David Bonderman, a founder of the giant investment firm TPG, who helped transform private equity into a multitrillion-dollar industry that reshaped corporate America, died on Dec. 11. He was 82.
His death was announced by his family, TPG and the Seattle Kraken, the National Hockey League franchise he co-founded. The cause and place of death were not disclosed.
Mr. Bonderman, a lawyer, took various legal paths over his career — law professor, civil rights lawyer, corporate lawyer — before becoming a financier. That led him to create what is now TPG, a $239 billion financial giant that buys companies, invests in start-ups, makes loans and more.
TPG is one of the biggest players in what Wall Street calls alternative investments, among the fastest-growing businesses in finance, and has minted many Midas-level fortunes. Mr. Bonderman had an estimated net worth of about $6.7 billion, according to Forbes.
Though Mr. Bonderman stepped down from day-to-day management at TPG about a decade ago, he retained the title nonexecutive chairman.
“David Bonderman was one of the most creative and innovative deal makers since 1990,” Stephen A. Schwarzman, a founder of Blackstone and a longtime rival, said in a statement. Henry R. Kravis of KKR, another competitor, said Mr. Bonderman was “a real pioneer in the alternative investment space.”
TPG’s core business of private equity, in which investors borrow money to acquire companies, restructure their operations and then resell them, became so successful that many of its tactics are now common across corporate America.
But when Mr. Bonderman set up TPG (originally known as the Texas Pacific Group) in 1993, with James Coulter and William S. Price III, private equity was largely about small partnerships pursuing small deals. The three were part of a generation of financiers — including Mr. Schwarzman; Mr. Kravis and George R. Roberts of KKR; and David M. Rubenstein of Carlyle — who turned the business into much more.
Yet Mr. Bonderman eschewed the traditional trappings of a Wall Street mogul. Known as Bondo to friends and colleagues, he often preferred khakis and loud socks to suits. He favored Diet Coke over fine wine. And guests at his firm’s annual meetings weren’t staid establishment figures like politicians; they were often celebrities like Jimmy Buffett and Elton John.
“He brought rock ’n’ roll into an industry that seemed to be playing only classical music,” Mr. Coulter said in an interview.
The unconventional figure that Mr. Bonderman cut fit his unorthodox professional path.
Mr. Bonderman was born on Nov. 27, 1942, in Los Angeles to Marguerite and Aaron Bonderman. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1963 and from Harvard Law School in 1966.
International matters were a particular interest: His undergraduate major was Russian studies, and at Harvard he won a fellowship that took him to the Middle East, where he became fluent in Arabic.
Mr. Bonderman taught law at Tulane University in New Orleans before joining the Justice Department under President Lyndon B. Johnson, focusing on civil rights. After Richard M. Nixon became president, Mr. Bonderman left government and briefly studied Islamic law in Tunis and Cairo before joining Arnold & Porter, a prestigious Washington law firm.
It was there that Mr. Bonderman established himself as a skilled negotiator by, among other things, persuading the Supreme Court to overturn the insider-trading conviction of his client Raymond Dirks, a securities analyst turned whistle-blower.
When Mr. Bonderman was in his 40s, he drew the attention of Robert Bass, a Texas oil baron, who pitched him on helping invest his fortune. Mr. Bonderman protested that he had no qualifications, having never even taken an accounting course; Mr. Bass responded that he had no idea what he was doing either.
At Mr. Bass’s family office, Mr. Bonderman led profitable transactions, including the takeover of American Savings and Loan Association during the banking crisis of the late 1980s. By 1992, he and Mr. Coulter had struck out on their own, buying the embattled Continental Airlines out of bankruptcy and turning it around.
The next year, the two men and Mr. Price founded the Texas Pacific Group, headquartered in Fort Worth and San Francisco. Their goal was to create an investment firm that did not follow the Wall Street mold.
“We never wanted to be the biggest private equity firm,” Mr. Coulter said, “but we wanted to be among the most interesting.”
Mr. Bonderman became a jet-setting deal maker, crisscrossing the globe to establish TPG in Asia and elsewhere. (By some colleagues’ estimates, he annually racked up more than 1,000 hours in the air for years.) And TPG became known for investing in prominent companies, including Burger King, Creative Artists Agency, Petco and — twice — J. Crew.
Mr. Bonderman’s reputation as a corporate turnaround artist grew: The Obama administration named him a director of General Motors in 2009 after it rescued the troubled automaker.
Not all of TPG’s bets worked. Several deals it struck shortly before the 2008 global financial crisis, including the takeovers of the Texas utility TXU and the casino giant Caesars, eventually went bad.
But Mr. Bonderman helped lead TPG into other kinds of investing, including the lucrative business of backing fast-growing start-ups. The firm became an investor in companies like Uber, Airbnb and Spotify, and was often known for extracting highly favorable terms in exchange for its money. (Mr. Bonderman resigned from the board of Uber in 2017 after making a sexist remark about women at a meeting.)
Mr. Bonderman is survived by his wife, Laurie Michaels; five children; and three grandchildren.
Finance was not the only field in which Mr. Bonderman made a mark. He became involved in historic preservation, playing a key role in the survival of Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. He donated to wilderness conservation efforts, including through the Wilderness Society and the World Wildlife Fund.
He also led a group of investors who helped create the Kraken, which brought professional hockey back to Seattle for the first time since the 1970s.
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