When Scott Bok left his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to attend the University of Pennsylvania in 1977, he had no plans for a career on Wall Street. Few of his generation did, and for good reason: Interest rates were 20 percent and the Dow was at 1000. Bok did not know what an investment banker was, hedge funds barely existed, and the terms “private equity” and “shareholder activist” had not yet been coined.
But by 1986, as Bok pondered which Wall Street firm to join, the stock market was already beginning to take off — the start of a now-50 year run that would change the world. It would also create sums of wealth few could have imagined, and the power that goes along with that, which Bok now believes has had some negative consequences. He points to the troubles facing Ivy League universities, their endowments, and even private equity — in addition to democracy itself.
The next half century was a tumultuous one on Wall Street, as Bok details in his recent book “Surviving Wall Street: A Tale of Triumph, Tragedy and Timing.” As he recounts, various events tested the market’s resilience — from the near collapse of Long-Term Capital Management and the dot-com crash to the financial crisis of 2008 to Covid-19 and its inflationary aftermath. Hedge funds were liquidated, Lehman went bankrupt, and many small prestigious firms fell by the wayside. A few elite firms, like Morgan Stanley, where Bok got his start, survived by morphing into giant trading behemoths, then retail powerhouses, and finally, during the 2008 financial crisis, banks regulated by the Federal Reserve.
Bok — the “survivor” of the book’s title — managed to sidestep much of the drama by leaving Morgan Stanley to join Robert Greenhill, who had previously started Morgan Stanley’s M&A advisory business and later launched his own small advisory firm Greenhill & Co. It became one of the most successful boutiques by sticking to its knitting, which included helping corporations fend off corporate takeovers, facilitating mergers, and other financings. After 27 years at Greenhill and 16 years as its CEO, Bok by early 2023 had decided it was time to sell the firm. Contemplating a quieter life ahead, he was finishing up a memoir of his Wall Street career.
Then the donors of the University of Pennsylvania revolted — thrusting Bok into the public spotlight in a way he’d never experienced before.
As the president of the university’s board of trustees, Bok found himself dealing with the same tactics he had faced defending the corporate world. But this time, as he put it in his book, “the stakes were higher.” The targets were ostensibly Penn President Elizabeth Magill and Bok, her defender, but as Bok tells it, they also included “free speech, academic freedom, antisemitism, DEI, ‘woke-ism,’ and the role of wealthy Wall Street patrons in the governance of nonprofit institutions.”
He was going up against the same financiers who’d attended Penn’s Wharton School of Business, a breeding ground for members of the Wall Street elite including himself, and who now were some of Penn’s wealthiest donors. Though hundreds of them got involved — at least in letters or emails to Bok — the person leading the fight in public was Marc Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, one of the most powerful private equity firms.
You can read my Q&A with Scott here:
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/why-wall-street-veteran-scott-bok-sees-trouble-ahead-endowments-and-private-equity
Michelle Celarier 