Growing up in Paris and attending boarding school in Switzerland in the 1970s, Berggruen was passionate about politics. As a teenager, he read Jean-Paul Sartre and leaned left; for a time, he refused to speak English because he thought it was the language of imperialism. At the age of 17, he reconciled with capitalism and worked as a trainee for Robbie Rayne, who was then investment director of buyout firm London Merchant Securities, known today as LMS Capital Plc.

"He was very bright and much more serious than most people his age," Rayne says. "And very quickly, he caught on to the private-equity business."

He enrolled at New York University in 1979 and got his undergraduate degree in business in just two years, according to the school. In 1985, he founded a company to manage his investments and the small family trust.

Today, Berggruen Holdings has offices in Berlin, Istanbul, Mumbai, New York and Tel Aviv and nine senior executives who help the founder find investments and manage them. The firm owns more than 30 companies, ranging from real estate to furniture, to health care. Berggruen is financing skyline-shaping towers around the world, including designs by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Richard Meier in Newark, N.J., and Tel Aviv.

He also bought German department store chain Karstadt Warenhaus GmbH out of bankruptcy in 2010 for the symbolic price of 1 euro. The investor immediately provided the business with a 65 million euro ($83 million) cash infusion and promised to spend 400 million euros over five years to revive the brand-his highest-profile corporate rescue effort to date.

'Terrible Manager'

Berggruen, who says he negotiates many of the buyouts himself, looks for companies loaded with debt or with family owners who are looking to retire. The firms also need to have strong cash flows and defensible business models. After restructuring the company's debt and investing in expansion, he'll often hold it for a decade or more before selling. He says that he rarely fires rank-and-file workers, because his goal is to grow revenue. But he does typically shake up top management.

"It is always a question of finding the right people," he says. Berggruen himself is never one of them. "I discovered pretty early that I am probably a terrible manager," he says.

Berggruen's $7.8 million purchase of AAi.FosterGrant Inc., an indebted Smithfield, R.I.-based eyeglasses manufacturer, was one of his biggest scores. He pushed management to offer new product lines and trendier styles. In 2004, the company acquired the Magnivision brand of nonprescription reading glasses, more than doubling its share in that market.

Following the acquisition, the company was renamed FGX International Holdings Ltd. When FGX went public in October 2007, Berggruen sold about half of his shares for $113 million. Two years later, French company Essilor International SA bought FGX, earning Berggruen another $139.2 million.

Berggruen has had more success managing his own money than other people's wealth. In 1988, Berggruen co-founded Alpha Investment Management LLC in New York to run a hedge fund plus a fund of hedge funds. Alpha Investment's flagship fund of funds, which collected a management fee on top of charges from the underlying hedge funds, didn't outperform the market. After subtracting fees, it only about matched the returns of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index in the 1990s, with a third of the index's volatility, Berggruen says.

The firm grew to about $2 billion under management before the founders sold it in 2004 for an undisclosed sum. By then, Berggruen had soured on Alpha.

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