Nelson Peltz Quotes

One, I love the creativity. I love the ability to create a capital structure that is appropriate for a company, no matter what field it happens to be in.

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

With a private company, you've got to get into who's investing and what's the balance sheet like. So going public is a positive thing from the perspective of the sales organization.

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.

I think most CEOs think their stock is undervalued, probably.

I know how to finance something. It's easier today because, as you're more successful, everybody wants to do deals with you. But even in the beginning, when I took Landry's public, I owned 100 percent of it. I never had investors or anything. I was just always able to find a way to do it.

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.

The deal machinations many companies put themselves through, while certainly a bonanza for investment bankers, can confound the typical investor.

Some managements do not even think of buybacks as an option. The idea of shrinking their equity base repels them. Their inclination instead is to get bigger, and this often leads them to pay rich prices for acquisitions that never earn their keep.

A buyback is itself a special kind of acquisition, made at prices that are typically a bargain compared with those a company must pay for an outside purchase.

Today we're focused on small acquisitions to add technology where necessary. I think it's fair to say we're not out looking for a large one, but I think it's also very fair to say that as a public company you can never say never.

I have either run private equity funded companies or been a partner in a private equity fund since 1982. I've had a front row view of the vital role private equity continues to play in building and keeping American businesses competitive in the global economy.

In the case of Enron, we balance our positions all the time.

All I'm trying to do is manage money and take care of my shareholders.

I think businesses live longer that are on the stock market.

If the goal is to build companies that maximize long-term equity value, then optimizing corporate performance in a way that Wall Street appreciates is obviously critical to that goal.

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn't just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations - it's also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and running.

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

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

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.

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.

We don't think of ourselves as a regional investment bank. We think of ourselves as merchant bankers with clients all over the country.

Tech executives have historically been owners of significant portions of their companies' stock so there is a propensity for them to diversify as a rule.

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