Rubenstein has said that he was once offered the opportunity to meet Mark Zuckerberg (and invest in Facebook) before he dropped out of Harvard but decided against it, and this is his single greatest investment regret.[15] Rubenstein also said that he turned down a 20% stake in Amazon during the very early years of the company. He told Amazon founder Jeff Bezos that if he got lucky and everything worked out he would at most be worth $300 million.[16]
In 2018, he formed Declaration Capital, a family office focused on venture, growth, real estate, and family-owned businesses.[17][18]
Mobile home parks controversy
Rubenstein was publicly criticized for the work of The Carlyle Group of which he is the chairman, which owns a number of mobile home parks and has been pushing poor people out of their mobile homes by hiking up the rental price.[19] In an episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver pointed out that manufactured homes are not easy or cheap to relocate, and so poor residents on fixed incomes face eviction and homelessness as rent increases threaten to price them out of their mobile home parks.[20]
wikipedia
Billionaire David Rubenstein’s philanthropic efforts trash the Founding Fathers, even though his own business has made a fortune from deals that have profited off the less fortunate.
Since 2013, Rubenstein, 72, who co-founded the private equity giant the Carlyle Group, has given millions to entities that repair and upgrade historical monuments and landmarks like the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument as well as Monticello and Montpelier, the homes of US presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. But some say the restoration at the presidential homes has recast the presidents as sinister racists while downplaying their accomplishments.
Recent visitors to Monticello and Montpelier have flooded Trip Advisor with complaints about how the former presidents have been virtually reduced to villainous slaveholders in lectures by the tour guides while books on anti-racism and critical race theory by Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates dominate the gift shops.
Remarked Dan A. after his visit to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello: “Do your history homework before going, so you can appreciate this great American… the woke tour guide will leave you feeling like he started the Ku Klux Klan.” “They have demonized the founding fathers now,” wrote another recent visitor to Monticello. “Same thing with Madison’s home. I would stay away from places like this. It’s not worth the propaganda.”
https://nypost.com/2022/07/30/woke-billionaire-who-trashed-the-founding-fathers-profited-off-eskimos-oil/
Somewhere I can see Balta enjoying this guy.
But a quick dive into Rubenstein’s backstory shows he’s not so pure himself. He made his initial fortune in the 1980s by exploiting a tax loophole in Alaska allowing him to profit from deals made with Natives — and the Rubenstein family has been expanding their influence in the 49th state ever since.
In 2014, Rubenstein’s then-wife helped elect a governor in Alaska who in turn opened up the state’s $80 billion Permanent Fund, a fraction of which is managed by the Carlyle Group, to special interests. Rubenstein’s daughter was appointed to the board of that fund last month.
“Here’s a guy who has taken advantage of other people to climb to the top while he expects perfection from the Founding Fathers,” Dan f**an, a talk show host and journalist who covered Alaska for 25 years, told The Post. “Because of the Rubenstein family and how [his ex-wife] influenced the change in the state’s sovereign fund, the average Alaskan family has lost tens of thousands of dollars.”
Balta maybe NOT SO MUCH enjoying this part of the backstory.
https://nypost.com/2022/07/30/woke-billionaire-who-trashed-the-founding-fathers-profited-off-eskimos-oil/