King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone
by David Carey · 7 Feb 2012 · 421pp · 128,094 words
. Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder of the Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity firm, was about to turn sixty and was planning a fête. The financier’s lavish holiday parties were already well known in Manhattan’s moneyed circles. One year Schwarzman and his wife decorated their twenty-four-room, two-floor spread in Park Avenue
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’s toniest apartment building to resemble Schwarzman’s favorite spot in St. Tropez, near their summer home on the French Riviera. For his birthday, he decided to top that, taking over the Park Avenue Armory, a fortified brick edifice that occupies a full square
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an immense portrait of the financier—also a replica of one hanging in his apartment—the headliners, singer Rod Stewart and comic Martin Short, strutted and joked into the late hours. Schwarzman had chosen the armory, Short quipped, because it was more intimate than his apartment. Stewart alone was known to charge $1 million
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and hedge funds “locusts” and British unions lobbied to rein in these takeovers. By the time the starry canopy was being strung in the Park Avenue Armory for Schwarzman’s birthday party, the blowback had come Stateside. American unions feared the new wave of LBOs would lead to job losses, and the enormous profits being generated
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, the former Blackstone partner who went on to head Cendant. Proposals were already circulating to jack up taxes on investment fund managers, Silverman knew, and the party could only fan the political flames. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal fretted about the implications of the extravaganza, saying, “Mr. Schwarzman’s birthday party, and the
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the party, new tax proposals were announced, they were immediately dubbed the Blackstone Tax and the Journal blamed Schwarzman, saying his “garish 60th birthday party this year played into the hands of populists looking for a real
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. Notwithstanding the controversy over the new wave of buyouts and the brouhaha over Schwarzman’s birthday party, Blackstone succeeded in going public. By then, however, Schwarzman and others at Blackstone were nervous that the markets were heading for a fall. The very day Blackstone’s stock started trading, June 22, 2007, there was an ominous sign of
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of the financial system. A history of Blackstone is also a chronicle of an entrepreneur whose savvy was obscured by the ostentation of his birthday party. From an inauspicious beginning, through fits and starts, some disastrous early investments, and chaotic years when talent came and went, Schwarzman built a major financial institution. In many
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—and helps explain why Blackstone avoided the kind of brazen, outsized gambles that caused some high-flying rivals to run aground. Schwarzman and Peterson had a breakfast ritual, convening at eight thirty nearly every morning in the cafeteria of the former Mayfair Hotel, on Sixty-fifth Street and Park Avenue, now the site of
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and other backers of the buyout. From the moment Winograd settled in at 345 Park Avenue, he pressed the idea of a second buyout of Edgcomb, whose stock had languished after it went public. Schwarzman quickly said yes. In May Blackstone negotiated a $330 million deal to take Edgcomb private for $8 a share
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. (Later Steinberg would be linked to Blackstone in another way: When his financial empire crumbled in 2000, he was forced to sell many personal possessions, including his sumptuous duplex apartment at 740 Park Avenue. The apartment’s buyer, who paid a reported $30 million, was Steve Schwarzman.) HFS was set up to take advantage
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Manhattan-dandy act so achingly funny that the next day at 345 Park Avenue he pinned up Schwarzman’s fashion shot in his office to draw laughs from those who dropped by. “Pete thought it was hilarious,” says a former Blackstone partner. “Steve was really pissed off.” To those who knew Peterson, it was
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relaxed and discreet setting, so he invited James to dinner at his apartment at 740 Park Avenue. “I didn’t want to meet him in a work setting. I wanted to really learn how his mind worked,” Schwarzman explains. Over a long meal they traded experiences and their takes on the world. “I
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, looked and acted more like an Eagle Scout than a Master of the Universe. He walked to work from his apartment twenty blocks straight up Park Avenue from Blackstone’s headquarters. His attire—a cheap digital watch from Wal-Mart, sedate ties and suits, sturdy wingtips—completed the quotidian effect. He joined
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didn’t have to scratch hard to see the antipathy. Schwarzman never missed a chance to put down KKR, as he did when he called it “a one-trick pony” to BusinessWeek, and he conspicuously neglected to invite Kravis to his birthday party in 2007. While it was hard at times to distinguish
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of answering to the public markets and said to him, “Geez, I wish you could buy us, but we’re too big.” It was Schwarzman’s sixtieth birthday party on February 13 that elevated him from being one more Wall Street bigwig to a symbol. It transformed him into a cliché for the
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. 27, 2007; Michael J. de la Merced, “Dealbook—Inside Stephen Schwarzman’s Birthday Bash,” NYT, Feb. 14, 2007; Richard Johnson with Paula Froelich, Bill Hoffmann, and Corynne Steindler, “Page Six—$3M Birthday Party Fit for Buyout King,” New York Post, Feb. 14, 2007; Michael Flaherty, “Blackstone CEO Gala Sign of Buyout Boom,” Reuters, Feb. 14
Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das · 14 Oct 2011 · 741pp · 179,454 words
shares to the public and the price skyrocketed. Blackstone, KKR, and others rushed to cash in on the gold rush. Schwarzman’s $5 million 60th birthday celebration, held in February 2007, was another sign of impending doom. The venue—the Armory—was decorated to replicate Schwarzman’s Park Avenue apartment, featuring a large portrait of the
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a song especially composed in honor of Schwarzman. Rod Stewart, the sexagenarian British rock star, performed his hits including Maggie May and Do’ya Think I’m Sexy. In 2002, David Bonderman, co-founder of TPG, had staged a lavish $7 million party to celebrate his 60th birthday party for hundreds of his “closest” friends
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all the dollar signs is posted on the web site none of us will like the furore that results—and that’s even if you like Rod Stewart.”13 In June 2007, Blackstone’s share offering was priced at $31 per
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few months after the speech, the London Daily Mail carries a story of Ferguson’s own marital problems. The article chronicles a £30,000 40th-birthday party for his mistress, Somali-born former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to which Ferguson also invited his wife.11 In Lewis Carroll’s tale, Alice
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
by William D. Cohan · 15 Nov 2009 · 620pp · 214,639 words
, Tim Geithner, the ninth president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, on Park Avenue, about the unfolding financial crisis. Geithner had served three presidents and five Treasury secretaries, culminating in his appointment as undersecretary for international affairs for Treasury
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the plug on us Friday night and say enough.” At around 5:30 A.M., on his first all-nighter since college, Friedman walked across Park Avenue to 277 Park, the home of JPMorgan's investment banking division. Friedman's health club was in the building, and he decided to go there
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were a couple of issues, but nothing earth-shaking.” After Schwartz and Molinaro spoke, Tese's driver took him to Cayne's apartment, at 510 Park Avenue, and together the two men headed up to the Jackson Hole restaurant, at 91st and Madison. Tese wanted to talk sense to Cayne about the
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, joining in by phone from Jamaica before flying back on Saturday night—plus Tese and Salerno reassembled at Sullivan & Cromwell's midtown office, at 250 Park Avenue, to see if they could reach a new agreement with Dimon. “We went through everything,” Salerno said, “and the fact of the matter is JPMorgan
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the stock market was often fewer than a million shares a day. Bear Stearns's clients in those days were said to be “mainly rich Park Avenue German Jewish widows.” “People think 1932 was bad,” Sandy Lewis said. “My dad told me 1938 was the worst of it. They never thought they
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's decision, in 1944, to buy a huge new apartment at 778 Park Avenue for the princely sum of $20,000. The family had been renting two apartments at 1192 Park Avenue, one facing the armory to the north and the other facing Park Avenue. Lewis made the purchase at the insistence of his wife, who felt
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estate magnate, and Larry Tisch, the self-made billionaire and investor. He would play with these wealthy businessmen in their homes on Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue. Rapee told Cayne the rules for these games were simple: keep your cool, no frowning, no berating your partners for dumb moves, and no soliciting
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. Never was there any question about who was running Bear Stearns. It was Alan Greenberg.” Cayne called Lewis, who agreed to receive Cayne at his Park Avenue apartment. “He's got his slippers on,” Cayne said, “and he's got the butler with his scotch, and I tell him, ‘Now look, Cy
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week, Lewis had been instrumental in his career advancement. Slade told his partners he owed “everything” to Lewis for helping to make him rich. His Park Avenue apartment was lined with works by Picasso, Miró, and Chagall. Slade then gave Lewis a gold Piaget watch specially ordered from Switzerland. “As he started
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went public—that it had outgrown its headquarters at 55 Water Street. In March 1987, Bear announced that it was moving its headquarters to 245 Park Avenue, at 46th Street, and that half of its employees would be housed there. On July 13, Greenberg announced that the firm had a “record year
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smug self-satisfaction.” He reminded everyone that head count at the firm had increased by 800 during the year and that the move to 245 Park Avenue would significantly increase the firm's expenses. “Our industry is cyclical, and we are in the midst of the longest bull market in history,” he
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seeing great opportunities in all areas, particularly in personnel. I can assure you we are pursuing every lead at this very moment. Our move to Park Avenue will start shortly, and I truly believe that the timing is perfect. Just keep in mind it was just a few years ago that two
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him throughout his career from then on. “To escort visitors to meetings,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 1993, “the firm this year staffed its Park Avenue headquarters with models seductively clad in short skirts. After some women executives complained, Bear clothed the models— dubbed ‘geisha girls' because senior executives hatched the
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square block of land at 383 Madison Avenue, between 46th and 47th Streets, in Manhattan—just down the street from Bear's headquarters at 245 Park Avenue—upon which he would erect what he thought would be a monument to the firm he was guiding to higher and higher profitability and importance
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ninety-nine-year ground lease for $90 million. What had turned the tide in Bear's favor was that the Saudis had come to 270 Park Avenue to have lunch with William Harrison, then the CEO of Chase Manhattan, and, according to Flexner, “Harrison didn't show up and sent a junior
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account. Greenberg made his reputation as a canny trader, and to this day it is said that he regularly grills traders on the company's Park Avenue trading floor about why they are holding a position in this stock or that.” Yet, she argued, “investors dislike firms that are overly dependent on
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agreement “at the first hint of trouble.” That night, ironically, Steve Schwarzman, one of the two founders of the Blackstone Group, gave himself a boffo $4 million sixtieth-birthday party at the Armory on Park Avenue for 350 of Manhattan's glitterati. Martin Short emceed. Rod Stewart and Patti LaBelle sang. The menu included lobster, baked Alaska, and a
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great understatement of all time.” By this time, BSAM had moved out of 383 Madison Avenue into a separate office down 46th Street, at 237 Park Avenue. Friedman said he knew that Cioffi had suspended redemptions in one of the funds, but little else. “I go over to see Ralph with the
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an emergency medical call to her husband's physician, Dr. Jay Meltzer, a clinical professor of medicine at Columbia University with a private practice on Park Avenue. She told Meltzer that her husband was very weak and had no appetite. He also was having trouble drinking fluids and was experiencing dysuria, painful
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knew something serious had to be going wrong because this guy does not like to be sick,” Meltzer said. When Meltzer arrived at the Caynes' Park Avenue apartment at around seven from his apartment on Central Park West, he took Cayne's blood pressure. “When I got there it was 133 sitting
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discussed. But it was so automatic.” Cayne did not fully appreciate how upset this decision had made Greenberg until he went to Greenberg's eightieth-birthday party dinner at the Harmonie Club in November. He went by himself because his wife was at Bible class—she is a born-again Hasidic Jew
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, I know you very well. I know why this is happening. I know why you're angry. A month ago, I went to your eightieth-birthday party. Your wife was standing in the middle of the room at the Harmonie Club. And I go back a long way with her, where I
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to you, “it's his firm.”’” Cayne convinced Greenberg to stay at Bear Stearns. But between Kathryn Greenberg icing him at her husband's eightieth-birthday party and his convincing Greenberg to stay at the firm a month later, Cayne was thoroughy disgusted with the man who had hired him. “One of
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combined apartments, with 6,000 square feet of space plus maid service and room service, were around the corner from his longtime apartment at 510 Park Avenue. Although the new digs at the Plaza would require another year and millions of dollars more in cost before the Caynes could move in, it
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has been no evidence”: New York Sun, April 16, 2008. Chapter 13: Cy 153. Just after the start: NYT, May 1, 1923. 153. “mainly rich Park Avenue”: Judith Ramsey Ehrlich and Barry Rehfeld, The New Crowd (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1989), 143. Chapter 14: Ace 160. “He was a terrific boy”: Daily
The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything
by Jason Kelly · 10 Sep 2012 · 274pp · 81,008 words
in a Park Avenue apartment once occupied by Rockefellers. He has achieved enough wealth to have the nation’s most famous library—the Main Branch of the New York Public Library—renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in honor of his contribution of $100 million toward the building’s renovation and expansion. Companies Blackstone owns
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as saying. “I’m happy to be here. I was happy to make it to 60. That’s the simple reason for the birthday party.”7 Much to Schwarzman and Blackstone’s public relations team’s chagrin, the party has become an emblem for excess, shorthand for what’s wrong with private equity and
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phrase “the birthday party,” with something ranging from a smirk to a scowl. Most people don’t even mention Schwarzman’s name, but the details—a black-tie affair at the Park Avenue Armory in midtown Manhattan, replicating part of his apartment in the cavernous space, including a portrait of himself; the performances by Rod Stewart, Patti LaBelle
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of the strategy. Probably because it was not born of Blackstone, GSO feels the most distinct in terms of style and culture. By some combination of circumstance and desire, GSO was able to keep its offices a couple of buildings down Park Avenue from headquarters for several years. The differences were subtle, but
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-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1rAzfYUue 7. James B. Stewart, “The Birthday Party.” 8. Peter Lattman, “Birthdays Are Still Big in Buyout Land,” New York Times Dealbook. August 18, 2011. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/birthdays-are-still-big-in-buyout-land/ 9. Craig Karmin, “Blackstone Raises $10 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, February 24
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. While a Blackstone IPO may have been inevitable, its completion was far from certain in 2007. When the time came to actually sell the shares to the public, in the middle of 2007, Schwarzman knew he had to hurry. The year had been going exceedingly well. In addition to the birthday party, he’d
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built a firm beneath him that allows him to press Blackstone’s advantage. That means thinking about his biggest customers, staying ahead of the competition, and spending most of his time away from Park Avenue. Those billions aren’t going to raise themselves. Schwarzman has a habit of getting on a roll, oblivious to
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done, Asia would be waking up. He stood up and soon I was left staring at an empty chair. I descended from the Blackstone offices down to Park Avenue. Somewhere in midtown, David Rubenstein was likely regaling a would-be owner of his stock about the virtues of Carlyle’s impending public offering
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LeBlanc Teachers’ money commitment to Leon Black sixtieth birthday party on NYSE as one of biggest private-equity managers Teachers’ Retirement System of Texas and Apollo Global Management Arcapita Ares Arnold & Porter Arpey, Michael Assets under management (AUM) Bain & Co. and Blackstone hedge funds solutions business Blackstone real estate business Carlyle and Carlyle and
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. Rowe Taibbi, Matt TCW Teachers’ Retirement System of Texas Tehle, David Texas Instruments Texas Pacific Group. See TPG Texas Teachers The Texas Way “The Birthday Party” “The triumph of Blackstone on Wall Street” (Fortune) Thomas H. Lee Partners Three Ocean Partners Tigard Times Toronto-Dominion Toronto Maple Leafs Toys “R” Us TPG. See
Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland · 11 Oct 2012 · 481pp · 120,693 words
new, ascendant American plutocracy hosted another epoch-making gala, also on Park Avenue, this time at the Armory, less than a mile directly north of the grand hotel rooms where the Martins and their friends had frolicked. The guests at Steve Schwarzman’s sixtieth-birthday bash didn’t come in costume, and they arrived
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moguls (Mike Bloomberg, John Thain, Howard Stringer), and the entertainment was lavish—its highlight was a half-hour live performance by Rod Stewart, for which he was reportedly paid $1 million. Schwarzman’s friends evoked the same economic stimulus defense of the lavish celebration Martin’s supporters had voiced a century earlier. “This
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difference is the emerging markets and their first gilded age. Bunshaft’s signature construction is Lever House, a clean-lined modernist rectangle that presides over Park Avenue just across the street from the Four Seasons restaurant, the lunchtime canteen of Manhattan’s princes of finance. The architect designed just a few buildings
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me, ‘What happened in ’83? Why in ’83 did all of this intellectualism create mortgage securitization?’” Fink explained to me in his office just off Park Avenue in a 2010 conversation. “It was the technology revolution, which put computers on our desks. . . . It was really the advent of the PC and the
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protesters bloodily overthrew his father’s four-decade-long dictatorship, was courted by a private equity tycoon over Saturday lunch in his magnificent home on Park Avenue and gave speeches at Davos and at the Council on Foreign Relations. The London School of Economics accepted a £1.5 million gift from the
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, Schwarzman told Bloomberg TV when asked why he had decided to host a fund-raiser for Mitt Romney’s presidential bid at his triplex home at the storied apartment building at 740 Park Avenue. “In finance, that’s the way to make friends
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New York Fed, in March 2008 by saving Bear Stearns (admittedly at a fire sale price); Dimon even left his own star-studded fifty-second birthday party to make the transaction happen. Dimon insisted from the start that his bank took the TARP bailout money only as a favor to the Treasury
The Quants
by Scott Patterson · 2 Feb 2010 · 374pp · 114,600 words
for a tidy profit. They also like to party. The Tuesday after the Fortress IPO, Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder and chief executive of private equity powerhouse Blackstone Group, threw himself a lavish sixtieth-birthday bash in midtown Manhattan. Blackstone had just completed its $39 billion buyout of Equity Office Properties, the largest leveraged buyout in
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riches on Wall Street—though few knew it at the time. The location was the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue. New York police closed part of the fabled boulevard for the event. The five-foot-six Schwarzman didn’t need to travel far for the festivities. The elite gathering was held near his
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thirty-five-room Park Avenue co-op, once owned by oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. He’d reportedly paid $37 million
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with potables such as a 2004 Louis Jadot Chassagne-Montrachet. Comedian Martin Short emceed. Rod Stewart performed. Patti LaBelle and the Abyssinian Baptist Church choir sang Schwarzman’s praises, along with “Happy Birthday.” On its cover, Fortune magazine declared Schwarzman “Wall Street’s Man of the Moment.” High-society tongues were still wagging about
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master’s in business administration from Wharton. When he was twenty-eight, he joined the investment bank First Boston, working out of the bank’s Park Avenue office in New York. He started accumulating a large position in out-of-the-money Eurodollar futures contracts, one of the largest, most liquid markets
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be found. Some reading the email thought back to their history lessons and recalled that Columbus had been lost. Soon after, Griffin held his fortieth-birthday party at Joe’s Seafood Prime Steak and Stone Crab in downtown Chicago, a dozen blocks from Citadel’s headquarters. Employees presented Griffin with a lifeboat
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Giant Bets on Natural Gas Sank Brash Hedge-Fund Trader,” by Ann Davis, Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2006. They also like to party: “The Birthday Party,” by James B. Stewart, New Yorker, February 11, 2008. But one evening a colleague: “Going Under, Happily,” by Pete Muller as told to Loch Adamson
All the Money in the World
by Peter W. Bernstein · 17 Dec 2008 · 538pp · 147,612 words
$1 billion. He’s seeded twenty-five new hedge funds, which he says manage $13 billion in assets and are headquartered in his glass-walled Park Avenue offices. Still an investing legend, he helps underwrite public policy forays, such as Clinton’s Global Warming Initiative and the campaign for California’s 2002
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is a huge force—nothing is out of range for it. Nothing,” says venture capitalist Dick Kramlich. But the newly minted financiers, ensconced in their Park Avenue triplexes and Greenwich mansions, would do well to bear in mind the admonition of Henry Kravis, delivered in an early 2007 interview with the Wall
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in Moroccan costume and six hundred drummers, belly dancers, and jugglers. More recently, financier Stephen Schwarzman spent43 more than $3 million on his sixtieth birthday party at the Park Avenue Armory. The party, for about six hundred guests, included performances by rock crooner Rod Stewart and soul singer Patti LaBelle. It was as much the talk of the town
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Donald Trump. As if to drive home50 the extent of Schwarzman’s wealth, the venue, lit by chandeliers and embellished with orchids, was hung with a fifty-foot silk-screen re-creation of his $30 million apartment three blocks away at 740 Park Avenue—the most prestigious address in New York City. * * *
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, threw charity galas for the literary group PEN, and arranged dinner parties for the city’s movers and shakers at the couple’s spectacular 740 Park Avenue apartment. In the 1990s, the Steinbergs’ world came crashing down; Saul had a stroke and business reverses. Gayfryd memorably stood by her man, nursing
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Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. * * * If the Forbes 400 had an address51, in fact, it would be 740 Park Avenue. The building has been home to the city’s richest inhabitants ever since it opened its doors in October 1930, sheltering Rockefellers and Vanderbilts as
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Gogh at auction, guaranteed to enhance one’s brand and ensure it never loses its desirability.” Indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of 740 Park Avenue’s inhabitants that many of its residents profess the desire for anonymity while residing in one of the city’s most talked-about buildings. Displays
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parents trying to give their kids everything they never had as a child. “You wouldn’t find old money spending seventeen thousand dollars on a birthday party,” Hausner says. David Rockefeller Sr., the grandson of John D. Rockefeller and as old money as they come, is a case in point. He
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the late nineteenth century: Vanderbilt, Fortune’s Children, p. 110. 38. When Saul Steinberg’s twenty-five-year-old daughter: Leslie Eaton, “Selling the Farm, Park Avenue Style; For a Pair of Socialites, It’s Out with the Ormolu,” New York Times, May 27, 2000. 39. Wedding guests such as Norman Mailer
The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards · 7 Apr 2014 · 466pp · 127,728 words
Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The other Blackstone cofounder, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is a multibillionaire who became notorious for his sixtieth birthday party held at the New York Park Avenue Armory on February 13, 2007, just a few months before Blackstone’s sale. That party included a thirty-minute performance by Rod Stewart, for which the singer was reportedly paid
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Sorkin and David Barboza, “China to Buy $3 Billion Stake in Blackstone,” New York Times, May 20, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/worldbusiness/20cnd-yuan.html?pagewanted=print. notorious for his sixtieth birthday party . . . : James B. Stewart, “The Birthday Party,” New Yorker, February 11, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008
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. Stevis, Matina. “Euro Zone Closes in on Bank Plans.” Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2013, online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323734304578542941134353614.html. Stewart, James B. “The Birthday Party.” New Yorker, February 11, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/11/080211fa_fact_stewart. Subbotin, Alexander. “A Multi-Horizon Scale for Volatility.” Centre
Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase
by Duff McDonald · 5 Oct 2009 · 419pp · 130,627 words
Larchmont’s Murray Avenue School before his parents moved the family back into the city, this time to a four-bedroom co-op at 1050 Park Avenue. (Although he has accomplished much, Dimon’s is not a Horatio Alger tale. He has spent the majority of his life within the same five
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blocks on Park Avenue, home of New York’s upper class.) Ted Dimon, who eschewed borrowing money his whole life, paid cash for the apartment. • • • Themis Dimon wanted her
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personality, and he will not deny that. But he is no bully. He hates bullies. The Dimons, who lived at 86th and Park, walked down Park Avenue to school each day, picking up Paul on 77th Street. Already punctual to a fault as a teenager, Jamie Dimon insisted that the only time
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done. Dimon seemed to hope the same. Unaware that his own ouster was in the works, Dimon invited 100 Salomon Smith Barney brokers to his Park Avenue apartment on Sunday for brunch on his expansive terrace. As the brokers trickled in, he sat around in a Smith Barney tracksuit. Then Weill called
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guy, but his success was often based more on how he related to people.” Weill, was, and remains, a bit of a goofball. At a birthday party planned for him at The Four Seasons, the crowd listened to “I Heard It through the Grapevine” sung by a bunch of people dressed as
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1999, Theresa Sweeney picked up the office phone to hear Dimon on the other end. He told her to stand up and walk to the Park Avenue window. “You see that green patch between the lanes on Park?” he asked. “That’s where we’re going to be on Friday if we
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of wine and stared at Dimon’s whiteboard, envisioning the future. Over long dinners at the Della Femina restaurant in the Helmsley Building at 230 Park Avenue (now Bobby Van’s), they did more of the same. One day Posner found Dimon scribbling meticulously away on a single 8½ by 11 sheet
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, things started to get serious, and secrecy became a concern. They began meeting in a suite that JPMorgan Chase kept at the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue. Dimon also joined Harrison one night at Harrison’s home in Greenwich. As a matter of course, Dimon has always kept a one-page piece
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two teams had their own code words for the deal. Bank One called JPMorgan Chase “Park” in its documents (the bank’s headquarters were on Park Avenue) and called itself “Clark” (its own Chicago head office was on Clark Street). JPMorgan Chase referred to itself as “Jupiter” and called the smaller Bank
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week. Leaving home on Sunday night to come back to New York was depressing. I hated it.” The family eventually purchased a second apartment on Park Avenue for $4.875 million in December 2004, combining it with the one they already owned. Built in 1929, their apartment building is one of the
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Burr eventually settled their differences in a duel, and JPMorgan Chase owns the pistols they used. They’re displayed on the fiftieth floor of the Park Avenue headquarters and are worth an estimated $25 million. A banker named John Thompson founded the Chase National Bank in 1877. He named his firm after
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pages, Dimon did attend the $3 million birthday fete that the private equity kingpin Stephen Schwarzman threw for himself at the Park Avenue Armory in February 2007. The bash was seized on as a symbol of the new gilded age—Rod Stewart was paid $1 million to play for half an hour—and the city’s financial
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the history of the franchise in mind, Dimon also had the bank’s client dining rooms on the forty-ninth and fiftieth floors of 270 Park Avenue refurbished in 2007 and 2008. Spread across both floors are remarkable displays showcasing some of the company’s extensive collection of financial artifacts, including the
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, in fact, a number of executives, including the chief financial officer Mike Cavanagh and Charlie Scharf, sat in an eighth-floor conference room at 270 Park Avenue, getting ready to go to Seattle the following Monday. Washington Mutual, the Seattle-based bank, had run aground because of its own subprime mortgage troubles
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were interested. They were merely doing due diligence at breakneck speed. While several hundred top executives scurried around the company’s own headquarters at 270 Park Avenue holding meetings—some 2,000 people had been called in to work on the deal globally—Steve Black was thinking to himself, “Didn’t we
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and didn’t have one. With Bear Stearns, JPMorgan Chase had two investment banks, and so there was no interest whatsoever coming out of 270 Park Avenue. “For us, the close-down would have been astronomical,” said Dimon, referring to the mass layoffs and shuttering of duplicate facilities such a deal would
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
by Robert H. Frank · 31 Mar 2016 · 190pp · 53,409 words
the tax code. Consider Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, the fabled private-equity firm. Schwarzman lives well. He made the news in 2007 when he staged a $3-million sixtieth birthday party for himself and several hundred of his closest friends at the Armory on Park Avenue. According to Gawker’s coverage of the event, “Rod Stewart was paid $1
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-op at 740 Park Avenue.”18 But Schwarzman believes the government is taking