A deeper look at David Tepper

[Mr. Scot]

So with there being almost universal agreement that David Tepper is the leading candidate to be the next owner of the Carolina Panthers, I thought it'd be worth a deeper look at exactly who he is.

The most extensive profile of David Alan Tepper that can be found online comes from a New York Magazine profile of him written back in 2010.  You can read it in full here: Ready to be Rich

Here are some excerpts and commentary from me, starting with a story from a big financial conference where everyone was down, depressed and pessimistic to the point of being "funereal".

Enter Tepper...

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Then, late in the afternoon, David Tepper, a hedge-fund manager out of New Jersey, bounded up onstage and ripped off his tie, as though the lack of air in the room had become physically constraining. “I got a little story for you,” he said into the microphone, and proceeded to read it from a crumpled piece of paper in his hand.

“In 1898, the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York,” he said. “It was abandoned after three days because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis caused by urban horses and their output. In the Times of London, one reporter estimated that in 50 years, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.”

He paused, allowing people in the crowd to snicker to themselves, then went on to recommend a handful of investments most would consider highly risky...“every single one has a deficit-reduction plan! The ECB—the Bundesbank—bought back government bonds!” He paused for dramatic effect. “Holy Christ. It’s like the chastity belt is off, and the girl is starting to play.”

Colorful, isn't he?

We're not exactly talking about someone with a quiet, polite southern gentleman persona here.  Just the opposite, in fact.  Tepper would present a huge culture shock from Jerry Richardson.

For the record, Tepper's strategies paid off and his company made over 7.5 billion. So what happened next?

 

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The trade shot Tepper to the top of the list of hedge-fund-industry earners annually compiled by AR Magazine, just ahead of famed investor George Soros, and earned him comparisons to Warren Buffett in the financial press and a certain amount of hero worship inside the industry. “He is a golden god,” one distressed-debt investor told me, admitting that he had the Wall Street Journal article describing the trade taped to his wall. “Can you give him my résumé?”

In addition to an increase in profile, the trade netted him a personal payday of nearly $4 billion, more money than Tepper, who grew up in Pittsburgh and had never even been on a plane until he was 21, literally knows what to do with. “What do you think I should do with it?” he asked me. “I could buy an island. I could buy a private jet—but I have NetJets. I could get myself a 22-year-old!

“Sometimes,” he whispers, leaning across the table, “if someone is an asshole, like a waiter at a restaurant, I think, I could just buy this place and fire that guy.”

Again, not exactly a gentle soul here, but I suspect a lot of that talk is just bluster.  Based on what I've read of his personal life, I don't know that Tepper's ever actually "gotten himself a 22 year old" (he is divorced) or bought a restaurant to fire a lousy waiter, but clearly he enjoys joking about the perks that come with his money.

But let's be real: Some may find that off putting.  And they might not appreciate some of his other quirks either, like...

 

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“I will tell you this,” says his friend Phil Glassman, a neighbor with whom Tepper plays poker on Thursdays and golf on Saturdays. “If Dave can take twelve bucks off me on the golf course, he will do it, with pleasure and with a smile.”

Tepper loves it when people say things like this about him. “They’ll also tell you, ‘He never carries cash and has to borrow money to pay for things.’ See?” he says, opening his wallet. It is indeed empty. Also, he could use a new one. “I’m just a regular upper-middle-class guy who happens to be a billionaire.”

Obviously, he has professional reasons for wanting to come off this way—investors like to think the money managers handling their pension funds and endowments are penny-pinching rather than profligate. But for him, it’s more like an obsession. He gleefully describes how he talked the artist Peter Max down on a series of portraits of hedge-fund managers he did for Trader Monthly a few years ago. He’s been known to badger the secretaries about spending too much money on paper cups for the office and for years drove to work in a rusted minivan even while, one employee notes, “half the people in the office were driving Porsches.”

From the outside, that's funny.  But consider for a moment that if you worked for a billionaire boss who was complaining about paper cups, you'd probably think he was a jerk. And perhaps he is, or perhaps - as the story alludes - he just really likes to keep people on their toes.  You'll note that while he was complaining about paper cups, he was also driving a rusted minivan.  Kind of unusual for a billionaire.

That he comes from modest roots is important here, and perhaps more important that he still identifies with them, though with exceptions.

 

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This is not to say that Tepper doesn’t occasionally act like a billionaire. In 2004, he donated $55 million to his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon. Recently, when the owners of the Pittsburgh Steelers indicated they were willing to sell a stake in the team, he seized the opportunity with childlike enthusiasm. “Owning your favorite football team? Getting to watch all the games from the field? That’s every little boy’s dream,” says his friend Marc Kramer. (So is this: Flying private to every game with four of your closest friends. “It’s like a middle-aged version of Entourage,” says Kramer.) Five years ago, the Teppers hired Ashlee Simpson to sing at their daughter’s bat mitzvah. For his own 50th, he threw himself a little get-together at the Mandarin Oriental, during which he danced onstage with Ellen DeGeneres and sang “All I Wanna Do” and “If It Makes You Happy” with Sheryl Crow.

Try and picture Jerry Richardson doing any of the stuff in that last sentence. Tepper and Richardson are as different as night and day.

The "childlike enthusiasm" about owning a piece of the Steelers though?  That's a positive. That's probably what all of us would be like if he ever had a chance to own part of the Panthers (which you technically could right now, if you've got the dough).

For the record, Tepper owns 5% of the Steelers and made the purchase in 2009. 

When you have that much money (what the article gently calls "f--k you" money) there are always people who wouldn't mind having a little of it. 

What's his response to that?  Well...

 

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He’s also been getting a lot of letters from kids asking him to pay their college tuition. “I’m gonna have somebody put together a form letter for that,” he says. “It’ll say something like, I’m going to give you a great gift. What I got: Nothing.”

Ouch!

If you were looking for a story about how he agreed to pay for a bunch of kids to go to college, eeeehhh no.  Tepper has donated significant money to his alma mater, Carnegie-Mellon University, but he's not paying for the education of anyone outside his family.  He clearly believes everyone needs to earn their own keep, work their own way up, etc.  That's probably the kind of attitude he'll have toward players too.

A lot of that is probably bound up in the story of his own upbringing.

 

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David Alan Tepper’s childhood was just average. Born in 1957, he grew up in Stanton Heights, a middle-class section of Pittsburgh. His father, an accountant, was preoccupied by a certain amount of financial angst, but then, he had three children. David, the middle child, played football and memorized the baseball statistics on the backs of cards given to him by his grandfather—early evidence of what he claims is a photographic memory. “He was analytical,” remembers his brother, Scott. “We had a railing on our porch, and he would be like, ‘If I put my head in there, would I get stuck?’ ”

The sports love definitely started early.  I also like that he actually has played the game of football, even if it wasn't at a level any greater than high school.  The article also talks about him doing Elvis impressions in a school talent show, among other things.  A former teacher of Tepper's called him "self-confident", "irreverent", "a character" and a "guy's guy".

That's college.  What was he like when he entered the work force?  Well, he started out at Goldman-Sachs and, ummm...

 

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He was a boundary-pusher, loud and profane, and a know-it-all, who claimed, among other things, to have popularized the phrase “It is what it is.”

“David is not Mr. Goldman Sachs,” says Kolatch. “He does not have that navy-suit, Harvard-type background. I think he looked to them like a little bit of a renegade.”

Well, there's something Panther fans don't wanna hear.

That he's not a corporate, three piece suit, "wine and cheese" type though will probably be music to the ears of many, though.  Makes me think he's not the type that'll want a stadium full of people sitting quietly and casually enjoying the game.

He apparently also has a bit of a vindictive streak in him though, as this little story about what happened at a reception announcing his 55 million dollar gift to Carnegie-Mellon University will attest.

 

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At the gala reception announcing the gift, his college buddy Roland Lazzaro aired a video tribute to his friend. One segment was called “Cindy Perl: Thanks for Nothing,” after Tepper’s high-school girlfriend.

“Everybody in your life, there’s one person you want to rub their nose in it,” said Lazzaro. “After a five-year relationship, she said to him, ‘David, I love you, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to support the lifestyle I want.’ ” She ended up marrying a dentist.

Speaking of people whose noses Tepper might want to rub in his success, it’s worth noting that he happened to buy the exact $50 million mansion owned by the ex-wife of the man who had passed him over for partnership at Goldman Sachs. “You could frame it that way,” Tepper says, breaking into a grin. “You could say there was a little justice in the world.” The Teppers plan a total renovation of the mansion, which will likely involve razing the current property to the ground.

Okay, so maybe he does do a little more than just joke about it.

I'm not a big fan of people who talk about "the lifestyle they want", but I'm guessing Cindy Perl might just be regretting her decision about now.  Of course, she might be happy with her dentist.  Who knows? Maybe Tepper's "guy's guy" personality rubbed her the wrong way.

And about that...

 

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Tepper has a pair of brass testicles. Cartoonishly huge and grotesquely veiny, they are affixed to a plaque inscribed with the words THE MOST VALUABLE SET OF ALL TIME and are not at all out of place in Appaloosa’s offices, which resemble a high-end sports bar—all polished mahogany and flat-screen TVs and black-and-gold Steelers paraphernalia—or a wealthy frat house. (“We had this client, they make breast implants,” says a former employee. “He loved to keep them on the desk, he’d love to throw them around.”) Appaloosa is staffed almost entirely by men.

Ummmm...yeah.  Probably could have done without the graphic description.

I'm sure a lot of us would love to have our office look like a sports bar.  That said, given that he'd be following in the footsteps of a guy who's being kicked to the curb for workplace misconduct, the big veiny (eewww) brass balls and the silicone boob frisbees might be better left at home.

Let's...talk about something else, like maybe his approach to his job.
 

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“He takes a macro perspective on something, for instance this European sovereign crisis, which is that ‘it’s not going to be that bad,’ ” explains Kolatch. “And then he takes that and applies it to a micro idea, a particular stock, as opposed to saying I’m going to do this with the currency or do this with the interest rate, which is kind of what the macro guys do. He’ll buy these particular three stocks that will reflect this macro idea.”

This could be another reason why Tepper is so invested in being a regular guy. It pays to think like one. Of course the government will keep its promise, a regular guy would think.

Now this I like.  Don't overcomplicate things.  Focus on the big picture but solve the problems at the pixel level.  That's an approach I could easily see being successful when you're looking at a large team made up of individual players too.  In fact, it might just be ideal.

Speaking of approaches that I like...

 

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“I think when it comes to decisions, I try not to be emotional. To drown out the noise and look at the important facts.” Keeping your head about you when others are losing theirs is a lot easier said than done, especially in the midst of a panic like the one in 2009, when the data and rumors were at a fever pitch and people were worrying about whether they had enough canned goods to survive an economic siege. Even others who did the same trade as Tepper were afraid of going in as deeply. “That’s why he’s got a house in the Hamptons and I don’t,” says Kolatch.

Analytical, unemotional, unafraid.  That's a mindset that fits in with the Steelers way of doing things, and I imagine it's also what he'd bring to the table with the Panthers.  This doesn't necessarily mean the team would be completely heartless, but does probably mean they wouldn't allow sentiment to affect team related decision making.  That too would be a change from Richardson.

And then there's this...

 

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Asked where this preternatural confidence comes from, Tepper merely shrugs. “I was never afraid to go back to Pittsburgh and work in the steel mills,” he says.

When asked about his recent Super Bowl winning performance, Nick Foles said "don't be afraid to fail".  Tepper isn't afraid of failure either, not even of catastrophic failure.  You've always heard stories of stockbrokers jumping out of windows when they lost their fortunes.  Tepper's first response to that would like be to start updating his resumé .

That said, he isn't especially worried.

 

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Of course, he’s also cocky enough to believe he’ll never have to. “David has succeeded over time because he believes he’s the exception,” says Marc Lasry, the billionaire founder of Avenue Capital, a hedge fund that has invested in the same companies as Appaloosa. “If that’s how you’ve succeeded for twenty years, it’s hard to believe it’s going to end. I can guarantee you that David thinks he’s usually right. That he’ll be like, ‘Over time, I will always do a better job than others.’ It’s the only way he and others like him can succeed.”

“I used to get really upset when I had a down year,” Tepper says. “Now that I’ve been doing it this long, I have a much easier time. What matters, ultimately, is the track ­record I have over time.”

There’s simply not enough upside in self-doubt. “We’re not afraid to lose money,” says Tepper. “Hence the plaque. I should say, we’re not afraid to make money.”

Ego?  You bet, but good luck finding an NFL owner who doesn't have an ego the size of the moon.  It takes a fair amount of confidence to be able to look into the eyes of Bill Belichick and think "I'm gonna kick your ass".  Tepper obviously has that kind of confidence, tenacity and feistiness.

Or perhaps a little more than that...

 

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They’re not afraid to fight for it, either. Tepper likes to point out that Appaloosa is not a “vulture” fund exclusively and that the majority of investments are in equities, but that’s like a professional assassin pointing out that he doesn’t spend all his time killing people. The thing he is best at is finding a deal, and the best deals are found in sick and ailing companies. And this can be a dirty business. Two years ago, Tepper headed up a consortium that agreed to help auto manufacturer Delphi exit from Chapter 11 protection—only to pull out at the last minute after the credit markets seized up, stymieing the company’s ability to get financing. A bitter battle ensued. Delphi filed a lawsuit against Appaloosa, alleging, among other things, that Tepper “pushed, with the grace and diplomacy of a battering ram, to play a central role in the reorganization” of the company, only to turn tail and “manufacture an excuse” once they lost interest.

“I’m no longer mad,” says former Delphi CEO Steve Miller, who is now the chairman of AIG. Tepper has “certainly got a touch of arrogance, but he’s really entitled to it. He’s the kind of guy who moves ahead while you are trying to figure out what to do with your pawn. His ability to do math, really complicated balance-sheet math in his head, was awesome. But he’s impatient with us lesser mortals.”

Again, ouch!

People who have wanted the organization to have a killer instinct rather than being "polite", I think this is the kind of mentality you're looking for.  And it certainly doesn't hurt to have it packaged in a guy who not only appears to always be the smartest guy in the room, but quite unapologetically knows he is.

So does that make him a bit of an...

 

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“He’s an asshole, to say the least,” says someone who worked with him. “I had stuff thrown at me. He can be a nice guy off the desk, in the kitchen or walking to the car. It’s almost like Jekyll and Hyde, you didn’t know any given day who was going to walk through the door.” This is not merely someone with a grudge. When Tepper coached elementary-school kids in softball, Phil Glassman says, he could be heard screaming all the way down the block.

Tepper admits he can be difficult. “I used to be worse,” he says over the phone. “When I was at Goldman, I’d say things to people like, ‘Do you know what a schmuck is? Go look in the mirror.’ Now I’m kinder and gentler. Aren’t I kinder and gentler?” he asks his employees.

In the background there’s silence.

“Aren’t I kinder and gentler?”

I'm finding myself really glad that I don't work for this guy right now.

To anyone who is currently working in the Panthers offices, of course, you might wanna consider looking at...alternate options.

It hasn't all been sunshine and rainbows for Tepper either, though.

 

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“It just feels very uncertain right now,” he said over the phone in August. “I’m a natural optimist, but the numbers are just horrid. The whole economy is stuck in mud. Thick. Dark. Mud.”

Sure, he was still having fun: There was golf, and poker, and his nephew’s bachelor party, among other things. But his main pleasure, trading gargantuan sums of money, was unavailable to him. “This company looks cheap, that company looks cheap, but the overall economy could completely screw it up,” he said grumpily. “The key is to wait. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to do nothing.”

Basically, Tepper was bored. Betting on the markets is “like gambling,” he said. “It fills that same rush.” And once you get the rush of making $4 billion, it’s hard to fill that void with anything else.

“What would I do?” he said, back at the Hilton, when I asked why, with more money than he could ever need, he didn’t just quit while he was ahead. “When do you stop trying to be the best?”

That last sentence - that whole last paragraph, honestly - is pretty telling.

A guy who's made over 11 billion dollars was "bored".  So how, in that situation, do you find a new way to challenge yourself?

Maybe you buy an NFL team.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

So what do we learn here?

First and most obviously, Tepper's personality is pretty much a complete 180 from that of Jerry Richardson.  Where Richardson is a calm, genteel and laid back southerner, Tepper is a hyped up, non-stop, foul-mouthed and full speed ahead guy from the northeast. That persona means winning is paramount and mediocrity is unacceptable. Hence, job security won't be what it was under Richardson either. Tepper definitely doesn't sound like the type to listen to excuses or explanations.  If you don't perform, you're likely out the door and they'll find someone else who will.

That's a hallmark of the Steelers organization with which Tepper is currently affiliated, of course.  The Steelers aren't interested in appearing in championships.  They care about winning them, and every single person within the organization needs to be contributing toward that goal.  This means they don't necessarily care about emotional ties.  They're not the least bit reluctant to part ways with popular, big name players.  Their personnel machine gives them the flexibility to go "next man up" anytime they want.  You'd expect Tepper to want something like that here as well, and that setup may not include our current scouting staff.

Another effect of Tepper: I'm not sure the "Fan Code of Conduct" for gamedays at the stadium survives, to be honest. At the very least, it could be significantly relaxed so that people aren't told to sit down and be quiet when they want to cheer for their team.  The Steelers stadium certainly isn't quiet, nor are their fans always polite and accommodating to opposing fans.  People who want to get rowdy at games will most likely welcome a change of this sort, though those who take their families and young children with them might want to ask a question or two.

It should also be understood that where Richardson can be somewhat risk averse, Tepper fears nothing.  This likely means he'd be unafraid of adding guys with character concerns to the Panthers roster.  People who have been wanting the Panthers to take more risks on guys with character issues may finally get their wish if Tepper buys the team.  I'm not a fan of that because I don't like putting the team in the position of depending on people who are undependable, so for me that could be a concern.

And it's not the only one...

In today's workplace climate, you can't have brass balls on your desk or be tossing around breast implants.  My personal guess would be that Tepper knows that.  Bear in mind, this article was written in 2010, long before the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the #metoo movement and the expose' of Jerry Richardson.  It's unknown whether Tepper still has those things now.  As mentioned before, if he does, I suggest he not bring them to the offices of Bank of America Stadium.  Given what led to Richardson's exit, that'd be a bad look, one I doubt the NFL would want

Speaking of climate, for those who want the football side of the Panthers to present a kinder, gentler work environment, I don't see that coming with this fellow.  Tepper is a "win or go home" guy, and I wouldn't bet on him being especially concerned whether anyone gets their feelings hurt on their way out.  Think Dave Gettleman was rough?  If Gettleman were an abrasive cleanser, Tepper sounds like a wire brush. And this time that personality would be at the ownership level, so there'd be no one to tell him to tone it down.

The biggest issue for me, though?  The words "hands off" don't exactly sound like they describe this guy.

Tepper may indeed by super intelligent, clever and cunning, but he's not experienced in personnel evaluation, coaching or anything else that relates to roster building.  Now, as long as he defers those duties to someone who has done all those things and done them well, we're golden.  Unfortunately, if he decides he wants to micromanage the football operations side of the team though, that's a problem.  For whatever Tepper may or may not know about football, micromanager owners haven't been especially successful ones.  If that's what he turns out to be, Tepper could wind up being another Dan Snyder or Jerry Jones.  Or if you can believe it, potentially worse.

Not exactly something anyone wants to hear, is it?

The good news on all these fronts is that Tepper isn't coming into this blind.  He's spent the last nine years as part of arguably the best run organization in football. 

The Rooneys are not hands on owners.  They put good people in place and let them do their jobs. Everything in Pittsburgh is in the hands of capable GM Kevin Colbert, who in turn relies on a very well performing staff.  As mentioned above, the Steelers personnel and business operations are long tenured, highly respected and enormously successful.  Jerry Richardson talked a lot about emulating that model but never really did.  I suspect Tepper would do more than talk about it.

What about how Tepper relates to players?  Well, I certainly wouldn't expect him to be a "father figure" like Jerry Richardson was.  Tepper is more of a boss, and a demanding one.  When it comes to the business side of things though, as long as Tepper isn't a hands on owner, you could expect that any players who would be let go in Carolina would be told so by the GM rather than Tepper.  How their releases would be handled would depend a lot on what kind of GM Tepper chooses.  If he picks a guy like Colbert - who, while direct and firm, is not what anyone would call abrasive - you can expect things to go smoothly. If he picks someone with a personality much like his own though, all bets are off.  Impossible to predict at this point.

Barring his being out of contract (and the Steelers not renewing it) Tepper won't likely be bringing Colbert himself here if he takes over.  That said, I wouldn't be surprised if he did attempt to bring some personnel people, business folks and (potentially) coaches, with him from the Steelers offices.  Given their track record, that's not exactly a bad thing.  And since the Steelers aren't run with a "men's club" atmosphere (their quarterback aside), the question of workplace atmosphere could probably be laid to rest also.

Bottom Line: If this is our new owner, he sounds like he's going to be an absolute seismic shift from Jerry Richardson.  It would mean major changes from everything we've known about the Panthers since they first took the field over twenty years ago.

Here's hoping it also means championships.

[countryboi]

4 minutes ago, Mr. Scot said:

So with there being almost universal agreement that David Tepper is the leading candidate to be the next owner of the Carolina Panthers

So did I miss a memo or when the hell did this happen?

[Mr. Scot]

Just now, countryboi said:

So did I miss a memo or when the hell did this happen?

Do a quick Google search of "David Tepper Panthers" and see what you get.

[Moo Daeng]

27 minutes ago, countryboi said:

So did I miss a memo or when the hell did this happen?

Speculation considering the bids are just starting to come in.

[Moo Daeng]

Or even more correctly, the bidding process hasn't even started.

[Mr. Scot]

1 minute ago, Moo Daeng said:

Speculation considering the bids are just starting to come in.

He does have a couple of innate advantages, though.

One, he's already part of the club, vetted and prepared by the NFL itself.  It's how they got Haslam into the Browns ownership chair, and Tepper's Steelers stake was in fact bought from Haslam.

Two, eleven billion dollars.

Both of those would be difficult advantages to overcome, especially with the league having final approval.

Also doesn't hurt that the news of him being the likely front runner was reported by guys who work for the league itself on NFL Network.

[chknwing]

Do you have the cliff notes version

[Mr. Scot]

9 minutes ago, chknwing said:

Do you have the cliff notes version

"David Tepper can be kind of an a--hole, but he wants to win."

[Moo Daeng]

This guy comes across a pure cheese dick

[Moo Daeng]

If he becomes the owner hopefully he doesn't act like a hedge fund manager

[Mr. Scot]

1 minute ago, Moo Daeng said:

This guy comes across a pure cheese dick

Yeah, pretty much.

I know everyone loves the idea of having a new owner right now, but if he buys the team and gets settled in I won't be surprised if there are a fair share of fans who come to dislike him.

[Mr. Scot]

I'd add this too.

You're not looking at someone who would be afraid to move on from popular players.  Whether it be Cam, Luke, Olsen, whomever.  I get a definite sense that if he feels they can be replaced with someone better, Tepper will do it without blinking.

You can argue whether those would be good moves or not when and if the time comes, but I'd challenge anyone to read up on him and come back and say he wouldn't do it.

I have zero doubt that he would.

[Mr. Scot]

Also, Cam Newton deleted his Instagram account because he was told to do so by David Tepper.

 

 

 

 

Not really, but hey...

[Jon Snow]

Well if he ends up buying the team one thing is for certain, It will never be boring in Panther land.  

And those that hated Dave's approach will loath this guy.

Here's to hoping it works.