Henry Kravis Profile

"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."

Henry Kravis is one of the most successful investment bankers in history. He is famous in the business world for pioneering the leveraged buyout (or LBO), that is, borrowing money to buy a controlling interest in a given company. As managing partner of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts (KKR), he is responsible for some of the biggest corporate acquisitions in history. The list of companies Henry Kravis has bought and sold over the course of his career is a roll-call of great American brand names: Safeway, Beatrice, Borden, Playtex, Samsonite, Culligan, Texaco.

In 1988, he engineered the buyout of RJR Nabisco, a struggle dramatized in the book and film, Barbarians at the Gate. The purchase price, $24.88 billion, was the highest that had been paid for a commercial enterprise up to that time.

In addition to his business activities, Henry Kravis is active in charitable causes and as a patron of the arts. He is Chairman of New York's public television station, sits on the board of the Metropolitan Museum and the New York City Ballet, and was New York State Co-Chairman of the presidential campaign of George Bush. When the history of 20th century American business is written, Henry Kravis will stand alongside J.P. Morgan as one of the titans of American finance.