ROBERT BASS

Robert Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1948. He is one of four Bass brothers, heirs to an oil fortune built by their father Perry Bass and their great-uncle, the legendary wildcatter Sid Richardson.

Robert went to Yale and then Stanford for an MBA. In 1985 he set up the Robert M.

Bass Group as his personal investment company. In 1990 he renamed it Keystone, Inc., after the Keystone oil field in West Texas where the family money came from.

He made his name buying distressed assets and running leveraged buyouts. He founded Oak Hill Capital Partners along the way.

And his firm became a training ground. David Bonderman and Jim Coulter both worked for Bass before leaving in 1992 to start what became TPG, now one of the biggest private equity firms on Earth.

Keystone, Inc. is his family office in Fort Worth, the hub of everything he does.

Oak Hill Capital Partners is his private equity firm, part of a wider Oak Hill family of funds that spans more than $45 billion across different asset classes. Oak Hill Advisors is the credit arm, which specializes in below-investment-grade and distressed debt.

Later it took on General Atlantic as a minority investor. Then there is Aerion Corporation, his attempt to build a supersonic business jet, which shut down in 2021.

Bass tends to own quietly and for a long time.

Bass is a deep value, buy-the-thing-nobody-wants investor with a private equity engine bolted on. He hunts for distressed assets.

Failing banks, beaten-down companies, messy and complicated situations. He buys them cheap, fixes them, and waits.

He is patient and concentrated, happy to make a few big bets rather than spread money thin. The other half of his style is backing people.

His stated approach is to find management teams with great skill, integrity, creativity, and judgment, and then let them run the business.

American Savings, 1988. Bass led a group that bought American Savings and Loan, the single largest thrift failure of the entire savings and loan crisis.

Everyone else saw a toxic, collapsing bank. Bass saw a cheap, government-backstopped opportunity.

His group put in roughly $500 million while the federal government absorbed about $1.7 billion of the bad assets. The deal was structured so Bass kept the healthy bank and the government ate the losses.

It became enormously profitable and is still taught as one of the best-engineered distressed deals ever done.

Aerion. Bass spent years and a lot of money backing Aerion Corporation, his dream of building a supersonic business jet that could cross oceans faster than anything else in the sky.

Even with a partnership with Boeing, Aerion could not raise enough cash to reach production, and it shut down in 2021. For a man who built a fortune on disciplined, downside-protected bets, Aerion was the opposite.

A capital-hungry moonshot with no government backstop and no payoff. The lesson is humbling.

Even a great value investor can fall hard for a shiny vision.

Bet on people over spreadsheets. Stay private and patient.

Structure every deal so the downside is somebody else's problem. Bass has built around the idea of doing well while doing good, and he holds positions for years rather than chasing quick flips.

He avoids the spotlight on purpose. While other 1980s dealmakers chased magazine covers, Bass made just as much money and stayed almost invisible.

The quietest man in the room often left it the richest.

Bass is married to Anne T. Bass, and they have four children.

They live in Westover Hills near Fort Worth, with homes in New York City and Washington, D.C. He is one of four Bass brothers, Sid, Ed, Robert, and Lee, who each took the family oil inheritance and multiplied it in their own direction.

Robert is the quiet one. The family gives generously through the Anne T.

and Robert M. Bass Foundation, usually with far less noise than the size of the checks would suggest.

Bass went to The Governor's Academy, then earned a BA from Yale in 1970 and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Stanford is where he refined the investing principles he later used to run Keystone.

He has since given tens of millions of dollars back to both schools, including a landmark gift to the Stanford business school.

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