David Rubenstein, co-founder and managing director of the Carlyle Group (described as the world’s largest private equity firm), recently recalled an incident years ago in which he was asked as a favor to admit a certain man to his board.
This man, Rubenstein found, knew essentially nothing about the company, and his contributions pretty much amounted to telling jokes — few of them clean — at board meetings. After three years, he approached the man and told him that this line of work probably wasn’t for him.
The man’s name? George W. Bush. “He became President of the United States. So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn’t have been in that category.”
10:17 pm on July 7, 2003
