Another scary billionaire
this guy is already deep into CA governance. Not that he's a CA resident. Or really a resident of anyplace at all.
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In 2009 he started the Nicolas Berggruen Institute, a think tank whose stated mission is to improve global governance, and promised to spend more than $100 million to further its goals. In California he’s pushing to overhaul the fiscally troubled state’s tax code, education system, and problematic initiative and referendum system. He would like to see greater political integration in crisis-plagued Europe, preferably under a single leader. He thinks it would be great if the Group of 20 nations become more of a permanent global policymaker.
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Berggruen will need more than money, charm, and the right names for his think tanks to save the world. His transformation from pleasure seeker to policy guy is a work in progress. Some of his ideas are not exactly made for prime time. For instance, he argues there’s much that Western democracies can learn from autocracies such as Singapore. As he puts it admiringly, the political leaders there really know how to get things done.
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Berggruen believes at least part of the solution to Western political paralysis is the Asian equivalent of the smoke-filled room. “If you can do this behind closed doors, you can force or push decisions, which happens in autocracies like Singapore and China,” he says. “The disadvantage is that it’s not very transparent. The advantage is that the people in the room, even if they have ideological views that are not along the same lines, can come up with compromises and solutions.” With Nathan Gardels, one of the institute’s senior advisers, he’s co-written a book in which he explains this unorthodox notion. It’s called Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way Between West and East.
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Berggruen was hardly a household name in California; he wasn’t even a resident. (He pays taxes in Florida.) The only thing he was known for was his yearly soiree at the Chateau Marmont. That didn’t seem to hurt him. He persuaded 15 prominent Californians to help draft a reform package. He wooed former Democratic Governor Gray Davis over lunch at the Peninsula. He won over Bob Hertzberg, a former California Assembly Speaker, at an airport in faraway Panama. He enlisted former Republican U.S. Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and George Shultz. Berggruen also recruited business leaders such as former Yahoo! (YHOO) Chief Executive Officer Terry Semel and Google (GOOG) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. He assembled them in a group he called the Think Long Committee for California.
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Read the article in its entirety here:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-27/deep-thoughts-with-the-homeless-billionaire#p3
Oh, and the headline is obscene.
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