The aggressively ambitious banker battling Goldman Sachs royalty

Michael Kramer is not your average white-shoe-blue-blooded Wall Street investment banker. Despite having an estate in Connecticut and co-owning a winery in Oregon, 56-year old Kramer didn’t come from money. He’s locked in a court battle with another top banker of his generation who does. 

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Perella Weinberg Partners (PWP), the boutique M&A firm, named after Joe Perella and Peter Weinberg, has accused Kramer and three of his associates of breaching their employment agreements when they left with colleagues to form Ducera Partners in 2015. In turn, Kramer and colleagues say they’ve been defamed and wrongly dismissed and that PWP has unfairly withheld $60m of equity due to them.

The case is finally playing out in court. Kramer, now in his late 50s, is currently going head-to-head with Weinberg, 67. 

The two men are very different. 

Weinberg’s grandfather shaped Goldman Sachs. Weinberg’s father was a senior partner at the firm; his cousin John runs Evercore. Peter Weinberg himself spent 20 years at Goldman, where he was CEO before joining Perella in 2005. He has an MBA from Harvard and has been described as banking royalty. 

Kramer, but comparison, attended California State University and his mother was a criminologist. He began his career at restructuring boutique Houlihan Lokey where he quickly made a name for himself through a willingness to work 100-hour weeks. He’s described as “very charismatic,” “talented”, and a huge generator of business. But in the estimation of Weinberg, he’s also fatally flawed. 

Speaking in court last month, Weinberg described Kramer as a “polarizing leader” who was an “enormous man with a great work ethic,” but also “ambitious to a fault.” For this reason, Weinberg – who claims that he personally enjoyed working with Kramer’s “huge talent” even though others did not – says he decided to demote Kramer from PWP’s management committee and to encourage him to go back to working with clients instead. This occurs “quite frequently” at PWP, insisted Weinberg. 

Kramer left PWP soon after, taking multiple senior colleagues, juniors, and most of PWP’s restructuring business with him. He founded Ducera, his own boutique. PWP had to spend $12m hiring a new restructuring team as a result. 

The case hinges on whether Kramer’s demotion was reasonable. Kramer’s team argue that it wasn’t and say PWP demoted and “summarily fired” him, despite promising him broad management responsibility when he joined. PWP claims it was, and says Kramer resigned in petulance and then incited his team to follow him after his lust for power and money was thwarted.   

Kramer himself has yet to take the stand, but his lawyers have already argued that the blue-blooded Weinberg simply considered himself “too rich” to have to deal with the ambitious Mike Kramer. 

In turn, Weinberg’s testimony claims that Kramer was riven with negativity and discontent. Weinberg said Kramer didn’t fit at collaborative PWP and that he kept criticizing things there. “My management style is one of transparency and it's one of directness in terms of evaluating people and evaluating business opportunities and one of working with others, kind of a partnership mentality,” claimed Weinberg. Witnesses called by PWP have claimed that Kramer could be difficult to work with - “abusive, yelling” - despite also being “great fun” to have drinks with.

The case continues to play out. Some have suggested a class dimension to the dispute, with the upper middle class Weinberg unable to tolerate the nakedly ambitious upstart Kramer, whom Weinberg said seemed to want to run PWP itself. Millions are at stake, as is the reputation of either man.

Neither PWP nor Ducera responded to a request to comment for this article. Despite his alleged character flaws, Kramer has built Ducera into a successful boutique. A recent presentation says it has 13+ partners and 60+ investment bankers; last year they generated $150m in fees. 

For those who like working with hyper-ambitious rainmakers, Ducera is hiring. Last year it added John Vaske, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs, as it builds out its M&A business. More recruits are expected soon. 

Ducera is 100% owned by its partners. PWP is arguing that the offer of equity in the firm was the main reason that Kramer's restructuring team left with him. Kramer would disagree: at PWP he's said to have claimed his team was unhappy and treated like a "red-headed step-child." At Ducera, this presumably isn't the case. At the very least, drinks parties there should be fun.

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