Banking Escapees Make Billions From Private Credit Boom
HPS personifies the remarkable ascent of direct lending, and its threat to Wall Street.
HPS founders Scott Kapnick, from left, Scot French and Michael Patterson in New York, on Oct. 6, 2023.
Photographer: Sarah Blesener/BloombergDinner with Barack Obama, mansions on both US coasts and dazzling modern art collections — from Frank Stella to Jean-Michel Basquiat. These are all solid bragging points when you’re sitting at finance’s top table.
And yet for the three core founders of HPS Investment Partners, how they spend their fortune is much less striking than how they made it. In 2016 the private credit firm bought itself out of JPMorgan Chase & Co. in a complicated deal valuing it at close to $1 billion. As it wrestles today with the idea of a public listing, it could be worth roughly eight times as much.