Christensen grew up in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the son of two tax lawyers. His mother worked for Citibank, and his father represented philanthropist and socialite Brooke Astor. The younger Christensen went to Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, with a year at New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy. After graduating from Yale University in 1994, he joined JPMorgan’s training program.
He left the bank in 2000, the year he was plucked for a photo shoot during a ski trip to Badrutt’s Palace in St. Moritz, Switzerland. He donned Dunhill ski wear for a fashion shoot in British GQ that year, according to a New York Observer story.
“Some people just have a classic look,” a fashion editor said about him then. “There’s something timeless about him.”
Casino Banker
Christensen received a master’s in business administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2003 and took a job at Goldman Sachs, where he helped advise Colony Capital LLC on casino purchases.
“When you get to see the casinos in Indiana and the casinos in Mississippi, they’re not the great engines of local economic redevelopment that they were sold as,” Christensen said. “Did I have moral misgivings about it? I think that’s kind of a strong word.”
He left two years later for Evercore Partners Inc., the boutique investment bank where he worked on mergers and acquisitions as a managing director. His clients included restaurant chain O’Charley’s Inc. and General Motors Co., the carmaker that filed for bankruptcy in 2009. A Justice Department trustee called the fees Evercore wanted “staggering.”
When Christensen worked on Yale friend Julian Schreibman’s campaign for Congress in 2012, he found himself enjoying the door-to-door canvassing and strategy more than work.
“For the first time in my life, since I stopped wanting to be an astronaut at the age of 15 or 16, I saw something else that I wanted to do more than being a banker,” he said.
‘Not Angry’