My favorite datapoint from Daniel Roth’s cover
story on Stephen Feinberg’s Cerberus Capital:
Squeezing money out of firms that weren’t in distress required different
skills. Feinberg went out and bought them. He hired 150 C.E.O.’s and
other top executives to form an active brain trust—paying them, according
to a competitor, around $500,000 a year—to field calls from Cerberus
employees, find and weigh in on deals, and open up their Rolodexes.
Half a mil a year to answer phone calls. Ya gotta love the private-equity bubble.