TPG Capital scraps plan for IPO: sources

Texas billionaire David Bonderman has shelved plans for an initial public offering of TPG Capital, as private equity firms are lately getting a bumpy ride on Wall Street, sources told The Post.

An IPO of TPG — whose investments include J.Crew, Caesars Entertainment, Univision and Chobani — was a “critical mission” for Bonderman as recently as a year ago, according to sources close to the situation.

That’s partly because, with roughly $75 billion in assets, TPG is the largest private equity firm that is still privately held.

As first reported by The Post, Bonderman in 2015 was angling for an IPO that would attract a $6 billion valuation — a figure contingent on the buyout firm raising a $10 billion-plus fund.

Last May, TPG announced it raised a $10.5 billion fund, but the figure was still not enough to fetch Bonderman’s target valuation, insiders said.

That’s a come-down for Bonderman, who has famously used his fortune to throw lavish birthday parties and company shindigs that featured the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits and John Mellencamp.

The problem: Publicly traded private equity firms “haven’t done very well in the last two to three years,” Oppenheimer analyst Chris Kotowski told The Post.

Most of the big private equity firms that went public years ago have falling stock prices. Shares of Blackstone Group, headed by buyout king Stephen Schwarzman, are off 21 percent over the past two years. Shares of KKR and Carlyle Group are off 20 percent and 39 percent, respectively.

Shares of Apollo Global Management, controlled by billionaire Leon Black, did relatively well during the same time frame, rising 3 percent, though that’s well short of the S&P 500’s 14-percent rise.

As a result, Bonderman’s prediction made publicly at a 2014 conference that “at the end of the day, everybody will go public” has failed to materialize.

Indeed, no private equity firm has taken itself public since 2014, when Ares Management listed its shares. Since then, Ares has been mired in a buyout of Neiman Marcus that has left the retailer saddled with debt as the luxury market founders.

Such disasters haven’t gone unnoticed on Wall Street, according to Oppenheimer’s Kotowski.

“The beginning of the end came when [Apollo’s Leon] Black said a few years ago they were selling everything that was not nailed down,” Kotowski said.

“Since then, everyone has been asking if this is the right time to own these stocks.”

In the last year, high-profile private equity firms, including Vista Equity Partners and Silver Lake Partners, have instead raised billions of dollars by selling stakes in private markets, much more than the total in prior years.

A recent TPG hire shows the change in its direction, a source said. TPG’s new general counsel, Bradford Berenson, started working at the firm in the last few weeks and has no known underwriting experience.

TPG declined comment.