Lynn Tilton

A Jersey girl with an undergraduate degree from Yale and an MBA from Columbia, Tilton had spent 19 years working on Wall Street, initially as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, and later as a specialist trading distressed-company loans. In 1993 she joined Amroc Investments, a boutique investment firm co-founded by the brother-sister investing team Marc Lasry and Sonia Gardner. Tilton was a senior saleswoman with a handful of customers who paid lavishly for her ideas. Tilton moved on from Amroc. The Caribbean was calling. But three of her biggest accounts, Elliott Associates, Nomura, and Cerberus Capital, urged her to start her own bank loan trading company so she could continue making money for them. In 1998, Tilton founded Papillon Partners. It was an entrepreneurial extension of what she’d been doing as a saleswoman. Bank loans at the time were traded through private transactions greased by personal relationships. It wasn’t a liquid market. She had three hedge fund clients eager to buy whatever she had to recommend to them. All she had to do was go to banks with high-yield loan departments, find portfolios of troubled loans they were looking to get off their books, value them, and broker the sale. Her take was 1 percent of the loan amount. Patriarch grew out of Papillon, but there was a short detour. In early 2000, one of Tilton’s long-standing clients at Nomura, Dennis Dolan, hired her to run a distressed-debt proprietary trading group at the Japanese bank. Dhe and Dolan left after a few months to start Patriarch. But while Tilton engendered fierce loyalty in many employees and partners, she chewed through others, creating a lengthy docket of litigation. Bachelor of Arts / Science, Yale University; Master of Business Administration, Columbia Business School