M&A Dealmaking Canon

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​  Dealmaking is a craft best learned through apprenticeship, honed by experience, and mastered by studying those who've done it best. Stan Druckenmiller said the best way to understand an industry is to look at every company in it. The same applies to people—read everything they’ve written, listen to every talk they’ve given. As Ogilvy put it:

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“The good ones just know more.”

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     Many of these books and articles are decades old, and that’s the point—most investors don’t study history deeply enough to grasp the cycles that built and broke those before them. Too many careers were shaped in a market that only moved up and to the right. History says that won’t always be the case. Levered beta gets mistaken for alpha. That’s why we study cycles obsessively. That’s why we keep reading. Capital flows, valuation, liquidity, structure—these aren’t details; they’re the foundation.
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     The other reason to study history? Perspective. The people in these books built empires—often with fewer resources and no roadmap. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of meeting some of the Giants whose shoulders we stand on. Their impact endures.​​

Books​​

• The House of Rothschild – Definitive history of the world’s most powerful banking family.

• Dark Genius of Wall Street – Jay Gould, the financier Rockefeller called “the best businessman I ever knew” and Vanderbilt deemed “the smartest man in America,” rewrote the rules of capitalism.

• The House of Morgan – America's most powerful banking dynasty.

• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller – Best biography on America’s first billionaire.

• The Warburgs – How a single family shaped global banking while navigating war, exile, and constant reinvention.

• When Money Was in Fashion – Henry Goldman was a visionary who revolutionized retail finance, shaped the Federal Reserve, and built Goldman Sachs.

• The Patriarch – The OG Kennedy was a banker, investor, WWI shipyard manager, Hollywood studio head, New Deal adviser, and (ironically) the founding chairman of the SEC.

• The Match King – The rise and fall of the Ivar Kreuger, who built (and lost) a billion dollar empire through financial engineering and fraud. 

• Financier: The Biography of André Meyer – The “Picasso of Banking” who shaped post-WWII American business at the helm of Lazard and also brokered the marriage of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis.

• The Last Tycoons – Definitive history of Lazard Frères & Co.

• Distant Force – Memoir of Teledyne and Henry Singleton, the greatest capital allocator of all time.

• The Marmon Group – How the Pritzkers quietly built the Marmon Group over 50 years into a diversified industrial empire through disciplined, quiet dealmaking. 

• The Gambler – Penniless dropout Kirk Kerkorian was one of the greatest, but least-known dealmakers in the history of capitalism. 

• Autopsy of a Merger – Goes through in great detail one of Jay Pritzker’s biggest deals, the 1981 acquisition of Trans Union.

• Riches Among the Ruins: Adventures in the Dark Corners of the Global Economy – In distressed emerging market debt, fortunes are made in the chaos of collapsing currencies and struggling nations.

• The Deals of Warren Buffett – How Buffett made his first $100 million. 

• The Predators' Ball – All roads in modern finance lead back to Michael Milken. Too many people in their 20s-40s don’t fully appreciate this era. 

• Special Situations Investing – The bible for hedging, arbitrage, and event-driven investing.

• A Time for Reflection – The world took notice when William E. Simon turned a greeting card company into a fortune, flipping Gibson Greeting Cards for 200x his money in just 16 months.

• Barbarians at the Gate – Chronicles the iconic 1989 RJR Nabisco LBO.​

• Storming the Magic Kingdom – Wall Street raiders battle for Disney in the 1980s.

• Den of Thieves – Best depiction of the 1980s junk bond era on Wall Street. 

• Cable Cowboy – John Malone’s incredible run at TCI and the invention of EBITDA.

• Going for Broke – Robert Campeau bankrupted the retail industry, jolted the junk bond market, and brought the booming '80s to a crashing halt.

• Boone – Lively account of T. Boone Pickens' early deals. 

• Towers of Debt – Extraordinary transformation of the Reichmann financial and real estate colossus into the world's biggest private bankruptcy filing.

• When Money is King – Rise of junk bond extraordinaire Ronald Perelman. 

• What It Takes – Stephen Schwartzman's memoir.

• Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? –  Powerful biography of Reginald Lewis – the first black founder of a major PE firm.

• Am I Being Too Subtle? – Sam Zell's memoir.

• Who Is Michael Ovitz? – Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz's memoir. 

• The Barry Diller Story – The meteoric rise of "Killer Diller."

• Limping on Water – Tom Murphy built Cap Cities from a single TV station into a $19 billion empire by executing one of the biggest takeovers in history with its purchase of ABC in 1985.

• The Making of a Blockbuster – Wayne Huizenga built three separate billion-dollar companies  (Waste Management, Blockbuster, and AutoNation) using the same roll-up playbook. 

• The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood – Geffen mastered Hollywood, but his real genius was betting big on the right people—Richard Rainwater, Leon Black, and Eddie Lampert—without ever losing much money.

• The Power Law – History of venture capital and why risk in the form of small, iterative bets allows us to discover the future.

• eBoys – The rise of Benchmark Capital and its investment in eBay.

• The Accidental Investment Banker – Perfect depiction of the investment banking industry during the dot-com boom of the late '90s.

• The Outsiders – Eight unconventional CEOs that were world-class capital allocators.

• Poor Charlie's Almanac – Life and philosophies of Charlie Munger.

• Damn Right – How Munger made his first few million.

• Kochland – Charles Koch used Deming’s concept of ’knowledge’, capital expertise, and data to build Koch Industries into an empire.

• Lessons from the Titans – Collection of case studies on industrial companies–from conglomerates like GE to compounders like TransDigm and Danaher–written by a group of equity research analysts who covered the companies for decades.

• The Fastest Tortoise – Ken Hersh founded Natural Gas Partners and revolutionized energy deals.

• The Caesars Palace Coup – World of distressed investing told through the lens of the 2015 Caesar's Palace bankruptcy where Apollo, Oaktree, Appaloosa, GSO, Elliott epitomized the term "creditor on creditor violence".

• The Alpha Masters – Inside the minds of the world’s top hedge fund managers like David Tepper–who thrived on chaos and evolved beyond just distressed investing.

• How to Make a Few Billion Dollars – Brad Jacobs built five separate billion-dollar publicly-traded companies (United Waste Systems, United Rentals, XPO, and XPO's two spin-offs, GXO Logistics and RXO).

• Junk to Gold – Willis Johnson created one of the most successful roll-ups of all time, growing Copart from one $75k junkyard into a $30 billion empire.

• George Soros, a Life in Full – He built no company, developed no algorithm, possessed no IP that could be bottled and sold. He just made money.