Billy Muscles Harry Out of the Picture
Commercial real-estate history was made this weekend when the debt-inundated Macklowe family saved their rear end by selling the GM Building to Mort Zuckerman's Boston Properties for $2.9 billion, but the juiciest part of the story was the behind-the-scenes battle between Harry and Billy Macklowe. The Wall Street Journal is out with a story this morning about the intrafamilial friction, which basically portrays Macklowe the elder as a past-his-prime loose cannon who irresponsibly bet everything on a $7 billion folly, and Billy as a young genius who heroically saved the family fortune from his father's incompetence.
The more obvious it became that Harry's 2007 purchase of seven office buildings from Blackstone was a horrible mistake, the more Billy pushed his dad aside: he replaced Harry's hoary team of advisers with a fresh team from Citigroup and CB Richard Ellis and worked tirelessly on the deal with Zuckerman (and Zuckerman's partners, Goldman Sachs and the governments of Qatar and Kuwait) while his father stewed on the sidelines. Now that the deal's done—and Billy looks like a miracle worker while his father seems hopelessly out-of-touch—the younger Macklowe is expected to officially dethrone his father in a few weeks. Hopefully time won't reveal Billy to be as adept at squandering billions as his father.
