13 Dec THE SMARTEST PERSON I EVER MET
December 11, 2024; Kuala Lumpur: One of our secrets is this: We learn more from our clients than we could ever teach them. It’s our secret and blessing. Our clients pay us to learn from them. And I’ve been personally blessed to have worked with and met some of the smartest people ever: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Mike Milken, Warren Buffet, Nobel Prize winners, and the best of the best of Ivy League professors.
But the smartest of them all passed away today, David Bonderman.
Twenty-some years ago, I partnered with David Bonderman in then one of the biggest investment banking deals in Asia, Texas Pacific Group’s acquisition of Korea First Bank, and its subsequent sale to Standard & Charter. David himself made many billions of dollars on this deal . . . maybe one reason he always liked me.
As with so many insurgent change leaders we’ve worked with, David Bonderman invented new ways of thinking including a firm that would change the face of private equity, Texas Pacific Group, or TPG Capital. David, who was Jewish, won a scholarship for a year of study in Cairo, Egypt and became fluent in Modern Standard Arabic and a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence and law. He was a Harvard-trained lawyer and partner at Arnold and Porter who successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court—before he ever took a course in or thought about accounting.
Soon, David Bonderman was reinventing accounting for the Bass Brothers and then moving off to partner with James Coulter to form a new kind of thing, a private equity firm, TPG Capital. David jetted around the world looking for deals and adventure, and he and Coulter guided TPG Capital to greatness and to its own successful multi-billion-dollar IPO in 2022.
But what I remember most about David Bonderman were two things: The first, in the late 1990s, was when my partner Bobby Armao and I spent a year working in Korea with David and his team to secure the successful acquisition and later sale of Korea First Bank. Every other day, we’d conference call with the smartest investment bankers from Morgan Stanley and the smartest deal lawyers and advisors on the planet. But David Bonderman was invariably one step ahead of us all, one piece of new thinking ahead, one piece of future strategy ahead: inching the deal forward. In other words, David just thought differently—and he was invariably unafraid to deploy this secret weapon. He kept thinking differently.
The second thing I remember about David Bonderman was a confrontation in the early 2000s at the prestigious Milken Conference in Beverly Hills, while on a panel, he was attacked by a relatively extreme climate change advocate for not doing more to protect the environment. Now, David was controversial, for example, when he decided to have the Rolling Stones play at his 60th birthday party that personally cost $7 million. But he was also passionate about climate change. And, on this afternoon, David went into another gear: He knew multitudes more about climate change than his attacker, or maybe than anyone listening, and he talked about his work and passion for The Wilderness Society, the Grand Canyon Trust, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and the Himalayan Foundation and his solutions for climate change and ended with the simple point that he was more focused on pragmatic problem solving than ideology. His attacker listened. We all listened.
David Bonderman bought sports teams and, remembering his Egypt experience, invented philanthropic programs like the Bonderman Travel Scholarship to send students to faraway places to study. He was unafraid of failing—and failing he did, on multiple deal crashes, and dramatic money losses. But in becoming a self-made multi-billionaire, David somehow trusted in the old adage: “Half the things in life you deserve, and you don’t get . . . but the other half you don’t deserve, and you get.”
David Bonderman was unafraid of thinking differently and of leading change. And the rewards of that courage will echo beyond his passing and attach to the many people he touched along the way of a life well lived.
David Morey is Chairman and CEO of DMG Global, and has advised 22 winning global presidential campaigns and a Who’s Who of some of history’s greatest business leaders, including David Bonderman.
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