Lunch with the FT: Ron Perelman

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.”

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