Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf has chosen her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
David Bonderman, the lawyer turned private equity pioneer, has died at the age of 82.
In the early 1990s, Bonderman co-founded Texas Pacific Group and led its acquisition of Continental Airlines. The deal cemented his status as a turnaround king, joining the ranks of adventurous financiers such as Henry Kravis and Stephen Schwarzman who had acquired some of America’s biggest companies.
After making a name for himself as a lawyer and preservationist, Bonderman took an unconventional route into the world of big-ticket acquisitions in his late 40s.
Among his legal accomplishments, Bonderman defended stock analyst Raymond Dirks against insider trading charges in 1973, ultimately winning an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. The 1983 decision later became a landmark decision in U.S. securities law.
A graduate of the University of Washington and Harvard Law School and a stint in Egypt, Bonderman’s legal career included a stint at the U.S. Department of Justice and then several years at the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter. Included.
He then worked for the Robert Bass Company in Texas. The oilman knew Bonderman through his pro bono work as a lawyer for preservationists who successfully petitioned against the demolition of the Beaux-Arts masterpiece at New York’s Grand Central Terminal.
In the Bass family office, Bonderman worked closely with his junior colleague Jim Coulter. The pair led the rescue of Continental Airlines, a deal that was a precursor to the creation of TPG. TPG is currently a publicly traded private capital group with nearly $250 billion in assets under management.
The company’s downhill slide toward bankruptcy in 1992 proved to Bonderman and Coulter that they needed more than just finances to understand how to run a complex business that required better management. It became a place for experimentation.
The two founded TPG that same year and quickly rode a wave of large-scale, highly leveraged acquisitions that made the company a force on Wall Street.
Bonderman and Coulter took TPG public in 2022, and its assets have since nearly doubled, returning the group to the top of the industry.
“David was an internationalist, meaning he had a very broad worldview,” Coulter said in an interview with the Financial Times. “For example, he took TPG to Asia. He appreciated all types of people and personalities and had a wide range of relationships.”
Recommended
Coulter pointed to TPG’s large-scale climate investment business, adding: “What we’re doing today is still very much in the spirit of David.”
Bonderman is known as one of America’s greatest conservationists, serving on the boards of the Wilderness Society, the World Wildlife Fund, the American Himalayan Foundation, and the Grand Canyon Trust. They are investing millions of dollars.
In his later years, Bonderman invested in sports, buying a minority stake in the Boston Celtics basketball team, bringing the Seattle Kraken of the National Hockey League to his hometown, and building the Climate Pledge Arena.
TPG called Bonderman a “private equity pioneer, legal scholar, conservationist, and global citizen.”
