Thomas Haskell Lee (March 27, 1944 – February 23, 2023) was an American businessman, financier, and investor credited with being one of the early pioneers in private equity and specifically leveraged buyouts.
[4] Lee attended Belmont Hill School and graduated from Harvard College in 1965, quickly going to work as an analyst in the institutional research department of L.F. Rothschild in New York City.
[7] By the mid-1980s, Thomas H. Lee Partners was firmly established among the top tier of a new class of private equity investors, while taking a friendlier approach than the so-called corporate raiders of the era (e.g., Nelson Peltz, Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn).
[8] In 1992, THL's acquisition of Snapple Beverages marked the resurrection of the leveraged buyout after several dormant years in the wake of the RJR Nabisco takeover, the fall of Michael Milken, and the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
[10] The final years of Lee's tenure at THL were marred to a certain extent by the firm's investment in Refco, a financial services company specializing in commodities and futures contracts that collapsed suddenly in October 2005, only months after its IPO.
THL as the lead investor (and Lee himself) was named in a class action shareholder lawsuit against Refco, along with Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Bank of America, and Grant Thornton.
In June 2008, at the conclusion of Hillary's unsuccessful presidential run, she and Bill were reported to have stayed at his East Hampton, New York, beach-front home for a few days for the period when she was out of the public eye.