Paid to Sweat: Centerbridge's Jeff Aronson on the Growth of Private Markets

Welcome to another episode of Goldman Sachs Exchange's Great Investors. I'm Allison Mass, chairman of investment banking in Goldman Sachs' global banking and markets division and your host for this episode. Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Jeff Aronson, the cofounder and managing principal of Centerbridge Partners. Centerbridge manages over $42,000,000,000 in assets across private equity, private credit, and real estate strategies. I'm excited to hear how Jeff built this business and how he's navigated the opportunities and challenges that face private investment managers today.

And I'm happy to be

here. Awesome. So you started your career as a lawyer, and I wanna go way back. When and why did you transition into finance?

Yeah, I started my career as a lawyer not because I knew what a lawyer did, but because it sounded good. It sounded good. And I enjoyed law school. I went to work at a big Wall Street law firm. It wasn't for me. It was not for me.

What law firm did you work for?

It was called Stricken, Stricken Living.

Oh, yeah.

And it's no longer. It's no longer. I spent two and a half years doing that. And I found my way into the legal department of a small investment bank. It was called LF Rothschild Unterberg Tobin. And my job as a very young lawyer was to advise the people who are managing the firm's proprietary capital. Two gentlemen, John Angelo and Michael Gordon. And this was, gosh, probably 1986. So I did that and I really enjoyed working with them. And then what happened is the stock market crashed in 1987 and LF Rothschild went bankrupt. Remember that. So I'm thinking, oh my gosh, it's like, I don't wanna

Yeah, no kidding, with all your And