George R Roberts

First Interstate Bancorp directors Monday rejected Wells Fargo & Co.'s sweetened takeover offer and reaffirmed their support for the proposed friendly merger with First Bank System Inc. And in a filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, First Interstate also provided new insight into the roles that two of America's best-known financiers, Warren E. Buffett and George Roberts, have been playing on opposite sides of Wells Fargo's hostile bid.

Four days before the start of the new decade, a court clerk in Tampa, Fla., stamped and filed a foot-thick batch of bankruptcy petitions from a local building materials and resources company, and a chapter in business history quietly ended. The company was Hillsborough Holdings, and its bankruptcy pleading Dec. 27 signaled the end of the era in which its owners, the great buyout firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., stood as a symbol of invincibility for all the financial world.

Four days before the start of the new decade, a court clerk in Tampa, Fla., stamped and filed a foot-thick batch of bankruptcy petitions from a local building materials and resources company, and a chapter in business history quietly ended. The company was Hillsborough Holdings, and its bankruptcy pleading Dec. 27 signaled the end of the era in which its owners, the great buyout firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., stood as a symbol of invincibility for all the financial world.

First Interstate Bancorp directors Monday rejected Wells Fargo & Co.'s sweetened takeover offer and reaffirmed their support for the proposed friendly merger with First Bank System Inc. And in a filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, First Interstate also provided new insight into the roles that two of America's best-known financiers, Warren E. Buffett and George Roberts, have been playing on opposite sides of Wells Fargo's hostile bid.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. affiliates plan to sell 25 million common shares of Safeway Inc., the supermarket and drugstore operator. Selling Safeway shares was one of KKR's most profitable activities last year. The New York-based buyout firm sold most of its Safeway stake--acquired in 1986 at an original cost basis of 50 cents a share, according to a KKR annual review--for between $43 and $58.25 a share. Pleasanton-based Safeway's shares fell $1.31 to close at $41.

You might think of them as members of Gov. Pete Wilson's $100,000 club. They are 20 private interests--companies, individuals and political action committees--that each have contributed at least $100,000 to help the Republican incumbent finance his reelection campaign against Democrat Kathleen Brown.

Here is Forbes magazine's 1988 list of the 400 richest Americans in descending order of wealth, showing estimated fortune in millions, residence, source of wealth and age. Duplicated numbers represent ties; boldfaced entries are used to designate Californians. 1) Sam Moore Walton, $6,700, Bentonville, Ark., Wal-Mart Stores, 70. 2) John Werner Kluge, $3,200, Charlottesville, Va., Metromedia, 75. 3) Henry Ross Perot, $3,000 Dallas, Electronic Data Systems, 58.

Thanks to its unprecedented $24.5-billion winning bid for RJR Nabisco, the investment firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts has cemented even further its reputation as a deal maker par excellence , a financial juggernaut that is changing the face of corporate America. But while KKR and its top partners receive top marks for their takeover acumen, they also score reasonably good reviews from analysts for managing companies they have acquired, if profits for KKR's investors are measured.

Beleaguered First Interstate Bancorp disclosed Wednesday that the giant investment firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. owns nearly 10% of its stock, including 3.5-million shares bought this week as part of a critical stock sale for the Los Angeles-based banking firm.

Financial fireworks continued on Wall Street Monday, as a New York investment group offered a record-breaking $20.3 billion for RJR Nabisco in what would be the biggest corporate purchase in U.S. history. The bid by the investment firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. eclipses a move last week by executives of RJR Nabisco--the food and tobacco giant--to buy their own company for a record $17 billion.

The record $20.3-billion bid for RJR Nabisco announced Monday by any standard would seem a shocking leap in the size of corporate buyouts. But for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., the leveraged buyout firm that made the bid, it is merely the logical next step in a succession of ever bigger deals, beginning back in the mid-1970s. KKR is credited with inventing the big leveraged buyout, in which companies are taken private with borrowed funds and paid off from the acquired company's own cash flow.