Liz’s view
Who buys Perella Weinberg? Who cares, says this reporter, who chased that tip for months.
Competitive hackles aside, the ranks of the independent advisory boutique now seem like so much ego detritus, a horse painting above a fireplace. The case for boutiques hasn’t disappeared — there will always be a place for independent advice from talented bankers — but the ground has shifted. By one recent estimate, $1.2 trillion needs to be raised just to fund the AI buildout. This era rewards balance sheets boutiques don’t have. A decade ago they felt new and exciting, a corrective to bloated banks oozing conflicts. Now they just feel like furniture.
Paul Taubman, who left Morgan Stanley in 2013 to hang out a shingle, was the last star whose exit made a meaningful dent in the M&A leaderboard. But he added talent and new businesses to move PJT Partners beyond his own Rolodex.
Almost nobody has followed. Of the 30 most active M&A banks today, as tracked by Dealogic, only one was founded after 2013, a sentence as true today as when I wrote it three years ago in a eulogy for Wall Street rainmakers that seemed to offend everyone who read it. Where is today’s Taubman, or Blair Effron, or Ken Moelis, or Frank Quattrone? It’s honestly baffling. With AI, it’s never been easier to scale personal relationships into a book of business. The tools exist. The talent and ambition seem not to.
What we have instead is limping consolidation. Greenhill, founded by M&A legend Bob Greenhill, hung on long enough for Mizuho to absorb it as the New York face of Japanese lending firepower. BDT & MSD has an investment arm to smooth out lumpy M&A fees and, I’m told, passed on buying Perella this year — it doesn’t need another 500 relationship bankers. Lehman star Skip McGee recently sold his boutique, Intrepid Partners.
Now Perella Weinberg, founded by M&A royalty Joe Perella and Peter Weinberg, is in talks to sell to Piper Sandler, which was itself formed by the 2019 merger of two boutiques that couldn’t hack it alone. Having covered the golden age of the rainmaker, it’s all a bit of a bummer.
Notable
- Perella Weinberg has struck a few deals of its own over the past few years, agreeing to buy UK-based adviser Gleacher Shacklock earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.