As Perelman’s salad is taken away, barely touched, I eat the last few spoonfuls of my chilled soup and ask about dealmaking. Past investments include the film processor Technicolor; Golden State Bancorp, America’s second largest savings bank; and New World Communications, whose Fox TV stations he sold to Rupert Murdoch in 1994 for $3.6bn. Only a few targets, such as Gillette in the late 1980s, have evaded him.
A generation ago, he explains, “what you had was a very lazy managerial elite”. The takeovers made possible by the easy financing of the 1970s and 1980s were “to the benefit of American enterprise”, he insists. But, after five post-crisis years of corporate belt-tightening, there are few easy pickings left. Most deals Perelman looks at now are small “bolt-ons” to businesses he already owns.
I observe that nobody now is writing books such as Barbarians at the Gate, the 1990 study of a ruthless leveraged buyout. Did dealmakers get dull? The chunky silver chains on his right wrist rattle as he taps a packet of Splenda sweetener on the table and answers: “At one point we were doing stuff that was new and different and unique. That’s not the case any more. The techie guys are doing that now, so they’re the ones getting the attention. What we’re doing is pretty mundane stuff. What the techie guys are doing is … change-the-world stuff.”