Here we go, straight from the SEC filing:
Why We Are Going Public
We have decided to become a public company:
• to access new sources of permanent capital that we can use to invest in our existing businesses, to expand into complementary new businesses and to further strengthen our development as an enduring institution;
• to
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Blackstone has turned its S-1 (its IPO filing) into the SEC, and thanks to the magic of the Internets it’s already up and available for perusal by all.
Here’s the first interesting thing I’ve learned: Its corporate private equity funds have earned investors 22.8% a year, after fees, since 1987. For “real estate opportunity,” around …
My friend Simon Robinson, our esteemed South Asia bureau chief, sent me this story. He wrote:
What should you do when you make a mistake–a genuine mistake–that impacts your company in a minor (or major–read below!) way? I assume you should take the route my three-year-old does and ‘fess up with the line, “It was an accident!” Pretty
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Well, this is pretty interesting. From the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story:
News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as soon as today that they are creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends, according to people close to the negotiations.
The two
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The other day I was honored to receive the first-ever Maxwell Smart Prize for Mediocrity in Financial Journalism, from the private-equity blog Going Private. The citation declared that my offense was the sentence (regarding the Blackstone Group’s rumored IPO):
It does nicely underscore the basic truth of the private equity business,
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Rob Sellar, head of North American equities for Aberdeen Asset Management, a big British investment house with a value bent, stopped by today and offered this bit of observation/investment advice:
At the end of the day, the brokerage community is all about generating noise, because that generates turnover.
A little later he said:
I hate
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ZDNet blogger Donna Bogatin, who pays much closer attention to Google than I ever will, raked my Google vs. Big Media column over the coals last week. At least, I think that what she was doing–her post spends a lot of its time countering arguments that I never really made, but perhaps are espoused by the more Web-2.0-besotted among …
I recently attended a job fair. Not because I was looking for work; I am, as of 4:19 p.m. on March 20, 2007, still, to my knowledge, employed. I went on assignment to talk to a particular set of jobseekers. I can’t tell you who just yet–not until my story meets its usual fate, bludgeoned to a mangy pulp and left for dead in the morgue …
Turns out I wasn’t the first to make the private equity/conglomerate connection. Back in April, the anonymous author of the blog Going Private (subtitled “The Sardonic Memoirs of a Private Equity Professional”) complained that private equity firms and hedge funds were getting too big and unfocused:
Didn’t we learn in the 1980s that
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I missed the breakingviews.com scoop last week on Carlyle Group co-founder Bill Conway warning his colleagues that private equity’s salad days are coming to an end. It’s very interesting:
In a recent memo to Carlyle’s investment professionals obtained by breakingviews.com, Conway acknowledges the firm’s “fabulous profits are not solely a
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I’m still trying to get my head around the news that, after years of badmouthing public equity markets, Steve Schwarzman is thinking of taking Blackstone Group public. It does nicely underscore the basic truth of the private equity business, which is that without public markets on which to buy and sell companies, it couldn’t exist.
When …
We’ve heard about the $6,000 shower curtains and the gilded umbrella stand. So we’re not exactly gobsmacked to hear former Enron head Kenneth Lay’s office was decked out in similarly tasteful style.
Now you, too, can experience the sensation of steering a multibillion-dollar corporation into the ground! You–yes, you–can buy the late …
