Bruce Wasserstein

Bruce Wasserstein

1947–2009

Before Bruce Wasserstein, investment banking was widely seen as a stodgy field, dominated by anonymous dealmakers working quietly with select clients. But the boisterous, disheveled Wasserstein, who died last week at 61, changed all that. In the 1980s he helped redefine investment banking as a flamboyant, cutthroat business by negotiating many highly public, highly priced mergers and acquisitions. Wasserstein was involved in more than 1,000 deals totaling $250 billion, and his talent for producing outsize prices earned him the nickname “Bid ’Em Up Bruce”—a moniker he reportedly detested.

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One sister, the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein, noted that he was born on Christmas Day “with, according to my mother, messiah potential,” said The New York Times. Graduating from the University of Michigan at 19, he earned dual honors degrees from Harvard’s law and business schools at 23. After working briefly for Ralph Nader, Wasserstein joined the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, but soon left law for banking, becoming head of mergers and acquisitions for First Boston. There he met Joseph Perella, and together they “built the firm into a powerhouse deal shop.” For Wasserstein, deal-making wasn’t “built on relationships,” but was “more akin to war, built on complex tactics and armies of bankers and lawyers.” At First Boston and later at the namesake firm he founded with Perella—sometimes called “Wasserella”—Wasserstein led “many of the deals that symbolized the frenzy of 1980s Wall Street.” These included the $3.5 billion sale of ABC to Capital Cities, the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Bros. for $15 billion, and Philip Morris’ $13 billion bid for Kraft. Most famously, Wasserstein negotiated Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’ $31.5 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco in 1989, “immortalized in the book and movie Barbarians at the Gate.”

“Paunchy, balding, and often seen with shirttail hanging out,” Wasserstein was relentlessly single-minded, said the London Times. His team would titillate prospective clients with what they called “Bruce Foreplay”—the assurance that Wasserstein himself would “personally supervise their bids.” To those who were “dithering over whether to press the button on a career-making or career-breaking takeover,” Wasserstein would deliver a famous exhortation “known as the ‘dare to be great’ speech.” Wasserstein anecdotes were legend; once, he “carefully tore a business card into small pieces before the eyes of its owner, who was trying to pitch an idea to him.” But he was not infallible. In 2000, “at the peak of the dot-com bubble,” Wasserstein was an advisor on the AOL–Time Warner merger—considered one of the most ill-conceived corporate mergers ever.

Perella split with Wasserstein in 1993, and “in 2000 Wasserstein sold his boutique bank to Germany’s Dresdner Bank for $1.5 billion,” said The Wall Street Journal. “Wasserstein resurfaced in 2002,” becoming chairman of Lazard Frères & Co., which he took public in 2005. Late in his career Wasserstein also emerged as a leading Manhattan media owner; among his purchases were New York magazine and American Lawyer. “Forbes magazine re-cently estimated his wealth at $2.2 billion, ranking him 147th on its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.” Divorced three times, Wasserstein is survived by his fourth wife, shipping executive Angela Chao, and seven children.