Obituary: Saul Steinberg, corporate raider

Saul Steinberg, a corporate raider who helped set the tone for a generation of aggressive financiers, died in his sleep at his New York home on Friday. He was 73.

Steinberg demonstrated a knack for investing at a young age.

At 22 he anticipated the computing boom but saw that it was expensive for companies to obtain information technology equipment. So he set up Leasco Data Processing Equipment Corporation, which leased IBM computers at a lower rate than the company itself offered.

Steinberg’s inspiration for that venture came from classwork that he had done at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, an institution he went on to support throughout his career.

He served as chairman of the Wharton board for more than 15 years, and the main undergraduate building at the school is partially named after him.

“Saul Steinberg was a remarkable human being, full of ambition and unmatched generosity,” said Wharton’s dean, Thomas Robertson.

Steinberg took Leasco public in 1965, and a few years later used the company to bid for Reliance Insurance, a 150-year-old insurer.

Though the company initially resisted, Steinberg eventually won the fight, taking over a company whose revenues dwarfed the one he was running. He was not yet 30 at the time. He went on to run Reliance for 32 years, until the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001.

His success in taking over Reliance whetted Steinberg’s appetite, and he used his perch there to go after other, larger targets.

In 1969, he made an unsuccessful bid for Chemical Bank, which is now part of JPMorgan Chase. Fifteen years later, he took a large position in Walt Disney.

Though he wasn’t able to wrest control from management, he got the company to buy back his stock at a steep premium, reportedly making nearly $40m. The episode helped coin the term “greenmailing”.

His success afforded him the opportunity to indulge his whimsies, and Steinberg, like many Wall Streeters in the 1980s, was unafraid to flash his wealth.

Steinberg lived in a 17,000-square-foot Park Avenue apartment, which he reportedly bought from the Rockefeller family. It was stuffed with rococo chairs and old master paintings.

In 1989, he threw himself a 50th birthday party that featured live models recreating scenes from his favourite Renaissance paintings.

The good times did not last forever. Steinberg suffered a stroke in 1995, and around the time of the Reliance restructuring, he was forced to sell the apartment and then auction off his antiques and art in 2000.

The buyer for the apartment was Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, who in 2007 held a lavish 60th birthday party that was criticised in the press.

Family members remembered Steinberg for his joie de viv r e and his intellect.

“He wasn’t interested in just the deal,” Julian Steinberg, the only child from Steinberg’s second marriage who now runs a private equity firm, said in an interview.

“He was interested in the larger vision, and the deal was how he got there.”

Steinberg also harboured a deep love of literature and history, according to his son, who added that his father had read 200 books a year since he graduated from college. “He would read authors and subjects to exhaustion,” he said.

Steinberg was born in 1939 in New York City. His father was a rubber manufacturer. He is survived by his third wife, Gayfryd, six children, and five grandchildren.

His eldest son, Jonathan, is chief executive of WisdomTree, an exchange traded fund provider, and married CNBC host Maria Bartiromo in 1999.

Steinberg’s death came as a surprise to friends and family. The evening before he passed away he and his son Jonathan had dinner at Steinberg’s favourite local restaurant, Sette Mezzo.