The following news story is a captivating summation of the rise of businessman Jeffrey J Steiner.
Jeffrey Steiner was a born Jewish Austrian who as a child fled his homeland during World War II to escape the Holocaust. As an adult, he speaks four languages and has residences in London, Paris, St. Tropez, Palm Beach, and New York. Jeffrey Steiner earned a degree in textile engineering from the Bradford Institute of Technology. He worked for Texas Instruments and advanced quickly through the ranks to earn a position on the management committee by age 25. He later obtained an executive position. Jeffrey Steiner worked for Texas Instruments for ten years before becoming interested in investment.
After leaving Texas Instruments, Jeffrey Steiner spent some time in Europe, where he dabbled in investment practices until deciding to return to the United States. Jeffrey J Steiner’s big break came when he bought enough shares of Banner Aerospace to become its Chairman. Rather than settling Banner’s debt, Jeffrey Steiner leveraged the company as a financial vehicle in other corporate buyouts. This eventually led to the purchase of Fairchild Industries, which Banner Aerospace rescued from the Carlyle Group and merged with its own business. Jeffrey Steiner is still Chairman of Fairchild Corporation.
GLOBE-TROTTING TAKEOVER ARTIST: Jeffrey J. Steiner; Transforming Nuts and Bolts Into Big-Time Deals
He grew up in Istanbul during World War II, after his family fled Hitler’s advance into Vienna. At one point, he was an executive at Texas Instruments Inc., at another, an owner of a Paris-based engineering firm doing business in the Middle East. He helped fund Carl Icahn’s first forays and is a buddy of the corporate raider Nelson Peltz.
Now Jeffrey J. Steiner, once one of the invisible hands in the takeover game, is stepping out on his own.
Mr. Steiner, whose investment vehicle is the Cleveland-based Banner Industries, is trying to buy Fairchild Industries, an aerospace company, in a deal valued at about $400 million. Fairchild would add to the 52-year-old takeover artist’s growing array of industrial companies that are, quite literally, nuts and bolts businesses - a collection, with annual revenues of about $1 billion, that has made Mr. Steiner a nine-digit millionaire.
”I’ve long had a goal of building a company in a specific core business and becoming No. 1 or No. 2 in that, and now I’m close to achieving it,” said Mr. Steiner, a dapper chain-smoker who dresses in the European tradition of sports jackets instead of suits and whose New York office is decorated with Andy Warhol portraits of some of his children.
[…truncated…]
Read the full news article about GLOBE-TROTTING TAKEOVER ARTIST Jeffrey J. Steiner.
