Sunday, December 11, 2011

Meet the Homeless Billionaire


New York Magazine’s Jessica Pressler writes: Is it cold outside?” Nicolas Berggruen asks, glancing through the picture window of his penthouse suite at the Carlyle. “Maybe I need another jacket.” He darts into the bedroom, where his clothes are stored neatly in a black wool duffel, and emerges in a zipped black cardigan. “Let’s go!” says the billionaire founder of investment company Berggruen Holdings and the Berggruen Institute, a think tank with the modest goal of solving the world’s problems, funded with $100 million of his own money and staffed with an impressive roster of boldface names from the international business community. A trim, tiny 50-year-old Ken doll, Berggruen looks like he’s 30 and acts like he’s 20. He’s always bounding restlessly around in search of action, so much so that a decade ago, he gave up his full-time residence and most of his belongings in favor of shuttling between luxury hotels on his Gulfstream—a haute-itinerant lifestyle that has earned him the moniker “the homeless billionaire.”

“It’s simpler,” he explains, as we make our way across the street to Café Boulud, where the maître d’ greets him by name and seats us next to a table of thin women with small dogs, Berggruen’s part-time neighbors. “Are you traveling a lot?” one of them asks. “A little bit,” he says, and everyone giggles….

Find out more at http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/encounter/nicolas-berggruen-2011-12/

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