Michael Rees

Rees is a Pennsylvania native who studied engineering at the University of Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who arrived at Lehman Brothers in 2001. In little more than a decade the firm that Rees co-owned, Dyal Capital, has paid out well over $10bn to buy minority stakes in some of the best-performing companies in finance. He has forked out hundreds of millions of dollars to the founders of private equity firms including Silver Lake and Providence Equity; to hedge fund managers including Jana Capital; and to firms such as Golub Capital and Owl Rock. Having started Dyal in 2011 as an experimental division of asset manager Neuberger Berman, he broke free of his parent company and pulled off a $12 billion transaction that amounts to one of the biggest ever stock market debuts by a US private capital group. The enlarged company is now known as Blue Owl.