Henry Kravis

Henry Kravis Biography

Henry R. Kravis (born January 6, 1944) is an American businessman. He is the co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a private equity firm with over $62 billion in assets as of 2011. He has an estimated net worth of $4 billion as of March 2012, ranked by Forbes as the 88th richest man in America and the 281st richest man in the world. He mainly lives in New York City and has a residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

Early life

Kravis was born into a Jewish family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of Bessie (Roberts) and Raymond Kravis, a successful Tulsa oil engineer who had been a business partner of Joseph P. Kennedy. Kravis began his education at the Eaglebrook School, ('60) followed by high school at the Loomis Chaffee School. He then majored in economics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California and graduated in 1967 before going on to Columbia Business School, where he received an MBA degree in 1969.

Career

Kravis at Bear Stearns

After working at various jobs in New York City's financial sector, he and his first cousin, George R. Roberts, joined the staff of Bear Stearns. Kravis and Roberts share the same grandfather, an immigrant from Russia. There, they worked under the corporate finance manager, Jerome Kohlberg, Jr.. They both became partners at Bear Stearns at a very young age, 30 and 31.

Working for Bear Stearns in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kravis, alongside Kohlberg and Roberts began a series of what they described as "bootstrap" investments. In the following years Kohlberg and later Kravis and Roberts would complete a series of buyouts including Stern Metals (1965), Incom (a division of Rockwood International, 1971), Cobblers Industries (1971), and Boren Clay (1973) as well as Thompson Wire, Eagle Motors and Barrows through their investment in Stern Metals. Although they had a number of highly successful investments, the $27 million investment in Cobblers ended in bankruptcy. Kravis and his associates created a series of limited partnerships to acquire these various corporations, ones they judged were performing well below their sales and profit potential or where there were untapped financial assets that could be monetized.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts

Main article: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts

By 1976, tensions had built up between Bear Stearns and the trio of Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts leading to their departure and the formation of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in that year. Most notably, Bear Stearns executive Cy Lewis had rejected repeated proposals to form a dedicated investment fund within Bear Stearns and Lewis took exception to the amount of time spent on outside activities.

Early investors in KKR included the Hillman Family and the Griffith family (who are also large shareholders in MGM and Time-Warner) By 1978, with the revision of the ERISA regulations, the nascent KKR was successful in raising its first institutional fund with approximately $30 million of investor commitments.

In 1987, Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. resigned from KKR, and Henry Kravis and George Roberts continued to lead the firm. Under Kravis and Roberts the firm was responsible for the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. At a cost of $31.4 billion, it was then the highest price ever paid for a commercial enterprise. The publicity surrounding the event led to the story being dramatized in the book and film, Barbarians at the Gate. In early 1995, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co divested its remaining holdings in RJR Nabisco.

The list of companies in which Henry Kravis's KKR has invested over the years includes health care provider Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), TXU, Playtex, Beatrice Foods, Safeway, Duracell, Toys "R" Us, Borden, First Data and Regal Entertainment Group.

Personal life

Kravis has been married three times. His first marriage was to Helene Diane Shulman (deceased in 1997). They had three children before their marriage ended in divorce in the early eighties. Their 19-year-old son, Harrison, was killed in an automobile accident in 1991 and he has two remaining children, Robert R. Kravis and Kimberly Kravis Schulhof, both of whom are now in their mid-thirties.

He later married New York designer Carolyne Roehm (born Carolyne Jane Smith) in 1985, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1993. The home decorated for the couple by Robert Denning and Vincent Fourcade was parodied in the 1990 movie The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Kravis is currently married to a prominent Canadian economist, Marie-Josée Drouin, and former columnist and TV personality in Canada. She also sits on the boards of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Robin Hood Foundation, and is the president of the Museum of Modern Art board of directors.

Kravis currently owns homes in New York, NY; Southampton, New York; Palm Beach, Florida; Paris, France; Meeker, CO; and Sharon, CT.

Henry has one older brother, George R. Kravis, who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. George Kravis owned radio station KRAV for a number of years before selling the station.

Politics

A supporter of Republican politics, he was a supporter and fundraiser for President George W. Bush and John McCain. He was also a major contributor to the 1992 re-election campaign of President George H. W. Bush. In 1997, Henry Kravis joined with Lewis Eisenberg to establish the Republican Leadership Council.

Kravis has been subjected to criticism from various liberal campaigns, most notably "War on Greed," which attempts to document his lifestyle in an effort to force legislative changes in relation to the taxation of private equity, specifically the carried interest earned by private equity firms.

Philanthropy and Public positions

The Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership identifies extraordinary leaders in the nonprofit sector, celebrates their accomplishments and shares their best practices with others. The Prize is presented and administered by Claremont McKenna College (CMC) and Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis. Marie-Josée Kravis, an economist, is a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute. Henry R. Kravis is an alumnus and trustee of Claremont McKenna College. The Kravis Prize is affiliated with the Kravis Leadership Institute, a research institute at Claremont McKenna College.

Established in 2006, the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership chooses an annual recipient who has demonstrated bold and visionary leadership within the nonprofit sector. A formal award ceremony celebrates the recipient's accomplishments, and $250,000 is directed to a nonprofit organization designated by the recipient. Collectively, the first five Prize recipients have impacted more than 500 million people in more than 60 countries on five continents.

The 2011 Kravis Prize was awarded to Vicky Colbert and the Escuela Nueva Foundation. Past recipients include Pratham in 2010, Sakena Yacoobi in 2009, F.A.W.E. in 2008, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in 2007, and Roy Prosterman in 2007

Additionally, Kravis funds the Henry Kravis Leadership Institute that sponsors the Leadership Studies programs at Claremont McKenna College, and the "Henry Kravis Internships for Teachers of Color" program. He has also financed the construction of extensive facilities at Middlesex School (Kravis House), the Eaglebrook School (Kravis Dorm), Deerfield Academy (Kravis Arena), and The Loomis Chaffee School (Kravis Hall).

He is a benefactor and a past chairman of New York's public television station and sits on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A Trustee of the Mount Sinai Medical Center, Henry and wife Marie-Josée Kravis donated $15 million to establish the "Center for Cardiovascular Health" as well as funding a Professorship. They have also endowed the chair in Human Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

He previously co-chaired with Jerry Speyer the influential Partnership for New York City, founded by David Rockefeller in 1979, and now sits on its board of directors. He created the New York City Investment Fund, a non-profit organization to create jobs and new business in New York City.

He is a Trustee of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and is a member of the Executive Committee of The Business Council for 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. He co-chairs the Columbia Business School Board of Overseers where he recently pledged a gift of $100 million to support the school's new campus project and is a vice-chairman of Rockefeller University.

Quotations

"We've got a portfolio of companies that range all the way from hotels to television stations and cable TV companies, oil and gas, consumer products, and industrial products. If there's anything that I want to know more about, I have the opportunity. It's right in our portfolio. I can spend time at the factory or with the management and learn as much as I want. You can't get bored doing that."
"A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath him or her."
"If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing."

With an estimated net worth of around $3.9 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 281st richest person in the world.