The co-founder of the Carlyle Group, the giant district private-equity firm that invests tens of billions of dollars on behalf of pension funds and other investors, said over the weekend that he expects most of the major firms in his industry to become public companies in the next few years.
“These guys who built these private-equity firms: You can say many things about them, but one thing you can’t say is they’re stupid, or they are not an alpha male,” said David M. Rubenstein, Carlyle’s managing director. “These guys are going to be fairly forthright about getting what they think they earned for building these firms.”
What about his company? Rubenstein, 57, said Carlyle is in “a monitoring mode” and would closely watch how one of its chief rivals, the Blackstone Group, does with the initial public offering it announced last month.
“It’s fair to say that Carlyle . . . would be thought to be a natural candidate to go public,” Rubenstein said. “We don’t have our heads in the sand and we’re not ignoring what’s going on with Blackstone or Fortress [Investment Group] or others. Today we are not working on an IPO. But . . . if our competitors all go public and all of them seem to be stronger than they were before, obviously we would have to take a look at the situation.”