JOSEPH BAE

Bae was born in South Korea in 1973 and moved to the US as a child. He went to Phillips Academy, then Harvard, graduating in economics in 1994.

He started at Goldman Sachs, then joined KKR in 1996 when the firm was still mostly a US buyout shop. In 2005 he moved to Hong Kong to build KKR's Asia business from scratch.

That bet turned into one of KKR's crown jewels, with Asia-Pacific investments worth more than $20 billion in fair value and Japan alone making up over a third of the regional portfolio. He was promoted to co-president and co-COO in 2017.

In October 2021 he and Scott Nuttall became co-CEOs when Kravis and Roberts stepped back. Today he helps run a firm with more than $600 billion in assets.

KKR & Co. Inc.

(co-CEO), formerly head of KKR Asia

Bae plays the long game and he plays it locally. His core belief is that you cannot parachute into a country like Japan or India and expect to win.

You need people on the ground who actually understand the place. So he built local teams first and let deals follow.

He is a buyout investor at heart, which means KKR buys big stakes in companies, improves them, and sells later for more. His edge is connecting those local teams to KKR's global network, so an Asian company can reach US buyers and a US company can crack Asia.

He is patient to a fault, happy to wait years for the right entry point.

The whole Asia platform is his biggest win. When Bae moved to Hong Kong in 2005, KKR had basically no presence in the region.

He turned that into a business with more than $20 billion in fair value and some of KKR's best returns anywhere. He has said flatly that KKR's best returns come from Japanese private equity, a market most Western firms wrote off as impossible.

That single long bet is a big reason he got the co-CEO job.

Bae does not have a famous public blowup, which is partly the point of how he invests. The real risk hanging over him is the goal he set himself.

He wants KKR at $1 trillion in assets by 2030, roughly double where it sat when he took over. Growing that fast without letting returns slip is brutally hard, and plenty of firms have chased scale and paid for it with worse performance.

If KKR stumbles on that march, this is the chapter people will point to.

Bae believes value gets created by people and relationships, not spreadsheets. He often says KKR's connected culture is the real engine, not any single deal.

He thinks the biggest returns come from markets everyone else finds too hard or too far away, which is why he pushed so hard into Asia. He is a believer in owning things for the long haul and fixing them, not flipping them fast.

And he is convinced private markets will keep swallowing more of the global economy, which is why he wants KKR at $1 trillion in assets by 2030.

Bae is married to Janice Bae. The couple has been active in philanthropy together, including a major 2021 gift to Harvard.

He keeps his private life mostly out of the press.

Bae went to Phillips Academy, the elite New England prep school, before Harvard College, where he earned an economics degree in 1994. Those two institutions plugged him into a network that later helped KKR.

He has stayed a committed Harvard donor and a supporter of Asian American studies there.