Bruce Wasserstein
Bruce Wasserstein, who died on Wednesday aged 61, was a celebrated Wall Street investment banker whose 30-year track record of aggressive corporate deal-making earned him the nickname "Bid 'Em Up Bruce".
Telegraph, 15 Oct 2009
Since 2001, Wasserstein had been chief executive, and latterly chairman, of Lazard Freres, whose fortunes he revived dramatically – though not without a bitter falling-out with its patriarch, Michel David-Weill, who had recruited him but later publicly regretted having done so.
The major source of friction was Wasserstein's determination to transform Lazard from the idiosyncratic partnership of its 19th-century foundations into a public listed company. After an extended power struggle, Wasserstein prevailed; David-Weill was forced out; and an $855 million share offering went ahead in 2005.
Soon afterwards Lazard reclaimed a place in the premier league of global investment banks and went on to profit from the US banking crisis in 2008, collecting giant fees for advising the crippled broking firm Bear Stearns on its emergency sale to JP Morgan Chase. Most recently, Wasserstein advised the chief executive of Kraft Foods, Irene Rosenfeld, on her hostile bid for Cadbury.
Prior to his Lazard years, Wasserstein had made fortunes for himself and many of his clients through his boutique merger-and-acquisition advisory firm Wasserstein Perella – a celebrated player in the late 1980s and 1990s takeover booms.
Among his most famous deals were the $13 billion bid for Kraft Foods by the tobacco giant Philip Morris in 1988, and the $30 billion buy-out of RJR Nabisco by the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which was the subject of a best-selling investigative book, Barbarians at the Gate.
Having brokered the merger of Time and Warner Bros in 1990, he later advised in the ill-fated marriage of Time Warner and AOL during the dotcom boom, and he caused ructions in 2006 when he teamed up with the veteran corporate raider Carl Icahn to try to force the break-up of the struggling media group he had profited from helping to create.
Never shy of controversy, Wasserstein could claim to have had a hand in more than 1,000 merger and acquisition deals in the course of his career, amounting to some $250 billion in value. Whether in defence or on the side of the hostile bidder, he deployed a mastery of takeover techniques, a sharp tongue and formidable powers of persuasion to keep his clients in the game to the last hand – hence "Bid 'Em Up Bruce", a sobriquet which he was said to hate.
Bruce Jay Wasserstein was born in Brooklyn on Christmas Day 1947, the son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant who ran a ribbon-making business. Both his maternal grandfather, Simon Schliefer, and his sister, Wendy Wasserstein, were noted playwrights, the latter a Tony award and Pulitzer Prize winner for The Heidi Chronicles. Wendy once said that their mother believed Bruce's birth date was a sign of "Messiah potential".
Something of an academic prodigy, Bruce graduated from the University of Michigan at the age of 19 and went on to study at Harvard's Business and Law Schools. He spent a summer working for the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and in 1972 came to England as a Knox Fellow at Cambridge to study British company mergers.
After his Harvard graduation, Wasserstein joined the "white shoe" New York law firm of Cravath Swaine & Moore, and in 1977 he moved to launch his corporate finance career with the investment bank First Boston, where he swiftly rose to be co-head of its merger advisory team, alongside Joseph Perella.
When the East Coast grandees of First Boston began to tire of Wasserstein's brash and unkempt style, he and Perella – a more urbane operator – left to form their own firm.
Though the pair remained friends, Perella departed in 1993 to join Morgan Stanley, leaving Wasserstein the autocratic command which was the only mode in which he was truly comfortable. As Michel David-Weill later said of him: "That is his nature, he is a man of solitary power."
Wasserstein went on to complete what was certainly his most lucrative personal deal by selling Wasserstein Perella to Dresdner Bank for $1.56 billion in 2001.
He stayed briefly to run the business on behalf of the new German owners, but it was not a happy arrangement and he was soon in negotiation with Lazard – whose eventual flotation scooped another $500 million into the Wasserstein coffers.
Once asked why he bothered to go on working at such a relentless pace when he had already made more than enough money for one lifetime, he answered: "Frankly, I never considered the alternative. That is who I am." In later years Wasserstein also ran a private investment firm, Wasserstein & Co, and developed a sideline as a media tycoon. In 1997 he bought (and sold for a huge profit a decade later) American Lawyer magazine and the National Law publishing company; later he acquired New York magazine and the Daily Deal.
Wasserstein's personal wealth was estimated by Forbes at $2.3 billion. He kept palatial homes on Fifth Avenue and in East Hampton, but was not inclined to spend his evenings at gala fund-raising dinners amid New York's glitterati when there were corporate deals to be driven through instead.
He nevertheless gave $25 million to Harvard Law School – the second-largest donation in its history – and was a donor to Democratic Party causes, including Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
Bruce Wasserstein divorced his first wife, Laura, in 1974, and had three children with his second wife, Christine. Divorced again in 1992, he had two sons with his third wife, Claude, a French-American television producer.
After the death of his sister Wendy in 2006, her daughter also became part of Bruce's family. He and Claude parted last year, and earlier this year he married Angela Chao, a shipping company executive whose sister Elaine was George W Bush's secretary of labour.
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