Word: silverman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Realogy's passage into private ownership was nonetheless a landmark--because it marked the end of chief executive Henry Silverman's career as boss of a publicly traded corporation. Silverman, 66, is no household name, but he may be one of the iconic figures of modern American capitalism. Either that or "the Zelig of the corporate world," as he once called himself, evoking Woody Allen's cipher of a character who shows up at major historical moments...
...Silverman really has been a player in just about every important business trend of the past three decades. He has watched the rise, fall and resurgence of private equity--what used to be called leveraged buyouts, or LBOs--from inside and out. "There are certainly cycles," Silverman said, when I talked to him a few days after Realogy went private. "And in the current iteration of the capital markets, clearly the private-equity guys are sitting in the catbird seat...
...leading catbirds, Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman and Apollo's Leon Black, happen to be old pals of Silverman's. In the 1980s, Silverman too was an LBO artist, working alongside corporate raider Saul Steinberg and funding his exploits with Michael Milken's Drexel junk bonds. Then, as a partner at Blackstone in the early 1990s, he sniffed a change in the financial winds, cobbled together a few struggling hotel chains (starting with Ramada and Howard Johnson) into Hospitality Franchise Systems (HFS), took the company public and stayed...
...Golden Globe for playing a Kazakh journalist who calls Alan Keyes a "genuine chocolate face" and asks a gun-shop owner to suggest a good piece for killing a Jew. Quentin Tarantino has made a career borrowing tropes from blaxploitation movies. In the critics-favorite sitcom The Sarah Silverman Program, the star sleeps with God, who is African American and who she assumes is "God's black friend." And the current season of South Park opened with an episode about a Michael Richards-esque controversy erupting when a character blurts the word niggers on Wheel of Fortune. (He answers...
...license to borrow terms other people have taken back can worry even edgy comics. A few months ago, I interviewed Silverman, who argued that her material was not racist but about racism (and I agree). But she added something that surprised me, coming from her: "I'm not saying 'I can say nigger because I'm liberal.' There is a certain aspect of that that I'm starting to get grossed out by. 'Oh, we're not racist...