Bloomberg – Bruce Wasserstein, Stephen Schwarzman and Ken Moelis made their reputations on Wall Street by buying and selling companies. So why are they doing deals that Henry Paulson, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the king of takeovers, has so far resisted?
Wasserstein’s Lazard Ltd., Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group LP and UBS AG, where Moelis is president of investment banking, earned as much as $50 million advising hedge funds and corporate raiders on hostile takeovers and management shakeups in the past year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. While that’s what some CEOs make in a good year, it’s not enough to tempt Goldman, which has much more at stake helping companies that disdain hedge funds and raiders alike.
Goldman’s mergers and acquisitions group raked in about $735 million in the first quarter, more than any Wall Street rival. The New York-based firm is the world’s top merger adviser for the past five years, serving corporate clients including Walt Disney Co., General Motors Corp. and Knight Ridder Inc.
“Advising activist shareholders isn’t a long-term business strategy that makes sense for Goldman Sachs,” said Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University who was the senior international partner at Goldman during the 1980s. “They have a lot at stake with their client business.”
