Known best in the Valley for co-founding PayPal and serving on the board of highly-valued Facebook, on Wall Street Thiel is becoming better known as a hedge-fund wunderkind — Clarium Capital, the fund Thiel manages, is well past $3 billion may have already hit the $6 billion mark. The fund's take for taking care of…
Super-rich guys who work in private equity may be the masters of the universe, but it's remarkably easy to get under their skin. All it takes is some crappy "street theater" mocking them as mean, heartless wealthy elites, and they run back into their corner offices and cry into their monogrammed handkerchiefs. The…
Further evidence it's an election year: One of the biggest unions in the country, Service Employees International Union (or S.E.I.U.) is teaming up with MoveOn.org and Amnesty International to expand its campaign against private equity firms. (This is the same group, as you may recall, that staged protests outside…
How awesome is the private-equity business? Private-jet awesome. That's the message that Bertram Capital vice president Michael Chang likely hoped to send to friends when he posted an album of photos to Facebook from his firm's trip to Cabo San Lucas. Slightly less awesome reality: Bertram had to borrow the jet from…
Private equity management fees, the percentage these fancy financiers charge merely to hold onto the riches' money, reached $33 billion in 2007, up 83 percent from $18 billion in 2003. Venture funds charged investors $6.8 billion during the year. These fees do not, of course, include the fund managers' share of…
Bear Stearns' epic fail will make M&A financing hard to come by. IPOs seem to have gone the way of Kozmo.com. That leaves exactly zero practical exit strategies for VCs. I came away with that insight after swimming through the flood of water metaphors in Tom Abate's economic pulse-taker in the Chronicle.
Asian markets tanked this morning and the U.S. dollar fell to lowest level in three years, but private equity investors — including venture capitalists — are still looking to spend at least another $820 billion, according to Preqin, a London-based research firm. [OhMyNews]
White financiers are all flooding up to the Waldorf Astoria this morning for the opening of today's Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst confab! The topics and the attendees are undeniably sexy; Paul Gigot, the WSJ's editorial page editor, Hamilton James, president of Blackstone Group, and, most of all, David Rubenstein,…
