To woot-wooting groupies of Mad Money, Jim Cramer’s nightly stock-tip pep rally on CNBC, the overcaffeinated Cramer isn’t simply a guru, he’s a superhero. And just as Batman had his Robin, Cramer has Cliff Mason, his precocious, slightly nerdy nephew. Hired as a summer intern in 2005, Mason, then a Harvard sophomore, leapfrogged to scriptwriter on his first day, when staffers were striking out on story pitches and Mason proposed a piece about investing in private student-loan providers. His uncle was impressed. “Not only did he have an idea, but he wrote the piece that I did verbatim,” Cramer recalled via e-mail from vacation in Barbados. “Game, set, match.” After that promising start, Mason would never have to fetch a cup of coffee.

Before taking the internship at Mad Money, Mason imagined himself as a writer living a bohemian life. “I didn’t want to work at all,” he says. Two years later, he lives in a two-bedroom apartment with hot tub that he owns in Manhattan’s trendy Chelsea neighborhood, where comparable apartments generally run well over a million dollars. Mason pays the mortgage by working two jobs. The first is as a staff reporter at TheStreet.com, Cramer’s financial website, where Mason passionately espouses the theme that young people should invest aggressively and not worry about retirement. When he’s not writing for TheStreet.com, Mason e-mails scripts to the Mad Money team at CNBC’s Englewood Cliffs, N.J., studio. Mason’s prolific energy and youthful intelligence, Cramer says, make him "the lynchpin" for the future dominance of TheStreet.com and Mad Money in the financial services media.

Mason has thinning, sandy-colored hair, glasses, and pale skin whose only glow comes from the light of computer monitors. Over beer, burgers, and a Camel at the Old Town bar near Union Square, he proves easygoing, more subtly animated than his uncle, and fully cognizant of his familial good fortune. "I’m good at what I do,” he says, “but the fact that I am as involved as I am now is preposterous.”

Born in Manhattan, Mason grew up in nearby Chappaqua, where he once encountered neighbor Bill Clinton at a Rite-Aid. (Recently, Mason has been pushing Rite-Aid’s stock.) Finance was in his blood. His father, Todd, a Harvard Law graduate, left the law in the late 1980s to work at a mixed arbitrage hedge fund. Uncle Jim, his mother's younger brother, was a regular Thanksgiving guest, talking manically about his many projects, handing out TheStreet.com penknives, and recruiting Cliff for mailbox-stuffing expeditions. Mason absorbed the language of finance. “I know all the acronyms, stupid shit that anybody that works at CNBC should know,” he says. ”Price-to-earnings-to-growth, stuff like that.”

That first summer he worked punching up daily scripts, shaping raw concepts into material that was accessible and camera-ready. Throughout, he collaborated with Cramer. “I don't know which one of us is crazier,” Mason says. “We keep tweaking until it airs.” When the summer ended and Mason returned for junior year, the show scrambled to find a replacement. It couldn’t. Accepting a salary any undergrad would delight in, Cliff volunteered to telecommute from campus four to six hours a day. Juggling Harvard and Wall Street required some improvisation; Mason often performed last-minute rewrites on his laptop during seminars. As a senior, the social studies concentrator pulled back-to-back all-nighters to keep up with his academic work. Cramer’s advice: "Work your butt off, but don't get me in trouble with your mother." Mason graduated on time with his sanity mostly intact. “I don’t think I would have been fully immersed in my studies anyway,” Mason says. “It would have been, ‘Am I doing Mad Money, or am I sleeping 12 hours a day, getting trashed with my friends?’"

The dude schtick belies Mason’s aptitude for his accidental career and his affinity for the stocks-and-Red-Bull show, whose audience is squarely his own generation. Mad Money premiered a few months before his internship, and he was a fan from episode one. "Our generation is more into crass materialism,” Mason asserts. “We don't feel bad saying, 'I want to have lots of money so I don't have to work, and buy lots of cool things!'"

In one recent video segment, Mason confessed to buying the iPhone because it is “pretty cool” and a “babe magnet.” People earning less than $50,000 could probably spend their money more wisely, he conceded, but that was not his situation, and in any case, he was so busy, he lacked the time to spend all the money he made. Mason’s “spend now, save later” columns elicit the kind of hate mail long familiar to his uncle. Correspondents charge him with irresponsibility and general cluelessness. Cramer advises his nephew not to sweat it and argues that Mason’s counterintuitive tack on twentysomething consumption “is so brilliant that I can’t believe everyone isn’t talking about it. But they will be.” Ten years from now, he predicts, his nephew “could run a network and a web company simultaneously.”

Meanwhile, Cliff is happy to continue his double life at TheStreet.com and Mad Money. "Unless Jim fires me. But my Mom would throw a phone at him, so I think I'm safe."