The culture at large may have been dumbed down, but business culture was smart, competitive, obsessive, relentless in its pursuit of the next best idea. Business became the ultimate abstraction. A new, near-philosophical language was invented to deal with the many-hued nature of reality and nonreality that the world of business was defining (it was as Utopian as the language of revolution). Business became the focus of how people related to one another, of how communities were created, of how human progress was made. Business, as a system of logic that would allow you to accomplish any goal, at potential great benefit to everyone (and with a little extra to the person running the spreadsheet), was the metaphor of the age: The rich would get richer, and so would everybody else.
And the rich would get richer to a degree that had no precedent in history.
If he had not left the New York Times, Rattner would have earned, in twenty years, assuming a stellar career, an aggregate of $3 million to $5 million dollars (he would have been making about $50,000 in 1982 and something more than $300,000 in 2002). In twenty years as an investment banker (he was already making $1 million a year two years into his new job) with a stellar career he would have earned $300 million to $500 million.
The point is not just the hundredfold difference. It is that in the former scenario, he and his family would have lived a middle-class life in Manhattan or the suburbs, with minimal net worth to show for it, while in the latter he would have both supported his family in maximum style, while his net worth appreciated vastly, supplying his family with almost unlimited wealth for generations to come.
In other words, the difference here is not just between a reporter who makes less than a banker and lives a different sort of lifestyle (say between the Upper West Side and Larchmont—as it might have been in the fifties, sixties, and seventies), but between a reporter without assets and one of the richest men in the world, between a functionary in the information business and one of its key leaders.
Even if Steve Rattner had become the executive editor of the New York Times—that could hardly compare with the personal influence and freedom he had achieved.
He had gone to Lehman Bros, then to Morgan Stanley, and then to Lazard Frères, where he was the number two.
Lazard, for a long time, remained a rarefied Wall Street place. It was not so much a player as the firm that played the players. It sold pure knowingness, synthesis, metathinking. It made its money not through the amassing of so many less-dignified commissions, or through the creation and retailing of financial instruments, but through the discipline and mystique of the mandarin.
These were the behind-the-curtain players.
In some sense, Rattner finds the true value here of the New York Times. The $50,000-a-year job he had in 1982 is converted into a $20-or $30- or $40-million-a-year job.
This is almost a pure business-model point. You can retail your expertise the way a newspaper does, or you can do it the way an exclusive investment banking firm does. The point is about packaging and distribution.
There’s a personal point too, of course. Few New York Times reporters, even the best business-desk people, could show up downtown and be seen to have great value to anyone. They are sloppy, and literal, and indiscreet—all flat affect.
The value, however, is in the package—in talking the talk and walking the walk.
Rattner is, too, by temperament, a social climber. This is a rarer attribute than you might think in this celebrity age; most people, in and out of business, have a natural and ingrained reticence. They’re shy. Insecure. Afraid. Ashamed.
Social climbing requires complex emotional breadth and stamina—and often a novelist’s, or courtesan’s, understanding of individual value and distinction and of the myriad underlying relationships in any given room, or professional or social circumstance.
You have to be both arrogant and obsequious.
You have to be able to both know your place and to be able to cleverly advance it.
You have to be shameless.
Indeed, the premium on social climbing and starfucking, and people who have the shamelessness to engage in it, is so great that it has meant that a great number of vulgar, tawdry, unrefined people have been accepted into and elevated up the social and business ranks.
Rattner had the great advantage then of being an active and willing social climber but not being sleazy. He was very smooth.
He has a certain degree of Wasp aestheticism—or Wasp envy. Formality. Reserve. Efficiency. Soft-spokenness. (He was a kind of perfect museum board member.)
As it happens, none of these are particular virtues of media moguls. But Rattner’s qualities turned out to be good banker qualities, especially for the Lazard kind of banker. He seemed like a wise man and a careful man, and a man who kept confidences and secrets.
There were suddenly, however, much easier ways to make much more money than the way Lazard was making it—and Lazard was making a lot of money.
For the three or four or five years of the big boom (depending when you got with the boom), what you wanted to be doing was owning pieces of these vastly inflating enterprises. You didn’t want to be just in the advisory and fee-generating business—which Lazard was in. You wanted to be buying into, at a ground floor price, some of the most outrageous wealth-creation schemes (i.e., stock speculations) that have ever been created.
You wanted to be a promoter rather than an advisor.
Now, there were reasons that you wouldn’t want to be this. To be an advisor was not only fiscally more prudent, but it was not sleazy. Indeed, that is what you were selling: I’m not sleazy.
But the sheer breathtaking, beyond-imagination amounts of money that could easily be made destablized these trade-offs and underlying value propositions. There was no kind of respectability that could compete with the respectability that came from billions. And the more people who made these billions, the less respectable you seemed without you yourself having billions.
So Lazard, in the last years of the boom, clinging to respectability looked dowdy, out-of-it, failing.
Now, Rattner was fabulously rich anyway. He didn’t need Lazard anymore. Rather, he seemed to have already designed his segue. He had risen through the ranks of Clinton administration favorites, contributing money, raising money, playing personal host to the homeless first family. He had even now successfully transferred this affinity to Gore and his prospective administration.
He was about to be that historically important figure, the Wall Street guy who goes to Washington.
The upside here was really fabulous. He had made hundreds of millions, and now he was going to have historical stature added to the résumé (and be able to someday go back and make, potentially, hundreds of millions more). He was going to be Bob Rubin, or even Clark Clifford.
But it didn’t turn out that way. The Democrats died.
Hence, Quadrangle.
You create a vehicle for economic self-expression.
It’s less your business than your business avatar. It’s going to represent your business, economic, organizational, and technological philosophy.
Because you have made money before, money is now going to come to you, reside under your command like the armies of lesser lords. The money is your instrument.
A fund.
To have a fund.
Pete Peterson, the former treasury secretary, started a fund called Blackstone Group, which, in addition to making him vastly more wealthy, made him more central, engaged, called upon, than he was as treasury secretary. Before Peterson, another treasury secretary, William Simon, created Wesray, and arguably created the model for the personal fund. Henry Kravis, at KKR, with his fund became the seminal businessman of the eighties. John Doerr at Kleiner, Perkins made his venture capital fund the virtual arbiter of the nineties.
Leverage,