Lynne Tilton - the Benefactress of the Rust Belt

In a world of reality programming where the most under talented celebrities or uneducated socialites can dominate the media, it is refreshing to read about a woman who has accomplished so much yet isn't immediately recognizable.

This is Lynn Tilton, the 52 year old founder of Patriarch Partners, self made billionaire and hot blond. According to this article by Robert Frank in the Wall Street Journal,
Tilton Flaunts Her Style At Patriarch,
Tilton has used distressed debt to purchase all or most of 74 companies with 120,000 employees and revenues of $8 Billion.  In other words, she has purchased the debt of 74 failing businesses, invested her time, money and management teams, and turned these businesses around keeping workers employed.
And, that's more than than the US Stimulus package ever did.

From the article
Earlier this year, private-equity chief Lynn Tilton flew to Detroit to try to improve sales at one of her auto-parts companies. She got a cool reception from Ford Motor Co.'s purchasing chief, Tony Brown, who asked if she was like other private-equity chiefs that "strip and flip" their companies.


"You must be mistaken," she shot back. "It's only men that I strip and flip. My companies I hold long and close to my heart."

Where Buffett has become the Oracle of Omaha, Tilton has become the Benefactress of the Rust Belt.
Ms. Tilton, 52 years old, built her fortune from an unlikely corner of the economy: down-and-out industrial firms. Her strategy is to buy manufacturers headed for the scrap heap and bring them back to life with new management teams and products. In the process, she's become an unlikely crusader for America's rust-belt.


"The key to America's future is manufacturing," she says. "We simply have to become a country that can make things again."

Here's a link to other quotes such as
“Until job loss turns to job creation, we have little chance for a true economic recovery. Absent job creation, little else matters.”

Normally, with this photo from the WSJ, I might make a snide comment about Ms Tilton's sartorial choices.

But I won't.  As far as I'm concerned, she rocks and she can wear anything she wants.

This is a woman who is making this country a better place, on an actual not theoretical basis, one business at a time, one job at a time.

And, she has become the leading woman in private equity in the US without even having a Chinese mother.  Amazing.