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Bruce Wasserstein and Lazard: All the Other News That's Fit to Print

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The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 13, 2008, "Greenhill's Thrift Pays Off: More Left for Shareholders; As Firm Pinches Pennies; On Employees, Other Costs" (by subscription only)

"Roger Altman and Bruce Wasserstein, the mergers-and-acquisitions maestros running Evercore Partners and Lazard, respectively, should pay more attention to Bob Greenhill ...

What makes Greenhill stand out? It is more careful with its pennies. First, the mergers specialist's noncompensation expenses are an industry-low 10 percent of revenue. That is almost half the ratio at Lazard, as well as larger firms … "

The Financial Times, Feb. 24, 2008, "Fix financial Incentives"

The Spectator, June 2, 2007, "How Bid 'em Up Bruce' became yesterday's man"
"'It created the technology of the M&A business, and it was very good at it. But I don't think Bruce Wasserstein cares about any of that. He cares about Bruce Wasserstein.'"

The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2007, "Q&A With William Cohan: 'Dead' Men Do Tell Tales"
"Bruce has made $1.2 billion on investment banking, and he's gotten no accountability on the quality of advice. Why should they make that much money and at the same time they're not doing anything of substance. Something has got to change."--William Cohan, author of The Last Tycoons

The New York Times, Feb. 26, 2006, "The Adviser Who Became the Activist"
"For much of the late 1980's and the 1990's, he lived with the nickname, Bid 'Em Up Bruce, a reference to accusations that he pushed his clients to overpay for deals to enrich himself."

Vanity Fair, April 2005, "Lazard's Clash of the Titans" (excerpt only; not available online) "'Just about everything Bruce touched blew up in his face,' says a former colleague.'

The worst--as far as many partners were concerned--came when he invested a total of $400 million of the firm's money in a takeover of a U.K. supermarket chain, Gateway Isosceles. Gateway, according to the British bankers on the transaction, was a chain that 'any British housewife could have told you was a bad deal ... .'

'Bruce on the investment side has what I would describe as smart man's disease,' says former colleague. 'He can never believe he's wrong. And in this business you need to say, 'O.K., I'm wrong,' and cut your losses … but he would continue to make larger and larger bets to prove that he was right.'"

The New York Times, Dec. 18, 2003, "Why Did He Buy New York? Hey, Wasserstein Loves Deals"
"While the moniker was originally a positive reference to his ability to make buyers pay more in an auction, his critics have used it as a derogatory term to describe the way he pushed his own clients to raise their bids to inflate his fees."

The New York Times, Aug. 19, 1992, "Company News; 'Wasserella' Losing Some of Its Talent" "Mr. Wasserstein is called 'Bid 'em Up Bruce' by detractors who say he lacks restraint; they say that instead of staying away from dubious deals, he pushes purchase prices up to unreasonable heights. One example they cite was his advice to the Canadian developer Robert Campeau to purchase the Allied and Federated department store companies; the debt from those deals pushed the two chains into bankruptcy."