George Roberts

"From there, he moved on to the investment bank Bear Stearns’ “corporate finance” department, dealing with corporate transactions, where his cousin George Roberts worked. The head of the department was Jerome Kohlberg, and as the eldest of the three, he would become the first K in KKR. While they were still at Bear Stearns, they developed a form of business that was named “leveraged buyout,” or purchase with financial leverage. The leverage was the loan, which made it possible to buy a larger company and thereby generate greater profit. Leveraged company purchases had been done before in various ways, but never in this structured way or with such a high proportion of debt. The reason why it is more effective to use borrowed money than your own capital is that interest on debt is tax-deductible."

"George Roberts and Jerome Kohlberg were significantly less extroverted, and they went home to their families when the day’s work was over. Kravis was also the most aggressive in business. He pushed forward when KKR in 1988 entered the legendary battle for RJR Nabisco, a large publicly listed corporate group that, among other things, sold cookies and cigarettes. At that time, KKR was the largest of the buyout firms and paid a record price of 25 billion dollars, a sum that would take ten years before anyone surpassed it."

"Again, Heatley reached for the phone. He got through to George Roberts, one of the world’s foremost names in leveraged buyouts. The pair had never met, but Heatley said he would like to fly to Roberts’ San Francisco office and sit down with him to talk about the possibility of Rainbow buying a stake in Woolworths Australia. Roberts agreed but told Heatley he could promise him only 10 minutes. He was polite but not encouraging. ‘If you want to come all this way, well, okay.’ Then he added, ‘I wouldn’t make the trip if I were you.’"