David H. Murdock Quotes

I have never run a public company. I spent my entire life working for a private company.

There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it's also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.

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

Yahoo would benefit from going private or becoming part of a larger corporation.

In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history.

I delivered lectures, and I was also a consultant for international companies in finance, both private equity and big venture capital funds.

If I'm on the board of any company where there's an offer that comes in, I want to negotiate.

Even if a company is taken private, at some stage people want to make it public.

You're doing a major merger, you got to hope you didn't get it wrong. That's the view of any CEO.

In a literal sense, even a private company, of course, cannot do everything that it wants without some discussion with government. As a good corporate citizen, Severstal discussed the idea of a merger with Arcelor with the Russian government.

I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate.

It is much more convenient not to be a public company. As a private company you don't have to give information to the public. Secrecy is an important factor of success in the commodity business.

As I became a venture capitalist, it's almost like I went to the dark side for a while.

I wanted a CFO with public company experience; I needed an HR department, new office space, and a board which could help me grow the business. Insight, the private equity firm I chose, helped me with all that.

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.

Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.

In the 1980s, corporate raiders began mounting unfriendly takeovers of companies that could deliver higher returns to their shareholders - if they abandoned their other stakeholders.

Regarding our links with the Russian government, Severstal is a private company with no government participation. We are answerable to our shareholders.

This is a bit like big-game hunting. You look for companies of a certain size that deserve to be public.

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.

My research interests since then have shifted strongly towards the economic and regulatory problems of the financial services industry, and especially of the securities and options exchanges.

I don't think I'd enjoy running a public company. We haven't needed to go to the market to fund expansion.

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

Blackstone is a major client of many of the largest banks around the world.