Timely and provocative reading on one of the many perils of the murky private equity world.
Two Wall Street Journal reporters demonstrate how a charismatic but crooked businessman conned elite investors into believing they could profit from doing good for the globally dispossessed.
Until he was accused of misappropriating funds in 2018, Pakistani-born Arif Naqvi, founder of the Abraaj Group, was a celebrated private equity tycoon. In this expansion of their investigation for the WSJ, Clark and Louch—who gathered information from “more than 150 people, including 70 former Abraaj employees, business chiefs, politicians and a Vatican cardinal”—chart Naqvi’s breathtaking rise to prominence and his even more stupendous fall from grace. The authors depict the young Naqvi as an exceptionally talented student of modest means whose “priority was to get rich.” The more ruthless side of his personality began to emerge in his young professional days. A real estate developer in Pakistan, one of his first bosses, noted Naqvi’s extreme ego and ambition and willingness to take problematic risks with debt. These traits served him well in his days as an independent fundraiser and dealmaker in Dubai and led him to form the relationships that led to the creation of Abraaj in 2002. The company quickly began making huge profits in developing countries that Naqvi marketed to Western investors and academics as “places of excitement and opportunity.” For the next 15 years, banks, philanthropists, and a host of foreign governments—including those of the U.S. and Britain—entrusted Abraaj with spectacular sums meant to fund socially conscious projects (such as the rescue of the perennially failing Karachi Electric company) that Naqvi surreptitiously used to “keep his billionaire lifestyle afloat.” As his fame grew, so did his darker tendencies, which manifested as significant abuses of corporate power. Compelling and disturbing, the book is a pointed tale of hubris, greed, and the narrow limits of so-called capitalistic “benevolence” in the era of growing economic inequality.
Timely and provocative reading on one of the many perils of the murky private equity world.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-299621-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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