SCOTT NUTTALL

Nuttall joined KKR in 1996 while still in his early 20s, after a brief early stint at Blackstone. He and Joe Bae started as analysts together and rose in lockstep.

Rather than chase headline buyouts, Nuttall built the machinery around them. He spearheaded KKR's push into credit, hedge funds, insurance, capital markets and fundraising, and was a key architect of the firm's 2010 public listing.

He served as co-president and co-chief operating officer from 2017 to 2021 and joined the board in 2017. In October 2021, co-founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts handed the reins to Nuttall and Bae as co-CEOs.

Under their leadership KKR has grown to more than $600 billion in assets, expanding aggressively into insurance through Global Atlantic and pushing to bring private markets to everyday retail investors.

KKR & Co., Global Atlantic Financial Group

Nuttall is less a single-deal investor and more an architect of an entire investing platform. His signature was recognizing that KKR should not just do buyouts but should also build big businesses in credit, real assets, insurance and capital markets, so the firm earns fees and returns across every market environment.

He is a believer in patient, long-duration strategies, including core private equity deals held for 10 to 50-plus years. He champions bringing private markets to individual investors, the so-called democratization of alternatives, betting that ordinary portfolios will shift money into private assets.

He prizes dry powder and discipline, keeping huge cash reserves so KKR can pounce when markets get cheap rather than overpay when they are hot.

Nuttall's biggest win is not one deal but the reinvention of KKR itself. He built the credit, capital markets and insurance businesses that turned a buyout house into a diversified giant managing more than $600 billion.

The clearest single move was pushing KKR deep into insurance by acquiring Global Atlantic, which added tens of billions in permanent capital and reshaped the firm's earnings. He also helped take KKR public in 2010, giving it a currency and balance sheet to grow.

The payoff arrived in 2021, when he and Bae inherited a firm far bigger and steadier than the one they joined as analysts.

Nuttall has no single famous personal blunder, which itself reflects his careful, behind-the-scenes style. But his repeated warnings carry the scar tissue of KKR's own history of overpaying in booms, most infamously the 2007 buyout of Texas utility TXU, later Energy Future Holdings, which piled on debt and collapsed into bankruptcy.

That disaster happened before his leadership, yet it is exactly the kind of bull-market hubris he now preaches against. His challenge as co-CEO is bigger and quieter.

Grow a $600 billion firm fast without repeating the industry's habit of confusing a rising market for genius.

Nuttall's core belief is that discipline beats bravado, captured in his line that you should not confuse a bull market with brains. He argues that credit markets are the sober, honest signal and equity markets are the emotional one, so when credit gets nervous, he gets nervous too.

He is convinced the future of the industry belongs to diversified firms that can invest across public and private markets and serve both institutions and individuals. He favors long-duration assets with strong secular tailwinds and defensible positions.

And he keeps enormous cash reserves on hand, treating dry powder as a weapon for buying when others are forced to sell.

Nuttall keeps his personal and family life private, in keeping with his generally low public profile. Reliable public details about his family are limited.

Nuttall earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania before joining the finance world. He essentially grew up professionally inside KKR, learning the business from the ground up after joining as an analyst in his early 20s, which shaped his platform-builder instincts.