As far as David Rubenstein is concerned, success comes with responsibility, and it is not something to be taken lightly.
A successful businessman who co-founded The Carlyle Group, one of the largest private investment firms in the world, Rubenstein, who has lived in the Washington, D.C., area since 1975 and in Bethesda, Maryland, since 1985, is also a philanthropist, author, host of a TV show and owner of the Baltimore Orioles. Yet with an exceedingly busy schedule amid a range of projects with which he is involved, Rubenstein has made giving back in a multitude of ways a core element of his identity.
A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Rubenstein practiced law in New York in the early 1970s before turning to a career in public service. He served as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments before serving as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy during the Carter administration.
Rubenstein describes the path and thought process that led him to ultimately working in the White House.
“In those days, if you were in a blue-collar family, you didn’t generally aspire to go become an extremely wealthy person — the ideas of tech startups, private equity firms, hedge funds, didn’t really exist,” he says. “If you were Jewish and wanted to go into business, you usually went into your family business — the business your father or grandfather had started. … But if you didn’t want to go into business, you might go into law or medicine or dentistry. And my skill set was probably better in things that led to being a lawyer. I was interested in politics and public service. I did not aspire to make any money, and so I just thought going into public service would be a useful way to spend my life. And so, I ultimately got a law degree, thinking that that would help. And then I did go to work in public service on Capitol Hill briefly, and then in the White House for four years.”
According to Rubenstein, going from a career in public service to co-founding an incredibly successful investment firm involved a fair amount of luck.
“Like most things in life that tend to be good, they often are by serendipity,” he says. “I worked in the White House for four years. I thought Carter would be reelected. I couldn’t imagine he would lose, but we did have hostages in Iran, we had gas lines, we had high inflation. And despite my telling Carter, ‘Look, you can’t lose to somebody so old — he’s 69 years old,’ when 69 seemed like an ancient age to me … we lost.”
After Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, Rubenstein found himself looking for work.
“The only skill set that I had was practicing law, which I’d done in New York,” he says. “So, I went back and practiced law in Washington for a few years, but I realized I really didn’t enjoy it and I probably wasn’t really good at it. I read about something called a ‘leveraged buyout’ and I decided I would start a leveraged buyout firm in Washington where none had existed and I recruited some people to do it with me who raised a little money. … It took off, and obviously became one of the larger ones in the world. But it was by serendipity, and we got lucky.”
As he achieved great financial success, Rubenstein became involved in various philanthropic efforts. He’s supported institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Jewish Museum of Maryland. In addition, he’s been a major contributor in the area of patriotic philanthropy and made significant gifts to help restore and repair the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Library of Congress, and many others.
“When you get lucky and you make a fair amount of money, you can be buried with it … but I just thought that it was better to do things while you’re alive and help other people,” he says. “What is the most important part of life? I think it’s the pursuit of happiness. And how do you get happiness? No one can really completely define it, but I think it’s probably helping other people.
“I decided when I got financially lucky that I would start giving away the bulk of my money, which I’ve been doing, and I’ve got various causes that I’ve been involved with,” Rubenstein says. “A lot of them relate to history or heritage of the country. A lot relate to education; a lot to medicine.”
In 2024, Rubenstein became the principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles when he led a group of investors who purchased the team for $1.725 billion. The Baltimore native and longtime Orioles fan saw an opportunity and chose to pursue it as a means of giving back to the community.
For Rubenstein, the decision to become the Orioles’ owner came down to one thing: his love of his native city.
“The reason I did it was in part philanthropic,” he says. “I thought that Baltimore, where my parents were born in, my parents were married in, my parents raised me in — I was born there, my parents were buried there, I’m going to be buried there — I thought I hadn’t done enough for Baltimore relative to what I’d done in Washington, D.C., or other parts of the country. So, I thought if I could buy the Orioles and help be part of the renaissance of Baltimore and revive the team a bit, I could maybe fulfill an obligation to Baltimore that I felt I had. That was the real motivation.”
How does someone who’s involved in so many things successfully juggle multiple projects simultaneously? “Well, actually, I’m a triplet and I have two identical other brothers that do some of this stuff,” Rubenstein says jokingly, before taking a serious look at how he manages everything effectively.
“When you’re doing what you want to do, and you enjoy it, it’s not work,” he says. “Work is when you don’t really enjoy something but you feel you need to do it. Everything I’m doing now, I really like, so it’s just a question of, at some age, you can’t do everything you want to do because the body slows down. But right now, I’m not big on vacations, I’m not big on many things that people do to relax, and so everything I’m doing kind of relaxes me. So, reading books, writing books, doing TV shows, interviews, it’s relaxing to me; maybe it keeps my brain sharp, so I enjoy it.”
One thing that Rubenstein really relishes is his role as host of “The David Rubenstein Show,” where he engages in conversation with an array of influential leaders in various fields. Over the years his interview subjects have included Warren Buffett, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Elon Musk, Josh Harris and Cal Ripken Jr.
“It’s always good when you have a live audience, because you can play off the audience,” he says. “If I ask somebody a question in a studio just one-on-one, they might not get some of the jokes I might be asking in the question. So, like when I asked Bill Gates one time in his office, do you think you’d be more successful if you actually had a college degree, he didn’t quite get the joke. But when I’ve asked that question of him in front of an audience, the audience laughs, and then it works better.
“It is said when you get older, you need to keep your brain active,” Rubenstein adds. “And there are a number of ways that people are said to be able to do that. One is to do crossword puzzles — I’m not good at that. Learn a foreign language — I have no language skills … Another thing is you learn a musical instrument — I’m tone deaf. So, I substitute all those things for doing interviews, because when you do an interview, you have to prepare, you have to read, you have to engage with the person and you have to be alert. So I do it in part because I enjoy it, but I get to meet a lot of interesting people … a lot of these people probably wouldn’t spend their time with me, but if I’m interviewing them and they want to be on a TV show that I have, then they get to know me and I get to know them.
So, I do it for a lot of reasons, but it’s mostly pleasure.”
Rubenstein, a student of American history, has amassed an impressive collection of historical artifacts, yet his collection is not for him alone.
“I stumbled into buying [a 1297 copy of] the Magna Carta, which is the only one in private hands and the only one in the United States,” Rubenstein says. “And once I did that, people started offering me other historic documents. … I think I have the largest collection in the United States of Declarations of Independence, more than the U.S. government. And I lend mine to the U.S. government very often, as I have with the Magna Carta, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, the Bill of Rights, and so forth.
“I think as a way of teaching people about history, preserving these artifacts is probably not a bad thing to do. And I kind of got into that. And the same thing with fixing buildings like the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, I just think preserving these things, making it better, gets more people knowledge about American history and so forth. So that’s why I do it,” he says.
Whether it’s his activities in the business sector, with the Baltimore Orioles, in the philanthropic world, or in any of his many other pursuits, Rubenstein enjoys what he does and has achieved great success. Yet despite the enormous amount of effort and energy that he exerts in each of his endeavors, in Rubenstein’s eyes, his success is primarily attributable to one thing: serendipity.
