One of Gagosian’s particular talents is conjuring complex, chesslike transactions that offer elements more enticing than cash. “He’s like a block trader,” says collector and Blackstone chairman, CEO and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, referring to the financial practice of making high-risk, fast-moving private deals on large quantities of shares. “He’s in the matching business.” When Schwarzman, for example, was seeking a rare Twombly “blackboard” painting for his apartment, “Larry found someone in Korea who owned a painting and found another painting that was larger and more important,” Schwarzman says. “So they sold their painting and bought another from Larry. That’s a classic Larry Gagosian execution—where everyone’s happy and Larry makes tons of money.”
Category: Portrait
Who Funds the Future?
“The biggest outcomes come when you break your previous mental model. The black-swan events of the past forty years—the PC, the router, the Internet, the iPhone—nobody had theses around those. So what’s useful to us is having Dumbo ears.” A great V.C. keeps his ears pricked for a disturbing story with the elements of a fairy tale. This tale begins in another age (which happens to be the future), and features a lowborn hero who knows a secret from his hardscrabble experience. The hero encounters royalty (the V.C.s) who test him, and he harnesses magic (technology) to prevail. The tale ends in heaping treasure chests for all, borne home on the unicorn’s back.
The Secret Six
“The FX was definitely ahead of its time for having a semi-automatic gearbox,” says Kim.
“The Sultan and his brother really were R&D for many high-end automakers. They were building custom bespoke cars that not only had unique bodies and interiors, but sometimes exotic technologies. And the money was limitless.”
The Buddha Of Kabul
• • •
These links to the past are so fragile, made of clay and dust. So easy to break, so easy to return to the earth they came from. Yet these are also the objects that remind the forgetful world, and Afghans themselves, of what they used to be, of the confluence of ideas and civilizations that formed their khak, their ancestry. When I asked Zafar why he works so hard to excavate and preserve the material remains of Afghanistan’s history, he replied flippantly, “Because I am in love with Buddhism, and archaeology.” If so, it is a fraught romance, as the country’s past has been erased over years of war, and now, over an uncertain, uneven peace. Zafar has learned to be like the patient lover of a volatile partner. He cherishes what he has, without asking how long it will stay.
The Most Important Apple Executive You’ve Never Heard Of
At the center of all this is Srouji, 51, an Israeli who joined Apple after jobs at Intel and IBM. He’s compact, he’s intense, and he speaks Arabic, Hebrew, and French. His English is lightly accented and, when the subject has anything to do with Apple, nonspecific bordering on koanlike. “Hard is good. Easy is a waste of time,” he says when asked about increasingly thin iPhone designs. “The chip architects at Apple are artists, the engineers are wizards,” he answers another question. He’ll elaborate a bit when the topic is general. “When designers say, ‘This is hard,’ ” he says, “my rule of thumb is if it’s not gated by physics, that means it’s hard but doable.”
Abnormal Capitalist 