A standing-room-only crowd gathered inside AU’s Constitution Hall on September 21 to hear from a business leader that Kogod Dean David Marchick called an “extraordinary American, investor, philanthropist, and mentor.”
Hosted as part of the Sine Institute of Policy & Politics Distinguished Lecturer Series, students, faculty, and guests from the AU Board of Trustees heard from David Rubenstein—co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, and an acclaimed author, television and podcast host, philanthropist, and lawyer.
Dean Marchick, a Carlyle Group alum himself, served as the event’s moderator and kicked off the discussion with a personal note about Rubenstein’s “intellectual curiosity”—a trait, Marchick said, he admires most about his mentor.
“When you meet him, he’ll ask you rapid-fire questions about your life,” Marchick explained. “And he’ll remember your answers.”
Rubenstein’s proclivity for asking questions is, perhaps, a key reason he’s become well known as an interviewer himself, regularly welcoming prominent guests to The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations on Bloomberg TV and PBS, as well as Bloomberg Wealth with David Rubenstein on Bloomberg TV.
He’s directed his thought-provoking questions—injected with some levity—toward Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, Elon Musk, and Kim Kardashian.
“Kim Kardashian has taken a brand and built it from nothing into something,” Rubenstein remarked, countering any surprise about his most recent guest. “She obviously has some talents and skill.”
The son of a career post office worker and World War II veteran, Rubenstein grew up in Baltimore, earning scholarships to study at Duke University for his undergraduate degree and at the University of Chicago for his law degree.
Following two stints as a lawyer and four years serving in the Carter administration, Rubenstein started the Carlyle Group in 1987 after reading that successful entrepreneurs typically start their business between the ages of 28 and 37.
“So, I said I’d better do something,” he explained. “I didn’t like being a lawyer; if you don’t like something, you can’t be good at it."