Michael Novogratz

Mike Novogratz is the president of Fortress Investment Group which was the first US-based private equity/hedge fund to sell shares to the public.

Novogratz was a wrestler at Princeton and also served as a helicopter pilot in the New Jersey National Guard,

Career

Novogratz began his career at Goldman Sachs, where he ran the fixed income group in Asia. When he earned partnership status in 1998, he returned to the New York office. After 12 years at Goldman, including a brief stint as chief of Goldman Sachs Latin America, Novogratz left for better opportunities in the hedge fund Industry. He joined Wesley Edens, Peter Briger, Robert Kauffman and Randall Nardone at Fortress, the firm they’d founded a few years before.

In 2006, the five men stunned Wall Street when they announced that they planed to go public. After the Japanese firm Nomura’s$890 million investment, Fortress raked in some $600 million for 8% of the company in a February 2007 IPO, valuing the portion held by Fortress’s principals at $9.7 billion. It was a groundbreaking moment for the industry, and helped start the wave of hedge fund and private equity firms that followed suit (or tried to). These included Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson’s Blackstone Group and Dan Och’s Och-Ziff Capital Management. Currently, Fortress has some $43 billion in assets under management, invested across several private equity and hedge funds. (Novogratz oversees the firm’s hedge fund operations himself.)

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