Bonderman, Coulter and Winkelried declined to comment for this story.

Even now Bonderman casts a seemingly indelible shadow. Run out of San Francisco and Dallas-Fort Worth, TPG long urged employees to think of themselves as the “Sir Mick Jagger” of private equity. The message: be yourself, regardless of fame or money.

And for three decades no one cultivated that mystique quite like Bondo.  

“TPG culture starts with Bondo,” said Bennett Goodman, a longtime leveraged finance titan who’s done business with TPG. “He's an iconic deal guy -- he'd get on a plane over 200 days a year circumnavigating the globe to chase deals and meet management teams.”

Coulter, the methodical, engineering-minded yin to Bondo’s frenetic, risk-loving yang, has mostly worked from the office, mentoring younger employees, putting out fires and keeping the business running. Together they’ve overseen brilliant successes — The turnaround of Continental Airlines, TPG’s early investments in Uber and Airbnb Inc. and the creation of one of the world’s biggest impact investing businesses, with the backing of rock legend Bono.

There were also the epic blunders, including TXU Corp., and Washington Mutual, where the firm lost billions in the wake of the financial crisis.

The TPG ethos has been mythologized in internal presentations for years. “Bondo And The Firm Are Weapons,” is one entry in a collection of slides obtained by Bloomberg News. “Not Wall Street: Encourage independent, non-consensus thinking and casual style,” reads another. “No Assholes — even when tempted” goes a third.

Among the material are photos of the Asia investment team dressed as Elvis Presley in Las Vegas, Bondo lighting the torch of TPG's “Olympic’’ ceremonies and an employee dog pile from a summer soccer tournament.

Other buyout barons have gotten richer. Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, for instance, is worth $36.8 billion today – more than eight times as much as Bonderman, with a net worth of $4.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

But the lanky, hyperkinetic Bonderman, one-time adviser to Texas billionaire Robert Bass, always seemed to exude a personal cool that the New York titans couldn’t quite match. He dialed in from Timbuktu, snowboarded in the Rockies, booked Tom Petty for an investor meeting (The Rolling Stones played for his 60th birthday party, Paul McCartney for his 70th). He joked that his Falcon jet was once a house of ill repute — it first came to him with red carpet and a French-style boudoir.