King of Capital

CHAPTER 1
The Debutants

"More Rumors About His Party Than About His Deals, blared the front-page headline in the New York Times in late Janu­ary 2007. It was a curtain-raiser for what was shaping up to be the social event of the season, if not the era. By then, the buzz had been building for weeks.

Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder of the Blackstone Group, the world s largest private equity rm, was about to turn sixty and was planning a fête. The nancier 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- oor spread in Park Avenue 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 forti ed brick edi ce that occupies a full square block amid the metropolis s most ex­pensive addresses. 

On the night of February 13 limousines queued up and the boldface names in tuxedos and evening dresses poured out and led past an en­campment of reporters into the hangarlike armory. TV perennial Barbara Walters was there, Donald and Melania Trump, media diva Tina Brown, Cardinal Egan of the Archdiocese of New York, Sir Howard Stringer, the head of Sony, and a few hundred other luminaries, including the chief ex­ecutives of some of the nation s biggest banks: Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Stanley O Neal of Merrill Lynch, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, and Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns. 

Inside the cavernous armory hung a huge indoor canopy . . . with a darkened sky of sparkling stars suspended above a grand chandelier, mimicking the living room in Schwarzman s $30 million apartment nearby, the New York Post reported the next day. The decor was copied, the paper observed, even down to a grandfather clock and Old Masters paintings on the wall.  

R&B star Patti LaBelle was on hand to sing

David Carey and John E. Morris

The authors [take] us from the early days of the Blackstone Group, when the firm was just two guys and a secretary, to the buyout boom, when Mr. Schwarzman s conspicuous consumption became a symbol of the new Gilded Age. In between, the book dives deeply into the firm s signature deals Celanese! Nalco! Distressed cable bonds! that made Mr. Schwarzman and his partners so rich. It also delivers some fun details about many of the now-famous Wall Street players that did tours of duty at the firm.
New York Times DealBook

Carey and Morris thorough reporting offers a compelling look into the little understood Wall Street giant and the secrets of its success.
Worth Magazine

[R]anks as one of the most even-handed treatments of the industry. David Carey and John Morris . . . received unusual access to Blackstone. . . . This allowed them to chronicle the firm in full and entertaining fashion across its 25-year history.
Bloomberg Brief Mergers

[A] broad history of private equity, with Blackstone as the touchstone.
Fortune.com
 
Check out "King of Capital" because it's got gossip, it's got brains, and it's as readable as hell. And it's got some really good Schwarzman stories too.
The Deal

"King of Capital aspires to be a serious portrait of Blackstone and the way that Schwarzman so brilliantly built it up, scoring numerous coups along the way and avoiding the mistakes of many competitors. And it does a fine job in what it sets out to do."
Financial Times

The authors link Blackstone s history to the larger story of private equity s expansion and its relationship to corporate America. They offer a lucid explanation of how the debt markets evolved from junk bonds to securitised loans, changing the types of deals that private-equity firms were able to finance.
The Economist