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Bruce Wasserstein (born December 25, 1947 in Brooklyn, New York)^[1] is an American investment banker and businessman. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Law School, and is currently the Chairman and CEO of Lazard LLC.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Morris Wasserstein, a wealthy textile executive, and his wife, Lola Schleifer, Wasserstein is one of four children. He has two late sisters: pioneering busineswoman Sandra Meyer and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, whose daughter he is now raising. His maternal grandfather was Simon Schleifer, a prominent Polish Jewish playwright who moved to Paterson, New Jersey and became a Hebrew school principal.

Wasserstein has helped broker more than a thousand transactions worth $250 billion since the 1980s. Starting his career as a Cravath, Swaine & Moore attorney, he later rose to co-head of First Boston Corp.'s dominant merger and acquisition practice.

He eventually formed investment bank boutique Wasserstein Perella & Co., which he sold in 2000, at the top of the 1990s bull market, to Germany's Dresdner Bank for $1.5 billion. He left the unit Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (formed by merging Dresdner's UK unit Kleinwort Benson with Wasserstein Perella) to take the job at Lazard Frères.

In 2005 Wasserstein completed the initial public offering of Lazard after getting into a corporate fight with Chairman Michel David-Weill who said that he regretted having ever hired Wasserstein.

Bruce Wasserstein controls Wasserstein & Co., a private equity firm with investments in a number of industries, particularly media. In 2004 he added New York Magazine to his growing media empire.

• With Justice for Some: An Indictment of the Law by Young Advocates (1972, ISBN 0-8070-0541-X)
• Corporate Finance Law (1978, ISBN 0-07-068423-5)
• Big Deal: The Battle for the Control of America's Leading Corporations (1988, ISBN 0-446-67521-0)
• Big Deal: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Digital Age (2001, ISBN 0-446-67521-0), second edition of above book.

• Wasserstein & Co. site.