Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s wife, Louise Linton, complimented Michael Milken on his midnight blue jacket Saturday night in Water Mill, telling him she’s encouraged her husband to wear brighter colors.
She should have checked out Milken’s socks: the pair he wore to Steve Cohen’s house on Friday for a panel on the business of sports featured split avocados.
Fashion was hardly the point of Milken’s whirlwind four-day stay in the Hamptons, during which he oversaw about 20 power sessions put on by the Milken Institute and hosted by billionaires at their homes. Because when the wealthy go back to school on a late summer weekend, they do it by the pool, with views of the ocean, chef-curated cheese plates for afternoon snacks, and classmates in the upper echelons of business, finance and government.
The conversations, in their fifth year, are much more private and under the radar than the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, attended by 4,000 people. They’re sort of a secret society branch of the conference.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham talked foreign policy. Nobel Prize winning biologist David Baltimore, former president of Caltech, weighed in on fighting an influenza pandemic.
Affordable Housing
Mnuchin addressed affordable housing and opportunity zones, giving guidance to the very wealthy in the room on how to defer capital gains tax by investing in low-income urban, suburban and rural communities.
For Richard LeFrak, the panel at his home in Southampton had him rethinking his SoLe Mia development in Miami. Some of the biggest potential returns may be found in building office space and relocating companies into the zone, he said in a telephone interview after the meeting.
“It’s not about the zone, it’s about the opportunity,” LeFrak said. Mnuchin liked the phrasing so much, he repeated it, with attribution, in a brief interview at the gala. The Internal Revenue Service will be providing guidance on investing in the zones “shortly,” Mnuchin said. Aron Betru of the Milken Institute said it was expected in about two months.
Lloyd Blankfein took part in the panel on education where Merryl Tisch told him he should run the New York City school system when he steps down as Goldman Sachs CEO.
‘Too Young’
Other offers are coming. “We’re going to try to recruit him,” Milken said. (Later, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs said Blankfein is “too young to retire and is thinking about a next chapter but he has a few more pages left in his current one.”)