Already a member? Log In

Lazard Times

Under the leadership of Ken Jacobs, who has been extremely well paid, Lazard has grown bigger and more robust. But its stock has underperformed badly.
Under the leadership of Ken Jacobs, who has been extremely well paid, Lazard has grown bigger and more robust. But its stock has underperformed badly. Photo: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for Autism Speaks
William D. Cohan
May 10, 2023

Most readers know by now that I have a soft spot for Lazard, the international investment bank where I worked for six years between 1989 and 1995. And, of course, Lazard was the subject of my first bestseller, The Last Tycoons, which was published in 2007 and won the 2007 Business Book of the Year Award, courtesy of the Financial Times and, ahem, Goldman Sachs. I bring this up only because former Goldman C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein gave me the award at a modern branch of the London public library and I repaid him by writing my third book about Goldman. (Lloyd, let’s catch up again soon.)

I was a banker at Lazard in the years before its Wasserstein-ization, before it joined the Wall Street herd and became a public company, in 2005. Back then, Lazard was a private partnership and one of the hot places to be on Wall Street if you wanted to advise C.E.O.s on their most important M&A transactions and if you had a taste for the mysterious, the enigmatic, and the flamboyant. It bears repeating what the late Michel David-Weill, the patriarch of Lazard and the fourth-generation heir of the founding family, liked to say, without irony, that the bank was a “haute banque d’affaires vis-à-vis the world.” He then proceeded to describe what he meant: “To me it is a state of mind, not an activity. It is a firm which puts itself at a level parallel with the level at which decisions are made in enterprises. It means that you remain at the decision-making level, that you give advice at that level, that you think at that level and that you remain exclusively at that level.” You can’t make this stuff up.