The barbarians have stormed the gate, taken the boardroom and commandeered the executive bathroom. The latest corporate honcho to fling himself on the private equity bandwagon is former MCI and Compaq Computer Corp. CEO Michael Capellas, who is joining Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. portfolio company First Data Corp. as chief executive. Capellas joins a procession of top management talent moving to buyout-owned enterprises. These include Greg Brenneman, president of Burger King Holdings Inc., run by Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners and TPG; David Calhoun, CEO of the Nielsen Co. BV, owned by AlpInvest Partners NV, Blackstone Group LP, Carlyle Group, Hellman & Friedman LLC, KKR and Thomas H. Lee Partners LP; and Mark Frissora, CEO of Hertz Global Holdings Inc., which was controlled by Carlyle Group, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice Inc. and the investment arm of Merrill Lynch before going public last fall (the PE firms still own a chunk).

What's leading the parade? If you guessed "money," you're way off. The correct answer is great steaming clinking-clanking piles of money. Take Cristóbal Conde, CEO of SunGard Data Systems Inc., which three LBO players bought in 2005 for $11.7 billion. As David Carey described in a recent story in The Deal, top managers at the transaction processing company got an 18% piece of the pie through a mixture of equity incentives and personal investments. Conde sunk another $22 million of his dough in exchange for an additional 2.3% of the upside. If SunGard is sold in three years for $22 billion (a reasonable expectation), generating a $10.5 billion gain on the $3.5 billion equity investment, Carey writes, Conde would collect $325 million.

For a rich guy like Capellas, who has been moonlighting as a senior adviser to Silver Lake Partners, that's not enough to make the world go around. But it will give it a push in the right direction. —Alain Sherter

See press release from First Data
See November 2006 story from TheDeal.com
See June 5 story from The Deal