Profile: Henry Kravis
Financier and Investor

"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 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, Kravis 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 2007 he surpassed his own record with the $45 billion acquisition of Energy Future Holdings (formerly TXU), the biggest corporate takeover in history.

In addition to his business activities, Henry Kravis is active in charitable causes as a patron of the arts and a generous supporter of medicine and higher education. In 2010 he donated $100 million to the Columbia Graduate School of Business, by far the largest gift in its history.