VENICE, Italy — Nicolas Berggruen can’t sit still.
An hour into our interview, at the poolside restaurant of the Hotel Cipriani, the billionaire investor glances at the lunchtime crowd drifting over from their sun loungers. He fidgets. His fingers pirouette along the table edge. Polishing off a cappuccino that’s heaped with mounds of whipped cream, he suggests we move.
Berggruen selects a pair of wicker sofas on a patio outside the hotel bar. “It is better here, no? A little cooler,” he says. Five minutes later, he decides we are too close to a boisterous group. So we move again, this time to a table tucked discreetly into the corner of a deserted veranda on the far side of the hotel.
Berggruen, 50, lives his whole life this way, always on the move, as he seeks out companies to buy from Berlin to Bangalore to Brisbane. For the past decade, the dual American and German citizen has had no fixed home address. He constantly roams the world on his Gulfstream IV jet, living out of five-star hotels. Most of the time, he carries only a small tote bag containing clothes and his BlackBerry.
“If you have things and if you are a perfectionist, which I am, you have to really tend to them, and it takes energy away from other things,” says Berggruen, whose pink shirt, monogrammed with his initials in red on the pocket, is fraying at the cuffs and collar.
The son of a wealthy art dealer, Berggruen parlayed a trust fund worth about $250,000 into a fortune of at least $2.5 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Over three decades, the investor has gotten rich by tapping his worldwide network of business contacts to find mostly small beaten-down companies to buy, expand and sell.
Berggruen has also made money with four blank-check companies: shell companies that go public and then use cash or shares to acquire an operating business.
“Nicolas is a very insightful investor,” says James Hauslein, a private-equity investor who’s a former chairman of Sunglass Hut International and a former independent director of a Berggruen blank-check company. “He has a long and successful career of building up companies and reviving brands.”
The eccentric investor has stumbled plenty too, particularly when taking detours from his buyout specialty. A foray into hedge funds produced lackluster results before he chucked the venture. And several of his investments in faddish businesses such as ethanol were a bust. “You make mistakes,” Berggruen says. “You learn. I’ve learned a lot.”
Now, Berggruen is moving even farther afield in a quest to save the West from sinking into chaos. He says the stock market swoons of 2011, the brinkmanship in Washington over the debt ceiling and the euro-zone debt debacle are symptoms of the same underlying problem. “What you really have is a deep, deep governance crisis in the West,” he says.
To reduce the political paralysis that threatens the United States and Europe, the billionaire donated $100 million to create the Nicolas Berggruen Institute, with offices in Berlin, Los Angeles, New York and Washington.
In early September, the institute assembled a group called the Council for the Future of Europe. It includes former government leaders Gerhard Schroeder of Germany and Felipe Gonzalez of Spain, former European Commission President Jacques Delors, as well as economists Nouriel Roubini, Joseph Stiglitz and Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive officer at Pacific Investment Management Co. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has served as an adviser.
In public statements from Brussels, the group called for greater political integration within Europe. That includes the centralization of some fiscal policy, wider powers for the European Central Bank and European Financial Stability Facility to restructure the debt of private banks and the issuance of joint euro-area bonds to relieve the sovereign debt crisis.
Berggruen, who in the past has made campaign contributions to Democrats, including Sen. Charles Schumer of New York and President Barack Obama, says his institute isn’t necessarily introducing new ideas. Rather, his aim is to help experts reach agreement and then lobby to turn their proposals into policy.
“In Europe, all the experts say you need more integration, but the public doesn’t buy it yet,” says Nathan Gardels, a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. “So their job is really to resell the vision of an integrated Europe to the public.”
Berggruen seamlessly slips between the worlds of politics, finance, art and Hollywood. He flew to the island of Borkum in the North Sea, where Schroeder was vacationing, to talk to him about the European initiative. Schroeder then helped recruit other former heads of state for the project.
“We got them one by one,” Berggruen says.
In Los Angeles, the investor throws an annual party at the Chateau Marmont that has drawn the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Paris Hilton. Berggruen is also a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has begun acquiring contemporary works for its collection.
“He’s a natural networker,” says Michael Govan, the museum’s director. “He looks at the world holistically, encompassing culture and economics and politics, and he weaves it together with all the people he knows.”
Today, Berggruen Holdings has offices in Berlin, Istanbul, Mumbai, New York and Tel Aviv and nine senior executives who help the founder find investments and manage them. The firm owns more than 30 companies, ranging from real estate to furniture, to health care. Berggruen is financing skyline-shaping towers around the world, including designs by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Richard Meier in Newark, N.J., and Tel Aviv.
He also bought German department store chain Karstadt Warenhaus out of bankruptcy in 2010 for the symbolic price of 1 euro. The investor immediately provided the business with a $83 million cash infusion and promised to spend more than $550 million over five years to revive the brand — his highest-profile corporate rescue effort to date.
Berggruen, who says he negotiates many of the buyouts himself, looks for companies loaded with debt or with family owners who are looking to retire. The firms also need to have strong cash flows and defensible business models. After restructuring the company’s debt and investing in expansion, he’ll often hold it for a decade or more before selling. He says that he rarely fires rank-and-file workers, because his goal is to grow revenue. But he does typically shake up top management.
“It is always a question of finding the right people,” he says. Berggruen himself is never one of them. “I discovered pretty early that I am probably a terrible manager,” he says.