David
Bonderman did from throwing a 70th birthday bash for about 700 of his
closest friends at the Wynn resort in Las Vegas on Saturday night.
Paul
McCartney was the party’s surprise musical guest, playing for more than
two hours. Himself a newly minted septuagenarian, the former Beatle
headlined a concert that also featured the comedian Robin Williams and
the rocker John Fogerty. Mr. McCartney played numerous Beatles hits, and a song befitting a 70th birthday, “Long
and Winding Road.”
“Paul McCartney is now playing at Bonderman’s bday bash in Vegas,”
wrote Jon States, who described himself as a concert promoter, on his
Twitter feed Saturday night. “Amazing to see him in such an intimate
setting #onceinalifetime.”
The party for Mr. Bonderman, the founding partner
of TPG, is the latest extravagant birthday celebration thrown by a
private equity billionaire. During the summer of 2010, Leon D. Black
marked his 60th with a show by Elton John at his oceanfront estate in
Southampton, on Long Island. Stephen A. Schwarzman’s 60th, thrown at the
Park Avenue Armory in 2007 and featuring a Rod Stewart concert, became a
symbol of the new Gilded Age.
Indeed, it was “Bondo,” which is
what his friends and colleagues call him, who set the standard for these
blowouts a decade ago. For his 60th birthday, held at the Hard Rock in
Las Vegas, he hired the Rolling Stones and John Mellencamp to play a
concert.
The
aging rockers who play these affairs, Mr. McCartney, along with the
Rolling Stones and Elton John, are part of a growing cottage industry of
stars that play private concerts for hire. Mr. Bonderman was not even
the first moneyman to score Mr. McCartney as a headline act. In 2003,
the San Diego money manager Ralph V. Whitworth hired Sir Paul to play at
his wife’s 50th birthday.
It is unclear how much Mr. McCartney
earned for Saturday night’s performance, but music-industry executives
say that his ask is well north of $1 million.
Whatever the
appearance fee, it was a rounding error for Mr. Bonderman, who is worth
about $2.6 billion, according to Forbes magazine. A Harvard Law School
graduate, he began his career as a civil rights lawyer and bankruptcy
lawyer in Washington before moving to Texas to work for the billionaire
financier Robert Bass.
In 1993, he and his colleague, James
Coulter, left Bass to start TPG. The firm, based in Fort Worth, Texas,
and San Francisco, has ownership stakes in businesses including the
clothing company J. Crew, the retailer Neiman Marcus, the
Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, and the health care business IMS
Health.
TPG has posted tepid returns in its most recent fund in
part because of two of its largest investments that have gone sour. The
firm’s $1.35 billion investment in 2008 in Washington Mutual was wiped
out after the government seized the Seattle thrift and sold it to
JPMorganChase. And TPG has written down nearly the entire value of its
stake in Energy Future Holdings, the Texas utility that it acquired in
the largest leveraged buyout ever, a $44 billion top-of-the-market deal
struck in 2007.
The firm’s latest fund – TPG VI, a nearly $20
billion pool of capital raised in 2008 – has generated a net return of
1.46 percent since inception.
But TPG’s issues, along with those
of the broader private equity industry, were put aside this past
weekend. Guests at Mr. Bonderman’s party included Hamilton E. James, the
president of the private equity firm Blackstone Group; Michael D.
Eisner, the former chief executive of Disney; and Marc E. Kasowitz, the
New York trial lawyer. Mr. Bonderman donated $1,000 to a charity of each
guest’s choice.
“Just a Sat nite bday bash in Vegas with Robin
Williams, John Fogerty, and Paul McCartney,” wrote Charlotte Moss, a New
York interior designer who attended the party, on her Twitter feed. “We
rocked the Wynn.”
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