Who is the "barbarian" known as the legend of Wall Street's mergers and acquisitions investment?

You should be talking about the famous Wall Street bank investor Bruce Wasserstein.

Wasserstein, a descendant of Eastern European immigrants, obtained law and business degrees from Harvard University and later joined the investment bank First Boston. There, he and another deal guru, Joseph Perella, drove the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s.

When Wasserstein worked for First Boston, his rivals nicknamed him "Price Raising Blues" because he was like a hypnotist who could make his clients pay the highest prices ever. Purchase at the highest price. Under Wasserstein's leadership, First Boston surged forward in the crazy 1980s.

Bruce Wasserstein has completed about 1,000 transactions with a total value of US$250 billion from the 1970s to the present. He operated the famous Time Warner merger in history, and Dean Witt (Dean Witt) Witter, the Discover & Co combination's merger with Morgan Stanley, and KKR's acquisition of RJR Nabisco.

In classic books on Wall Street, Wasserstein is an important figure who often appears. In the 1990s, in "Barbarians at the Gate", Wasserstein was a prototype of the "Barbarian" KKR team, completing what was called the most famous hostile takeover in the United States in the 20th century. KKR and the Wall Street people involved in the transaction "showed off" their unprecedented acquisition skills and financial IQ, which also reflected Wall Street's unique greed and cunning human nature. The image of "barbarians" has long been one of the labels for investment banks.

Not only has Wasserstein himself been written into a classic, his own book is also one of the classics on Wall Street. He has listed the big sales, big mergers, and big acquisitions that have changed the business landscape in the past 30 years. , and wrote the book "The Big Deal". Wasserstein reveals the changes in the modern transaction model: from the booming merger era in the 1960s and 1970s, to the medicinal acquisitions in the 1980s, and into the 1990s, each transaction is often worth billions of dollars.

Wasserstein also started his own business and started his own investment bank. Then in 2002, he joined the long-established investment bank Lazard. And his experience is also part of another classic book on Wall Street. "The Last Tycoons: The Rise and Fall of Lazard Investment Bank" swept the global investment banking industry in 2007 and is a must-read book for investment bankers.