Michel David-weill
Banker whose skilful management maintained Lazard’s position as one of the leading finance houses
MICHEL DAVID-WEILL, who has died aged 89, was the “Sun King” of transatlantic investment banking as patriarch of the house of Lazard in Paris and New York.
Though the French capital was his spiritual home, David-weill was best known as the chairman and major shareholder of Lazard Frères in New York from 1977 to 2005. The firm dated its foundation from 1848, when three émigré Lazard brothers opened a dry-goods trading business in New Orleans, moving in the 1850s into banking in New York and Paris. Their cousin (and the husband of their half-sister) Alexandre Weill, Michel’s great-grandfather, joined them in New York in 1856.
A billionaire with an important private art collection and an ever-present cigar, David-weill was both an autocrat and a skilful manager of a partnership within which other powerful personalities on both sides of the Atlantic – including Felix Rohatyn, the firm’s most prodigious New York dealmaker – were able to flourish.
He was less at ease in the milieu of merchant banking in London, but was credited with bringing his New York and Paris operations into closer co-operation with their City sister firm, Lazard Brothers, whose major outside shareholder, the publishing group Pearson, he eventually bought out: the formation of a global Lazard holding company was completed in 2000.
The unhappiest passage of David-weill’s career followed his decision in 1992 – despite opposition within the firm – to bring in as his heir apparent his daughter Béatrice’s husband Edouard Stern, a scion of another French banking dynasty whose rebarbative personality and undisguised manoeuvring for power earned him the nickname in the French press of “le gendre incontrôlable”, or the uncontrollable son-in-law.
In the end, despite family loyalties, David-weill had no choice but to force Stern out (he died in Geneva in 2005, shot by his mistress during a sadomasochistic bondage session). But the episode isolated the chairman among his partners – and Stern’s departure left him without an obvious successor, other potential leaders having moved elsewhere. His solution was to recruit, in 2001, another outsized Wall Street personality, the legendary mergers and acquisitions specialist Bruce Wasserstein (known as “Bid ’Em Up Bruce”). to whom he ceded day-to-day control while retaining the chair.
A bitter stand-off followed, the chief source of friction being Wasserstein’s determination to transform Lazard from a 19th century-style “haute banque” partnership into a public listed company. Wasserstein having prevailed, an
$855 million share offering went ahead in 2005 – and David-weill was pushed into retirement with a $1.6 billion pay-out for his shareholding.
Michel Alexandre David-weill was born in Paris on November 23 1932 to Pierre David-weill and his wife Berthe, née Haardt; his grandfather David David-weill had hyphenated their original surname.
During the Second World War, Michel, his mother and his sister Eliane hid from the
Nazis in the south of France under the assumed name of Wattel and the children were baptised as Roman Catholics to disguise their Jewish heritage – an experience that taught him, as he often told his partners, “Your first duty is to survive.”
In 1945 the family joined Pierre in New York, where Michel attended the Lycée Français before returning to Paris to graduate from the élite Institut d’etudes Politiques. After internships on Wall Street he joined Lazard in Paris in 1956, becoming a partner in 1961 and managing partner after his father’s death in 1975.
He took the same position in New York two years later, succeeding Lazard’s presiding spirit of the post-war era, André Meyer, and embarked on a radical reshaping of the partnership and its business profile.
It was said that Meyer would have preferred to hand the reins to Felix Rohatyn, but the latter had been diverted to chair an initiative to save New York City from bankruptcy. With Rohatyn as the businesswinner and David-weill as the keeper of the Lazard flame and resolver of internal tensions, the pair led the firm to new heights of success.
David-weill marked their friendship in 1979 by giving Rohatyn a Monet as a wedding present, though their relationship later became strained.
Small, plump and quizzical in manner, David-weill was often described as ruthless – and, in one account, “jaundiced in his view of human nature”. Colleagues who won his trust knew him differently, however, as a man who liked to talk about art and philosophy, who enjoyed good food, wine and female company – but who always put the firm first. According to one, he worked “far harder than he needed to” to ensure that Lazard remained a force in a changing financial world.
Among his long-time personal clients were the Agnelli family, owners of the Fiat car company. He was believed to be Concorde’s most frequent flyer, invariably booking seats 1A and 1B – the second for his Louis Vuitton briefcase.
The Last Tycoons by William Cohan (2007), subtitled “the secret history of Lazard Frères”, also provides a glimpse of David-weill’s plutocratic smoking habit: he inhaled deeply on big Cuban cigars and even recommended them as a cold cure
– but having lit one and drawn on it three or four times, he would invariably leave it in the ashtray and light another.
One of his junior partners would wait until the chairman left the room, then clip both ends of the abandoned smokes and slip them into his pocket, “so every Monday I had two $15 cigars, and no one ever knew”.
Michel David-weill’s Fifth Avenue apartment was filled with paintings by Corot, Fragonard, Picasso and Miró; he also kept a grand townhouse in Paris and an estate at Cap d’antibes. He chaired the French government’s art acquisitions committee and was a patron of major cultural institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
He married, in 1956, Hélène Lehideux, who survives him with their four daughters. Michel David-weill, born November 23 1932, died June 17 2022