The three founders of the Carlyle Group each took home nearly $138 million last year, confirming the widely held view that the intensely private buyout firm was as profitable for its owners as it was for its clients in 2011.
The release of the numbers, in documents filed Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, came after Carlyle closed out one of its most profitable years ever, returning $15 billion to clients in the first three quarters.
The amounts were not wholly unexpected — founders Daniel A. D’Aniello, William E. Conway Jr. and David M. Rubenstein for years have been ranked by Forbes as among the wealthiest Americans.
Each founder earned $275,000 salary, a $3.54 million bonus and $134 million in income from his share of investors’ profits last year.
The company is expected to begin selling stock to the public later this year and will list itself on the Nasdaq tech index under the ticker CG.
“It basically shows how well they have done as investors,” said Colin Blaydon, director of the private-equity center at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. “Their compensation is performance-based, explicitly. And they are getting what their performance delivered. That’s my best take on it.”
The executives’ earnings become public during an election year in which many have attacked the growing income chasm between the nation’s wealthy and the middle and poorer classes. President Obama has used economic fairness as a mantra during debates with Republican lawmakers over raising taxes on the affluent to avoid budget cutbacks in crucial services for the needy and to push through an extension of the payroll tax credit and unemployment benefits. Occupy Wall Street demonstrators across the country have been protesting that too much of the country’s resources are held by the richest 1 percent of its citizens.
Carlyle Group filed a 400-page document with the SEC in September as a prelude to the public offering. Tuesday’s filing is the latest in a series of amendments that illuminate the inner financial workings of the profitable private-equity firm, which was founded in Washington in 1987.
The documents also show that Carlyle’s founders plowed much of their cash back into the firm’s deals. Conway, for example, last year put $164 million of his own money into Carlyle investments.
The founders, who hold 60 percent of the company, have said they have no intention of leaving Carlyle in the near future, although the public offering allows them to eventually cash out billions.
Carlyle declined to comment on the founders’ earnings report.
The financial powerhouse is among the world’s largest private-equity firms, with about $150 billion in assets under its control. Forbes magazine last year ranked the three founders, worth an estimated $2.7 billion each, among the richest people in the United States.
Some of that money has found its way to various charities around the country. Rubenstein is the largest donor in the history of the Kennedy Center — where he is chairman of the board of trustees — having given the institution $25 million. Among his other gifts is a $10 million donation to the University of Chicago Law School for scholarships and a $21 million copy of the Magna Carta, which he lent indefinitely to the National Archives. Conway has given away millions to the homeless and recently asked the public for input on how he should dispose of his fortune. D’Aniello has donated to several charities and institutions, including a library in Pittsburgh, where he grew up, and Syracuse University, where he helps sponsor an internship program for entrepreneurs.
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