That attitude occasionally seeped into the way he ran TPG.
He spent weeks on the Helios 2 superyacht off the coast of Australia in 2009, not daring to set foot in the country or anywhere else in the British Commonwealth, while tax authorities wanted to question him about taxes that TPG might owe on a lucrative deal involving a big department-store chain. The Australians had even tried to freeze the firm's accounts, but the money was already winging its way to the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg. (Australia never did get the money and later lost in litigation.)
And then there's Russia. TPG had embraced investing in the country even as most private-equity rivals steered clear. Bonderman met with Putin in 2009 and joined the supervisory board of VTB after investing in the state-owned-bank. TPG took stakes in supermarket chain Lenta Ltd, a deal that soon turned violent after a disagreement with a shareholder over management, and transportation company Fesco.
The firm’s Moscow office at one point employed Alexander Vinokurov, who was recently added to the European Union sanctions list and is the son-in-law of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.
When Putin hosted his version of Davos in 2014 and 2015, Bonderman attended, even after Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA, asked him not to go. Coulter — who would have preferred not to conduct business in the country — stayed behind, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
TPG is now out of Russia, with no active employees or direct investments, according to a spokesman for the firm. TPG exited the Lenta investment in 2019 when it sold its stake to Russian billionaire Alexey Mordashov, liquidated its Fesco position the next year and recently closed the Moscow office.
Winkelried came onboard just months after the 2015 Russia conference. He had spent three decades at Goldman Sachs, much of that time with Paulson, as the bank transformed itself from Wall Street’s last great private partnership into a public company. He then stunned Wall Street by abruptly retiring at the peak of his career, at the age of 49, and heading west, to his ranch in Colorado.
Once there Winkelried developed near-professional level skills in horse cutting, a rodeo sport in which the rider separates a calf from a herd of cattle. He is also said to be an accomplished bowhunter – a sport, colleagues say, befitting his hard-edged style.
Waxman, another Goldman veteran, lured Winkelried to TPG as an adviser. Winkelried was named co-CEO with Coulter in 2015 and since then has expanded focus in areas such as healthcare and digital media. He’s also found new sources of capital for TPG — 30% of investor commitments in current funds are from relationships developed over the past five years, according to filings.
As the likes of Bonderman, Schwarzman, Leon Black and Henry Kravis sometimes begrudgingly make way for a new generation, private equity is evolving into a new, corporate version of itself. It may still be blood-sport capitalism. But public shareholders demand discipline and accountability in addition to profits.