Corporate buyout king Henry Kravis is donating $100 million to Columbia's Business School, which will help the school add 450,000 square feet of space. Which raises an interesting point about these types of donations: they are loathsome.
Julie Chen, co-anchor of the CBS Early Show and the wife of CBS honcho Les Moonves turns 40 today. Henry Kravis, the billionaire financier and co-founder of the private equity giant KKR, is turning 66. Film director John Singleton is 42. British food writer/TV personality Nigella Lawson is 50. Novelist E.L. Doctorow…
Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman Tops Best-Paid Chiefs [Bloomberg]
Steve Schwarzman [Twitter]
Mayor Bloomberg had dinner last night with Henry Kravis at Raoul's in Soho. "Security is everywhere." [Twitter]
The downtown Armory played host to the 37th annual Fragrance Foundation FiFi Awards last night. A big bunch of celebs and designerswere on hand as Marc Jacobs was inducted into the foundation's Hall of Fame, including fellow award winners like Diddy and Paris, as well as Queen Latifah, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer,…
• Bank of America sold off a $7.3 billion stake in China Construction Bank as it seeks to raise cash. Good news: only $26.6 billion to go! [DB]
• Andrew Cuomo is expected to announce that Hank Morris has pleaded guilty in the pension fund probe and will be cooperating with the investigation. [WSJ]
• Citigroup has lent…
• Andrew Cuomo reports that 15 of the top 20 recipients of the $165 million in AIG bonuses have agreed to give back the cash. As for the other five, Cuomo is still "thinking about" releasing their names. Hint, hint. [NYT]
• Tim Geithner will call for the Treasury to be granted the power to seize troubled financial…
At last month's orgy of consumption that was the Yves Saint-Laurent's art auction, a $28 million armchair claimed the prize for decadence. Now The Economist has revealed the mogul who flaunted his obscene wealth:
Last week, Henry Kravis's two publicly-traded investment vehicles reported losses of more than 90 percent "after writedowns on takeovers, mortgages and corporate loans." Now vehicles are plowing into his Park Avenue apartment building. Consider it yet another perfect metaphor for the times. [NYSD]
• Andrew Cuomo may demand the return of $4 billion in bonuses paid by Merrill Lynch just before it was acquired by Bank of America. [BN]
• U.S. GDP shrank 3.8% in the fourth quarter, the most since 1982. [BN, NYT]
• Two senators have introduced legislation to regulate hedge funds. [NYT]
• A handful of ex-Merrill execs…
Legendary financier Henry Kravis turns 65 today. This means he can now begin collecting full social security benefits, which he may very well need at the rate he's going. Also celebrating: Julie Chen, the Early Show co-anchor and wife of CBS chief Les Moonves, is 39. Director John Singleton is turning 41. British food…
The list of election '08 losers is a long one: There's John McCain, of course, who will die angry and bitter, notwithstanding his rather gracious concession speech last night. Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief strategist, will probably have trouble finding a Little League team to advise, unless he manages to redeem…
Unsurprisingly, there aren't so many people wanting to invest millions in pretty (or not so pretty) pictures at the moment: At Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art auction last night, only 64 percent of the lots sold. Still, it's not quite time to get the violins out: The overall tally was $223.8 million, which…
♦ Treasury officials say as many as 1,800 institutions may apply for government investments in the next few weeks. [WSJ]
♦ GM hasn't been so lucky extracting cash: The Treasury has turned down a request by the automaker for $10 billion to help finance a merger with Chrysler. [NYT]
♦ Henry Kravis's KKR is delaying…
Now is not a good time to be in the auction business, especially if your business involved selling overpriced items to people who have just lost all their money in the market. Sales were extremely slow at Sotheby's "Exceptional Wines" auction on Tuesday night: Only 70 percent of the 190 lots were ultimately…
Heart congrats to Henry Kravis: The billionaire financier unveiled a new website for his private equity giant today. The site is still missing glossy headshots of Kravis himself (and, sadly, he has not yet followed Carl Icahn's lead and started a blog), although the site does now sport slick Chinese and Japanese…
♦ It was the Metropolitan Opera's 125th opening night on Monday and so naturally a long list of recognizable faces trooped out for the occasion. In floor-length gowns and tuxes to walk the red carpet and watch Renée Fleming: Barbara Walters, Howard Stringer, Michael Bloomberg, Helen Mirren, Christie Brinkley, Faye…
Billionaire moguls Steve Schwarzman and Henry Kravis have never liked each other much. The private equity kingpins have competed for years for deals and priceless works of art; last year, they exchanged barbs in the press when Kravis called Schwarzman "the poster boy for greed" and Schwarzman referred to Kravis as a…
Vanity Fair's perplexing list of the "New Establishment," that collection of people who aren't remotely "new" but certainly represent the establishment, is now online! The usual suspects (and Graydon Carter pals) continue to dominate (Barry Diller, Ron Perelman, Steven Spielberg), but there have been a few changes,…
