The Ledger, every show

“The private equity business, they'd raised a fund and had made a couple of disastrous investors so that, that were within a year write-offs with about a third of the fund.”

“Every one of our acquisitions worked. There were two that didn't really move the needle strategically, but we made a very good return on the investment. We probably made three or four times our money.”

“Credit Suisse had all kinds of ethical lapses. DLJ had none, but they had immense controllers and process and whatnot. DLJ was skeletal.”

“I, you know, so I think there'll be some correction in private markets, but it's not going to be 2008 where you were destabilizing the system because it's not owned by banks at 30 to one leverage or these days the leverage is lower, but plenty were 20 to 30 to…”

“I think I think one of the great opportunities right now is there's about 30,000 portfolio companies of mid-market private equity firms that can't be sold, can't go public, there's no strategy. You know, 20 trillion or something worth of value. All those compa…”

“We accounted for all, 40% of all trading volume and high yield for 12 years.”

“I think it was the third biggest LBO ever called we bought the retailing subsidiaries from Household International. We ended up with Vons and Ben Franklin and TGI and Coast to Coast Hardware Stores, and we sliced and diced and sold them all, and we closed, and…”

“But we sold it for fourteen billion of cash, and two or three years later Morgan Stanley sold for eight.”

“We did that first of all, by basically telling people they can't sell any stock for eight years.”

“And we didn't lose anyone that we didn't want to lose for eight years.”

“So we bought it for a hundred and nineteen million. It's a hundred and twenty billion dollar business today. It's worth tens of billions.”

“I think our first fund had a 90% IRR.”

“And that, and we built that business when we sold DOJ to Credit Suisse, it was about a twenty-nine billion dollar AUM business. Blackstone at the time was high teens”

“So the more value we give, so whatever, if Costco can go find a new source for batteries and save a nickel, a hundred percent of that nickel gets lower prices. None of it goes into higher margin.”

“AIG had just put a hundred million dollars into Blackstone for 10% of the company and the rights to invest in our funds. So, at best, it was worth a billion dollars, and when I left, it was worth a 170.”

“I think virtually every, the leader of every business almost was changed, because a lot of culture comes from leadership.”

“Institutions have generally 25% of their assets in, in alternatives, let's say. The more sophisticated ones, like endowments, are 50. Retail was at two percent.”

“Blackstone wasn't a firm. It was a 173 independent partnerships, all with different percentage ownerships. Every fund had a different percentage ownership than every other fund.”

“Added seventy-five million dollars a year at the time to our operating cost, which is not nothing, a lot more today.”

“Steve delegated to me, and I did really with no one else in the firm actually helping for nine months. I did it at night, and worked out all this with bankers, outside bankers and lawyers, but not internal people.”

“I had at one point, I think, 50 direct reports.”

“So eight percent of African Americans that go to college go to HBCUs. But 16% of black graduates graduate from HBCUs. So twice the graduation rate. And then those graduates earn, on average, 50% higher lifetime income than black graduates of non-HBCUs.”

“We grew DLJ from essentially nothing to the fifth largest securities firm. We grew it at over 15% for 25 consecutive years.”

“The big turning point, I would say, was 1980 when KKR did a LBO for Hudai Industries, the first big public company that went, actually, was taken private.”

“By the way, we agreed 98% of the time.”