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Volkert Doeksen of AlpInvest Partners (originally NIB Capital). Being connected with Dresdner Kleinwort and Warburg Pincus, invests in club deals. Alumni of Kleinwort Benson, Dillon Read and Mortgan Stanley.
Howard Mark Lorber works through Vector Gorup Ltd., a NYSE listed holding company. Took control of Gouglas Elliman ight before NYC real estate taking off, which helped this largest residential real estate brokerage in the New York City area. He is also chairman of Nathan Foods and is part of the New Valley Corp (Western Union) and works financial magic through Aegis Capital and Ladenburg Thalman, both boker-dealers.
Attended Tulane University and transferred before eventually graduating with his BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He also manages a charitable organization called Steel Partners Foundation that is a significant donor to building of a first Jewish synagogue in Aspen, Colorado.
During the 80s he was a corporate raider, using debt provided by Drexel Burnham Lambert. Successful targets of his raids were the GAF Materials Corp. and International Specialty Products. He also made large sums of money in failed take-overs of Borg-Warner and Union Carbide. He has recently been involved in takeover attempts on Dexter, London Stock Exchange and Hercules Corp.
He achieved notoriety in Australia during the Qantas takeover when his hedge fund, declined to accept Airline Partners Australia's offer for his share, and after the failure of the offer subsequently accepted for over half his holding, although this was unsuccessful. As his total holding was said to be 10% of Qantas' shares, he had at risk over a billion dollars (Australian) in shares, and was possibly in violation of Qantas foreign shareholding rules.
His personal investment career began when he took over the reins at his family-controlled conglomerate Bolloré, which deals in maritime freight and African trade, and paper manufacturing. The company he leads today employs 33,000 people around the world.
He is a well-known corporate raider in France who has succeeded in making money by taking large stakes in French listed companies, in particular the building and construction group Bouygues, where he left with a sizeable capital gain after a power-struggle.
In 2005, through his family company, Bolloré expanded his media interests by launching the Direct 8 television station. Towards the end of 2005, he began building a stake in independent British group Aegis.As at 19 July, 2006, his stake in Aegis stood at 29%. Direct Soir, a free newspaper, was launched in June 2006. In January 2008, he manifested interest in becoming a shareholder of famed, but troubled, Italian car manufacturer Pininfarina.
He is a close personal friend of French President Sarkozy. It has been told that their friendship goes back over 20 years Sarkozy has been criticized for accepting vacations from Bolloré; however, both have insisted that no conflict of interest exists.
His greatest contribution was probably the strong support he showed, at very crucial initial stages, to the Special Olympics. Jacobs founded FLW Outdoors, the parent organization of the Wal-Mart FLW Our, a series of sportfishing tours best know for its bass fikshing tournaments, which were developed with an eye toward media coverage in general and television coverage in particular.
CAN BE PROUD OF: According to Fast Company, Khosla’s six best deals for the venture-capital outfit Kleiner Perkins turned $314 million of seed money into $15 billion in cash and stock.
ON THE RECORD: “The main problem to solving problems is having the problems be critical enough to get attention It’s almost like a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
CAN BE PROUD OF: Eurasia Center, a non-profit think tank based in London, and his short but very productive tenure as prime minister of Armenia. Armenia has seen explosive growth 1998 - 2006 period, mainly due to Sarkissian's road map of economic freedom initiatives and overall growth.
CRUCIFIXION-AVOIDANCE MOVE: Donated $15 million to a legal fund for families fighting foreclosure.
MANIFEST DESTINY: In the mid-1990s, Paulson, 52, bought a New York apartment and a mansion in the Hamptons at foreclosure sales.
NEIGHBOR RELATIONS: Reportedly persuaded Comcast’s Brian Roberts, a longtime client, to buy out a Martha’s Vineyard neighbor that Rattner, 56, had feuded with.
BIG DEAL: New York mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in January that he was putting his wealth (estimated at more than $11.5 billion) under Quadrangle’s management to avoid any conflicts of interest.
HIRING TECHNIQUE: “Given the choice between cutoffs and sandals or cuff links and Brioni, we’re going to take the first every time.”
QUOTE: “We had the good fortune of seeing a lot of the things and habits that tend to lead to the downfall and demise of young companies, and it’s helpful to have a litany of them to refer to from time to time.”
BIG NEW FRIEND: Oprah, now a partner, via Malone’s Discovery Communications, in OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network.
LABEL-DEFYING MOVE: Wall Street was convinced that Malone, 67, would take control of DirecTV, the country’s biggest satellite-TV service, and flip it for another asset. But so far Malone appears to be interested in operating the service in conjunction with Liberty’s cable programming.
ON THE RECORD: Malone, quoted in a Wall Street Journal article that later became a key point of contention in the Liberty Media/IAC trial: “There was a time when there was, I think, a 20 percent Barry premium” on Wall Street. “Today you could argue there is a Barry discount.”
NEW LITTLE ENEMY: Comedian Lewis Black targeted Kravis, 64, and K.K.R. in another Web video, railing against what he sees as their unfair earnings.
BIGGEST GAFFE: Last May, just before the market meltdown, he told a group of Canadian investment heads, “The private-equity world is in its golden era right now. The stars are aligned.”
MODE OF TRANSPORT: A Gulfstream GV.
LITTLE BUDDY: Monica Seles.
ROMANTIC RELATIONS: Forstmann, 68, is currently dating Top Chef hostess Padma Lakshmi. He insists his past relationships with Princess Diana and Elizabeth Hurley were purely platonic.
RECENT DEALS: Belgian brewer InBev’s $52 billion purchase of Anheuser-Busch, the K.K.R. public offering, and the sale of Bear Stearns to J. P. Morgan Chase.
MAKEOVER BONA FIDES: Wasserstein, once chubby and rumpled, is now slim and crisply dressed.
SPOUSAL RELATIONS: In July the New York Daily News reported that Wasserstein, 60, had separated from third wife Claude and was involved with a “young Asian beauty.”
RECENT DEALS: Large stock positions taken and pressures applied on General Motors and Ford Motors Company.
LITTLE BUDDY: Steve Schwarzman. (Lord Rothschild, 72, is on the International Advisory Board of Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group.)
PRIZED POSSESSION: His personal collection of some 15,000 bottles of Rothschild wines dating back to 1870.
BIG LOSS: Alwaleed, 53, lost billions when Citibank’s stock price collapsed because of the subprime-mortgage crisis—and he joined with other big investors to infuse $12.5 billion in new capital into the troubled bank. But his losses were partly mitigated by gains from his holdings in the Four Seasons and Fairmont hotel chains, which have thrived in the Middle Eastern market.
WINGS: Boeing 747-400 while he waits for delivery of his $310 million Airbus A380 Flying Palace. It’s expected that the superjumbo jet will have a gym, formal dining rooms, and a cinema. It’s so big that it can land only at airports in major cities.
CRIB: 317-room palace in Riyadh. It features four separate kitchens for four different cuisines: Lebanese, Arabian, Continental, and Asian.
EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY EXCESSIVE BEHAVIOR: Travels with a staff of 60.
LATEST ACT OF DO-GOODERY: Donated $15.7 million apiece to Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh to build new Islamic-studies centers.
RARE MISSTEP: Slim, 68, spent $2 billion to buy CompUSA, but couldn’t make the business work despite repeated turnaround attempts. He shuttered the last of the stores and sold the brand earlier this year.
COOL FRIEND: Shakira.
CLOUD OF UNCERTAINTY: The Mexican government is confronting Slim’s telephone dominance, forcing him to open up to a competitor.
AESTHETE BONA FIDES: His blossoming collection of Rodin sculptures and Renoirs places him among the world’s top art spenders, according to ArtNews.
COOL FRIEND: Lenny Kravitz.
RECENT ANOINTMENT: Awarded the 23rd spot on Details magazine’s Power 50 list, apparently because he has “taken over the space in your head.” Not sure what that means.
MOGUL BONA FIDES: An early investor in Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s company, Nevo recently invested in online music site Buzznet and Internet-based ad agency Spot Runner alongside Rupert Murdoch and Herb Allen’s Allen & Co.
EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY CONTRADICTORY BEHAVIOR: Two years after “firing” Tom Cruise, Redstone announced he’d work with the actor again after all, in yet another Mission: Impossible movie: “He’s a great actor and behaving very well these days.”
SWORN ENEMY: Mortality. Addressing succession plans in a recent interview, Redstone, 85, said, “I’m not worried about it ’cause it’s going to be another 20, 30 years.”
BIG DEALS: Advised Murdoch on his takeover of Dow Jones. The firm also guided NBC Universal on its $925 million purchase of Oxygen Media, the TV channel backed by investors Oprah Winfrey and Paul Allen.
MAN-OF-THE-PEOPLE MOVE: Wrote a New York Times op-ed calling for taxation on investment income of the endowments of the wealthiest colleges and universities (including his own alma mater, Williams College).
SIDE PROJECT: Allen is helping fund the former Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent’s oral-history-of-baseball project.
BOATING BUDDIES: Denzel Washington, Penny Marshall, and Saif Qaddafi (son of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi) attended Perelman’s birthday party on his 188-foot Ultima III yacht in St. Barth’s in December.
EX-SPOUSAL RELATIONS i: Third wife Patricia Duff re-entered the picture this year when Caleigh, her 13-year-old daughter with Perelman, sought a protective order (aided by Perelman’s lawyers) against her mother. (Duff counters that the animosity stems from normal teenage angst.)
EX-SPOUSAL RELATIONS ii: Perelman, 65, exercised the naming rights he received from a $20 million donation to his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, renaming Logan Hall after his second wife, the late gossip columnist Claudia Cohen. It is located in the Perelman Quadrangle. In July, he also sued Cohen’s brother over her fortune, which daughter Samantha is entitled to.
EX-SPOUSAL RELATIONS iii: Perelman and fourth wife Ellen Barkin are locked in a legal squabble over the funding of her production company, Applehead. He claims Barkin and her brother are misappropriating Applehead’s capital; she alleges that Perelman didn’t cough up the cash he promised.
CASTING CALL: Told CNBC’s Donny Deutsch that he would want Robert Downey Jr. to play him in a biopic.
MOGUL RELATIONS: Diller’s plan to break up his IAC conglomerate into five separate pieces, or “Baby Barrys,” was an acknowledgment that his strategy of the past 13 years wasn’t working any longer. But the bold move threatened to strip control from his biggest shareholder and erstwhile friend, Liberty Media’s John Malone, who had held a majority vote under IAC’s old corporate governance. Malone sued to push Diller, 66, and von Furstenberg, 61, off the IAC board, and his people piled on testimony that portrayed Diller as enjoying lavish perks and compensation without delivering commensurate results to shareholders. It proved to have no effect on the outcome: in March the judge ruled in favor of Diller.
OFFICE DIGS: A stairway lined with 3,000 Swarovski crystals winds through DVF’s headquarters, in a former meatpacking plant. Four blocks away, Diller sits in one of his five executive offices that take up an entire floor of the iconic IAC building.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Von Furstenberg recently collaborated with DC Comics to create a fashion line inspired by Wonder Woman.
ACCESSORY: Timepieces. He owns more than 60.
MOGUL RELATIONS: The battle between LVMH and PPR continues. Pinault, 46, wasn’t a fan of Bernard Arnault’s plan to buy the French financial daily Les Echos, and was one of the 100-some businesspeople who signed a petition calling for the paper to maintain its editorial independence.
ALTER EGO: One of PPR’s fastest-growing business units, CFAO, isn’t a luxury label but rather a distribution business that sells diverse products such as cars and pharmaceuticals across Africa and Vietnam.
LITTLE BUDDY: Pop train wreck Amy Winehouse, whom Abramovich paid a reported $2 million to sing at the opening gala of his girlfriend’s art gallery, in Moscow, this summer.
WINGS: A Boeing 767 with anti-missile system.
WHEELS: A Ferrari FXX, one of only 30 made.
EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY CONTRADICTORY BEHAVIOR: Just weeks after stepping down as governor of Chukotka, in Russia, in July, Abramovich decided he was into politics after all. He will run for speaker in the Duma of the remote arctic region in October’s election.
THORN IN HIS SIDE: A multi-billion-dollar lawsuit in London’s High Court alleging that he colluded with cool friend Vladimir Putin to force a rival Russian billionaire to sell a Moscow TV station, an aluminum producer, and an oil-and-gas company at prices far below market value. Abramovich disputes the claim.
BRAGGING RIGHTS: LVMH, which owns six champagne brands (Veuve Clicquot, Krug, and Moët & Chandon among them), controls the largest share of the limited grape output from France’s Champagne region.
NEPOTISM ALERT: Both his son Antoine and daughter Delphine sit on LVMH’s board.
THORN IN HIS SIDE: Watches. The 59-year-old magnate apparently feels that LVMH isn’t No. 1 in the luxury-timepiece market yet. He acquired the Swiss brand Hublot earlier this year to help close the gap. (He already owns Tag Heuer and Christian Dior.)
POWER STRUGGLE: LVMH is battling peddlers of counterfeits. In June, a French court ordered eBay to pay the luxury label $61 million for selling imitation LVMH goods on its site.
LATEST BIG DEAL: As a large shareholder in Anheuser-Busch, Berkshire will realize a $770 million gain when Belgian company InBev NV’s planned $52 billion takeover of the American brewer goes through.
SIGNS OF OMNIPOTENCE: This spring, as Bear Stearns was spiraling down the drain, the investment bank desperately reached out to Buffett for backing, knowing that any sign of support from the business guru would mollify the market. He passed.
ON THE RECORD: “You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out—and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight.”
POLITICAL RELATIONS: Often characterized as a right-wing ideologue, Murdoch is a clear-eyed pragmatist. Hence his decision to move away from the Hillary Clinton camp during the Democratic primary and all but endorse Barack Obama, whom he calls a “rock star.” Still, the News Corp. chief found the time in June to dine with GeorgeW. Bush and British prime minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street.
MOGUL MISHAP: At Herb Allen’s Sun Valley confab, Murdoch misplaced his wedding band, sending a gaggle of waiting journalists to their hands and knees in search of it. (The ring was never found.)
FAMILY BUSINESS: A Murdoch-family trust distributed $600 million in cash and News Corp. shares to Rupert’s first four children last year. The payout was supposed to help heal a dispute about inheritance brought on by Murdoch’s marriage to Wendi Deng, his third wife, with whom he’s had two more kids.
MANIFEST DESTINY: Murdoch’s genes indicate that he’d be an excellent long-distance runner, according to a DNA test he took at The Wall Street Journal’s D conference this year.
PHILANTHROPY WATCH: He and Wendi support N.Y.C.’s P.S. 184M, the first public elementary and middle school in the country that provides a bilingual education in English and Mandarin Chinese.
