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiary NetJets this year, David Sokol was widely considered Buffett's heir apparent. In 2010, CNBC ran an excerpt titled "The 'Next' Warren Buffett on what he's learned from the 'current' Warren Buffett" from Ronald W. Chan's book Behind the Berkshire Hathaway Curtain. A key lesson Sokol mentioned in the excerpt was the importance of removing emotion from business decisions.

????But Sokol lost his standing as "the next Warren Buffett" when he resigned from his position as a manager at Berkshire Hathaway this past March. His departure coincided with the possibility that he violated insider-trading rules when he purchased shares in chemicals company Lubrizol before Berkshire announced plans to buy the company. Sokol's fall from grace continued when Buffett, formerly supportive of Sokol, said in April at Berkshire's annual shareholder's meeting that Sokol's actions were "inexplicable and inexcusable."

Eddie Lampert

????Eddie Lampert looked like he was on top of the world in 2004 when he was still planning to merge giant retailers Kmart and Sears. Bloomberg BusinessWeek dubbed Lampert "the next Warren Buffett," comparing his investment in the flagging Sears to Buffett's purchase of the textile company Berkshire Hathaway, which was losing money before Buffett bought it.

????During Lampert's heyday in 2004, his hedge fund ESL Investments had had a 15-year run of 30% average annual returns. Kmart, which had just crawled out of bankruptcy in 2003, had a 300% jump in stock price thanks to Lampert's investment. Two years later, Fortune called Lampert, "the best investor of his generation" and "the Steve Jobs of investing."

????But Lampert's investment in the Sears-Kmart combo has been a dog, not a Dairy Queen. As of May 4, 2011, same-store sales at Sears had dropped every year for a decade. Lampert's 2010 annual letter to Sears shareholders stated, "Our financial results remain at unacceptable levels," a line Berkshire shareholders seldom encounter.

Louis Simpson

????A 2000 Forbes piece began, "the next Warren Buffett is a reclusive soul who, like Omaha's legendary wizard, is devoted to value investing." It was referring to Geico's President and CEO of Capital Operations, Louis Simpson. Forbes found convincing evidence for Simpson's eminence in Buffett's 1995 annual letter, which said, "[Lou's] presence on the scene assures us that Berkshire would have an extraordinary professional immediately available to handle its investments if something were to happen to [Vice Chairman Charles Munger] and me."

????But Simpson recently stepped out of the line of succession. After 31 years with Geico, he left his position at the end of 2010. Simpson retired, and now is managing an investment firm, called SQ Advisors LLC, with his wife in Naples, Florida.

LeBron James

????In 2007, CNNMoney published a piece called, "LeBron: The Next Buffett?" that highlighted basketball star LeBron James' business savvy beyond the court. In an article the same year, Fortune described James' deviating from the typical athlete-investor path because he didn't outsource all of his investment decisions to an agent. Instead, James took charge of his media deals by helping his business manager Maverick Carter found LRMR, a company that helps sports celebrities negotiate corporate agreements.

????LRMR managed LeBron James' infamous EPSN special, "The Decision." Aired last year, James took a full hour to tell the world that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Miami Heat.

????Buffett? Still living in the Omaha house he purchased in 1957 and revered all over town.

Li Lu

????Li hit it off with Buffett's right-hand-man Charlie Munger when they met at a mutual friend's Thanksgiving dinner in 2003, according to a 2010 story in the Wall Street Journal. Munger told the Journal that he considered it "a foregone conclusion" that Li would become a top investing official at Berkshire. In August, a Journal blog post titled "Who Is the Better Buffett 2.0: Li Lu or David Sokol?" compared the qualifications of each as potential successors.

????Li didn't leave the running as dramatically as Sokol, but instead, he never started working at Berkshire. He now runs his own company called Himalaya Capital Management, which Munger helped fund in its early days.

Hank Greenberg

????A 2000 New York Times article pointed out that while Warren Buffett was getting the credit for his investing genius, AIG CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg was running quite a profitable operation at AIG. The article claimed a 1990 investment in AIG would have generated better returns than one in Berkshire for that ten-year period. While the text doesn't call Greenberg "the next Warren Buffett," it compares the way the two men ruled their respective insurance businesses and suggests that Greenberg sometimes made the better investments of the two moguls.

????But Greenberg's status as on par with Buffett crashed five years later, when an investigation by then New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer turned up evidence that Greenberg had overseen fraudulent activities at AIG.

????Greenberg resigned in the midst of the controversy, and now is CEO of financial services firm C.V. Starr and Co., named after AIG's founder, Cornelius Vander Starr. Greenberg has been reported to be building AIG 2 at Starr, presumably stopping short of the period when his old firm required an $85 billion bailout from the U.S. Treasury.

The Beardstown Ladies

????A group of elderly women from Beardstown, Ill. caused a stir in the mid-'90s when they claimed their club, founded in 1983, had realized an annual return of more than 23% on their investments. The book they published, "The Beardstown Ladies' Common-Sense Investment Guide," became a New York Times best-seller.

????But the folksy know-how of the group proved too good to be true and the impressive numbers attributable to mathematical errors. The group checked its 23% number with an auditor who discovered the return was really 9.1%, well under the Standard & Poor 500's record average at the time. Turns out, one of the basic requirements of getting returns like Buffett is doing the math right.