Category:Famous Private Equity Investors
Private equity is the business of buying companies with borrowed money, holding them privately for a period of years and selling or refloating them. The people collected here are not a cross-section of the industry: they are its founding generation, the named partners of the firms that turned the leveraged buyout from a 1970s novelty into an asset class, plus the successors now running those same firms. A second pattern sits on top of the first and is hard to miss once noticed, which is how many of them ended up owning professional sports franchises.
Background
The modern buyout industry is usually dated to the 1976 founding of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts by three Bear Stearns bankers who had worked on leveraged buyouts there, and this category contains all three of them. Blackstone followed in 1985, founded by two Lehman Brothers executives with $400,000 in seed capital, and Carlyle, Bain Capital and Apollo came in the years after. The firms began as small partnerships doing one deal at a time and became listed asset managers running credit, real estate, infrastructure and insurance alongside the buyout funds, which is why the biographies here move from deal work in the early sections to institutional management in the later ones.
The firms and their founders
Jerome Kohlberg Jr., Henry Kravis and George Roberts founded Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in 1976; Kohlberg later left to establish Kohlberg and Company. The firm is now run by Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall as co-chief executives. Stephen A. Schwarzman co-founded Blackstone with Peter G. Peterson and remains its chairman and chief executive, with Joe Baratta as global head of private equity. David Rubenstein and William Conway Jr. co-founded The Carlyle Group, which was later run by Kewsong Lee and then by Harvey Schwartz. Leon Black, Marc Rowan and Josh Harris co-founded Apollo Global Management, where Rowan is now chief executive.
Outside that core, Josh Bekenstein and Steve Pagliuca spent decades building Bain Capital, Orlando Bravo co-founded and runs Thoma Bravo, Tom Gores founded Platinum Equity, Ron Burkle founded The Yucaipa Companies after a career in supermarkets, Ken Hersh co-founded NGP Energy Capital Management, and Ira Lubert co-founded Independent Capital Partners. Carlos Alberto Sicupira and Marcel Herrmann Telles built 3G Capital out of Brazil, Marc Lasry co-founded Avenue Capital Group, and Marko Maschek is a managing director of the Maschmeyer Group in Germany and co-founded Marondo Capital.
From buyouts to sports franchises
The sports ownership overlap in this category is dense enough to read as a pattern rather than a coincidence. Josh Harris owns the Washington Commanders and co-owns other franchises. Steve Pagliuca co-owns the Boston Celtics. Tom Gores owns the Detroit Pistons. Marc Lasry co-owned the Milwaukee Bucks from 2014 to 2023. David Rubenstein is the principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles, and Kewsong Lee is vice chair of the United Soccer League. The mechanics are the same in both businesses: a small equity check, a large control position, and an appreciating asset that trades infrequently.
Public office
Three members crossed into government. Timothy Geithner served as the 75th Secretary of the Treasury and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before moving to private equity. Bill Hagerty came out of the industry to serve as United States Ambassador to Japan and then as a senator from Tennessee. Bruce Rauner served as the 42nd governor of Illinois after a career in venture capital and buyouts.
See also
This category currently contains no pages or media.