| Anthony Scaramucci (Bloomberg) |
Slumped in a chair in a hallway of Las Vegas’s Bellagio hotel and casino one recent Friday morning, Anthony Scaramucci seemed satisfied. “I feel Wednesday and Thursday went well,” said the founder of New York–based SkyBridge Capital. “Now it is time to celebrate.”
Scaramucci wasn’t whooping it up for a job well done but rather looking forward to the afternoon pool party, which would cap the seventh annual SkyBridge Alternatives (SALT) Conference, the monstrous gathering that he and Victor Oviedo, a SkyBridge partner and head of business development, conceived in 2009, during the depths of the financial crisis.
Scaramucci stresses that these days SALT is more than just a hedge fund conference, although the nearly 2,000 attendees were riveted by the two dozen or so hedge fund managers who shared their ideas, including Lee Cooperman, Dan Loeb and John Paulson. He says people also enjoy hearing from noninvestors, including former world leaders, central bank heads, four-star generals and Hollywood stars.
Ever the showman, Scaramucci knows that attendees come for the Vegas glitz and fanfare: the over-the-top video displays in the ballroom and the poolside party under the stars, complete with Skee-Ball, Foosball, air hockey and a roaming magician, as well as a private concert, this year featuring rock band OneRepublic and a confetti shower.
The Mooch, as people call him, is hardscrabble–New Yorker–meets-successful-financier. But the Long Island native, who loves to invoke his blue-collar Italian roots, has been accused of being too self-promotional, appearing frequently on business TV and paying to get the SkyBridge logo into Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. (The SkyBridge founder had a small role in the movie, as a short-seller.) Scaramucci also famously accused President Obama in a public forum of “whacking Wall Street like a piñata.”
The 51-year-old Harvard Law School graduate, who has admitted to twice failing the bar exam and being fired from Goldman Sachs at 27, knows how to create synergy. So when SkyBridge chief investment officer Ray Nolte says, “This was the most successful” SALT conference, he is not referring to the bottom line. Although it barely breaks even, the event is connected to the growth of SkyBridge, the 12th-largest fund-of-hedge-funds firm in the world, with $12.4 billion in assets, up from No. 36 and $5.9 billion just three years ago. “SALT has helped SkyBridge, no doubt about it,” Scaramucci says. “We are not in the convention business.”
— Stephen Taub
