Backstage, Chubby Wombat—seer-sage, strummer-stoner—stirs in his chair. If anyone can envision a crowd in an empty hall, it’s him. He opens his eyes. Showtime.
Three days earlier, at Elevation’s annual meeting in October, Bono had called Chubby Wombat out.
The setting was a Q&A session for Elevation’s limited partners, including representatives of the Ford Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, and the several state pension funds whose combined investments make up one-third of Elevation’s capital. Gathered in a vast meeting room at the posh St. Regis Resort, south of Los Angeles, this group of more than 100 men and women had already heard from the top executives of Elevation’s companies. Then McNamee summoned the general partners to the front and addressed the most famous among them.
“Bono, do you want to say anything?” McNamee asked, kicking things off. “Any thoughts? Concerns?” All eyes shifted to the Irishman in green-tinted glasses, a black-denim shirt over a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black-suede platform shoes. “Hmm,” he said, hesitating. “Well, one big issue I’ve got to say I’m pretty concerned about is the length of Roger’s hair.”
The room exploded in laughter, and McNamee—dressed formally, for him, in chinos and a lavender dress shirt, no tie—laughed too. Since founding Elevation, he’d stopped cutting his hair, in hopes of earning more credibility as a rocker.
Over the course of the past 25 years, McNamee has cultivated a reputation as an intellectual provocateur, a man who can see around corners. A mentor for scores of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, McNamee befriended a generation of industry leaders—Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison—when they were making their first millions. “I’ve always been impressed by his ability to anticipate how key technology trends can disrupt entire industries and create new markets and new opportunities,” Gates says. When Gates was working on his first book, The Road Ahead, in the early ’90s, he recalls, “Roger was a great sounding board for many of the ideas I wrote about.”
A newer friend is Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook. When the two first met, in the summer of 2006, McNamee was “emphatic” that Facebook not be sold, Zuckerberg recalls. At the time, the social-networking site, in which McNamee would later acquire a small stake, reportedly had buyout offers of around $750 million.
“He clearly cared about building something long-term and about the impact of the things we build as opposed to just making money in the short term,” Zuckerberg says, adding that he found McNamee’s certainty “refreshing.” It would also, of course, prove prescient. In October, Facebook sold just 1.6 percent of the company to Microsoft for $240 million.
With Elevation, McNamee and his four general partners promise “a new form of private equity.” Unlike most of the big shops that propelled the buyout boom of the past several years, Elevation, its partners say, isn’t about stripping down and flipping companies; it’s about reinvigorating them. In language that inspires some and makes others roll their eyes, McNamee and Bono say Elevation was built around the romantic idea that business should have a role in transforming culture.
“I’m a top-line-melody guy,” Bono says, during a break at Elevation’s annual meeting. “That’s what I do. I understand harmony. I understand rhythm. But I sell ideas—musical, political, and, in this case, commercial ideas.”
Later, he adds, “So many great painters, great musicians, great geniuses, ended up with nothing. With broken hearts in rooms with broken windows. I want to see artists sitting at the table that decides the outcome of their lives.”
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