Mystery solved! While a number of media outlets have speculated in highfalutin editorial tones about why there weren’t more grateful-to-be-bailed-out Wall Street fat cats attending Barack Obama’s twin fundraisers last night in New York, it turns out the answer was simple: the president wasn’t the biggest draw in town. What was? Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s cocktail party at Manhattan’s Monkey Bar celebrating the release of New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin’s sprawling and cinematic tome, Too Big to Fail.
It is, surely, the first time so many Wall Street tycoons have been under one roof outside of Washington hearing rooms since the crash. Even before that, the only thing that comes close was Blackstone chief Steve Schwarzman’s over-the-top birthday party in early 2007. But those were different times.
Jamie Dimon, chairman and C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, rolled in at about 6:20 p.m., just minutes after Morgan Stanley’s top dogs, C.E.O. John Mack and C.F.O. Colm Kelleher. A smattering of hedge-fund and private-equity honchos also came to sip on cocktails, from David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group to Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman, Alson Capital’s Neil Barsky, Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, and Citadel Investment Group’s Ken Griffin. The only glaring absences: former and current Goldman Sachs C.E.O.’s Hank Paulson and Lloyd Blankfein. And while Warren Buffett was unable to attend, he made up for it by sending along a good-luck telegram that was the size of a boardroom table.
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The old-timer contingent was represented by former G.E. chairman and C.E.O. Jack Welch and his wife Suzy Wetlaufer. It was his first time out in public since a staph infection felled him this summer. As befits a Vanity Fair event, there were even a few scandalized characters in attendance, including car-czar-for-a-minute Steven Rattner and infamous stock analyst Jack Grubman. But the list goes on: Maria Bartiromo of CNBC chatted in a corner with silver-tongued analyst Meredith Whitney. Wendi Deng Murdoch parted the crowd, trailed by Ivanka Trump’s fiance, New York Observer owner Jared Kushner. And V.F. regulars Ronald Perelman, Barry Diller, Ted Forstmann, Brian Grazer, Jean Pigozzi, and Vivi Nevo mixed it up.
While the financial media hardly needs an excuse to go out for drinks, they were also well represented (and admittedly envious) at Sorkin’s bash. V.F.’s Bryan Burrough, Bethany McLean, and Vicky Ward were in attendance, as well as long list of others: everyone from Bloomberg heavyweight Norm Pearlstine to John Gapper (Financial Times), Rob Cox (Breaking Views), Jesse Eisinger (ProPublica), John Carney (Clusterstock), Jim Impoco (Reuters), Larry Ingrassia and Eric Dash (NYT), Anita Raghavan (Forbes), Robin Sidel (WSJ), and, of course, yours truly.
RELATED: Read an excerpt of “Too Big to Fail” on VF.com
Photographs by Daniel Paik.
Duff McDonald is author of Last Man Standing, a new biography of Jamie Dimon
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