Kara Swisher Quotes

... the world's largest merger.

In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Zuckerberg turned them all down.

As an investment banker, I'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets.

I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.

I love doing deals and operating companies.

Goodrich was the biggest acquisition in the history of aerospace.

I love big business!

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.

When you are buying companies, everyone in the company feels very good. Their chests are puffed out. At Blackstone, I used to tell people that there is nothing more fun than buying a company with somebody else's money. The business is growing, which creates more opportunity for your employees.

Private equity has been the purview of super wealthy individuals and institutions.

What if the slowdown in merger activity isn't cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that the biggest deals have already been done?

When investors, particularly investment bankers, talk about splitting up companies, there's a lot of discussion about multiple expansion, and the reality is multiple expansion is an outcome, not a strategy.

I have been in Wall Street all of my life. I love it. It has been good to me. I know many wonderful, decent, honorable, ethical, hard-working people that were in Wall Street with me.

John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.

The year 1983 was crazy. People wanted to sell not only their investments... but also their companies.

I learned about M&A and how to value assets and work with investment bankers.

China is littered with the wrecks of failed joint ventures. Investors are moving toward wholly-owned subsidiaries.

[Corporate] takeovers are for the public good, but that's not why I do it. I do it to make money.

It [a merger] will eliminate the two firms' vigorous competition against each other.

Goldman in the '80s was like a priesthood, a monastic experience where you worked all the time but were incredibly dedicated to client services, to building and growing companies.

Size is the enemy of excellence in investment banking, particularly when you are trying to put together two different cultures.

If you're just interested in the prestige of banking, that's not what's going to sustain you. You have to be interested in what we do: managing and originating capital, helping issuers and investors come together is great, bringing these companies to life.