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This from an article in the NY Times on Dec. 13th:
"Now with top hedge fund executives expected to receive annual bonuses that should exceed $1 billion this year — by comparison, the best- paid Wall Street chief executive may get $50 million — they have become even more lucrative game."
More from the article:
In the fast-shifting sands of New York’s moneyed classes, the explosion of hedge fund wealth has created a new financial pecking order. A century ago, the steel and oil money of Frick and Rockefeller was deemed to be new until it came to endow some of New York’s great cultural institutions. In the 1980s and 1990s, the buyout kings Henry R. Kravis and Ronald O. Perelman became billionaires and were furiously courted to join museum boards.
Now institutions like the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum and Lincoln Center are making a push for the newest money on the block as they try to lure hedge fund executives to join their boards. This effort has dovetailed with an emerging tendency by hedge fund moguls to spread their wings a bit in greater New York society.
“A lot of these guys when they get their wealth and power, they want something to go along with that,” said David Patrick Columbia, who has occasionally featured photographs of Mr. Ganek and his wife, Danielle, on his Web site, New York Social Diary. “Some collect art, some want to be philanthropists and once they get into the swim they find themselves being wined and dined by a variety of people. This experience gives them an affirmation of their social magnitude and that is an alluring thing for someone who makes a billion dollars.” The bait has always been simple: It is one thing to be rich and have world-class art on your walls, but it may not match the frisson that comes with having your name attached to a wing, rotunda or atrium. So, Mr. Kravis joined the board at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and got his wing; Mr. Perelman cast his lot with the Guggenheim and endowed a rotunda. More recently, Donald B. Marron, the former chief executive of PaineWebber and past president of the Museum of Modern Art board, had an atrium named after him and his wife.
(End of quote)
And that, boys and girls, is how the rich become the mega rich!
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