KKR & Co. Inc., also known as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., is an American investment firm that serves institutional investors, wealth investors, family offices, and companies across a variety of industries and markets. KKR operates across three business areas: asset management (public and private credit, private equity, infrastructure, real estate and capital markets), insurance (Global Atlantic) and Strategic Holdings. As of March 31, 2026, KKR had assets under management (AUM) of approximately $758 billion, making it one of the world's largest alternative asset management firms.
KKR was founded in 1976 by Jerome Kohlberg Jr., and cousins Henry Kravis and George R. Roberts, all of whom had previously worked together at Bear Stearns, where they completed some of the earliest leveraged buyout transactions. In 2021, Joseph Bae and Scott Nuttall were named co-CEOs of KKR after serving as co-presidents since 2017.
KKR is headquartered in New York and has offices in Abu Dhabi, Beijing, Boston, Copenhagen, Dubai, Dublin, Frankfurt, Gurugram, Hong Kong, Houston, London, Luxembourg, Madrid, Menlo Park, Miami, Mumbai, Paris, Riyadh, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington, D.C., and Zurich.
Notable deals include the buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1989, the sale of CHI Overhead Doors in 2022, which was recognized as that year's Deal of the Year in Buyouts, and KKR acquired insurance company Global Atlantic (completed in 2024).
KKR was ranked first on Private Equity International's PEI 300 list in 2022 and 2024 and has received a variety of awards globally in Infrastructure Investor for 5 consecutive years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024).
History
Founding and early history While running the corporate finance department for Bear Stearns in the 1960s and 1970s, Jerome Kohlberg, Jr., and later Henry Kravis and George R. Roberts, completed a series of what they described as "bootstrap" investments. They targeted family-owned businesses, many of which had been founded in the years following World War II, that were facing succession issues. Many of these companies lacked a viable exit for their founders because they were too small to be taken public and the founders were reluctant to sell out to competitors.
In 1964, Lewis Cullman made what some people call the first significant leveraged buyout transaction, acquiring and then selling Orkin. In the following years the three Bear Stearns bankers completed a series of buyouts including Stern Metals (1965), Incom (a division of Rockwood International, 1971), Cobblers Industries ($27 million, 1971), and Boren Clay (1973), as well as Thompson Wire, Eagle Motors and Barrows through their investment in Stern Metals. Despite several highly successful investments, Cobblers ended in bankruptcy.Burrough, Bryan. Barbarians at the Gate. New York: Harper & Row, 1990; pp. 133–136.
By 1976, tensions had built up between Bear Stearns and the three: most notably, executive Cy Lewis had rejected repeated proposals to form a dedicated in-house investment fund. This led them to form their own firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. The name had been planned to be Kohlberg Roberts Kravis, but public relations advisors preferred the sound of KKR.
The new KKR completed its first buyout, of manufacturer A.J. Industries, in 1976. KKR raised capital from a small group of investors including the Hillman Company and First Chicago Bank. By 1978, with the revision of the ERISA regulations, KKR was successful in raising its first institutional fund with over $30 million of investor commitments.Burrough, Bryan. Barbarians at the Gate (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), pp. 136-140. In 1981, KKR expanded its investor base after the Oregon State Treasury's public pension fund invested in KKR's acquisition of retailer Fred Meyer, Inc. based in Portland. Oregon State remains an active investor in KKR funds.
In 1979, KKR completed a risky, precedent-setting $380 million public-to-private leveraged buyout of Houdaille Industries, a well-known producer of machine tools, industrial pipes, chrome-plated car bumpers and torsional viscous dampers., pp. 149–169. It soon ended in a spectacular failure, breakup of the half-century-old company, and the loss of thousands of jobs, even though creditors earned a profit.
The firm's acquisitions during the 1980s buyout boom include:
Investment Year acquired Description of transaction Malone & Hyde 1984 KKR completed the first buyout of this public company by tender offer, by acquiring the food distributor and supermarket operator together with the company's chairman Joseph R. Hyde III. Wometco Enterprises 1984 KKR completed the first billion-dollar buyout transaction to acquire the Wometco Enterprises, with interests in television, movie theaters, and tourist attractions. KKR acquired the company for $842 million plus the assumption of $170 million of outstanding debt. Beatrice Foods 1985 KKR sponsored the $6.1 billion management buyout of Beatrice, which owned Samsonite and Tropicana Products among other consumer brands. Beatrice was the largest buyout completed. Safeway Inc. 1986 KKR completed a friendly $5.5 billion buyout of Safeway to help management avoid hostile overtures from Herbert and Robert Haft of Dart Drug. Safeway was taken public again in 1990. Jim Walter Corp. (later Walter Energy) 1987 KKR acquired the company for $3.3 billion in early 1988 but faced issues with the buyout almost immediately. Most notably, a subsidiary of Jim Walter Corp (Celotex) faced a large asbestos lawsuit and incurred liabilities that the courts ruled would need to be satisfied by the parent company. In 1989, the holding company that KKR used for the Jim Walter buyout filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Buyout of RJR Nabisco
At age 61, Kohlberg resigned in 1987. He later founded his own private equity firm, Kohlberg & Co.. Henry Kravis succeeded him as senior partner. Under Kravis and Roberts, the firm was responsible for the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. RJR Nabisco was the largest buyout in history at that time, at $25 billion, and remained the largest for 17 years. The deal was chronicled in Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, and later made into a television movie starring James Garner.
In 1988, F. Ross Johnson was the president and CEO of RJR Nabisco, a leading producer of food and tobacco products, formed in 1985 by the merger of Nabisco Brands and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In October 1988, Johnson proposed a $17 billion ($75 per share) management buyout of the company with the financial backing of investment bank Shearson Lehman Hutton and its parent company, American Express.
Several days later, Kravis, who had originally suggested the buyout to Johnson, presented a new bid for $20.3 billion ($90 per share) financed with Kravis' own aggressive debt package. KKR had the support of equity co-investments from pension funds and other institutional investors, including Coca-Cola, Georgia-Pacific and United Technologies corporate pension funds, as well as endowments from MIT, Harvard and the New York State Common Retirement Fund. However, KKR faced criticism from existing investors over the firm's use of a hostile takeover in the buyout of RJR.
KKR proposed to provide a joint offer with Johnson and Shearson Lehman but was rebuffed and Johnson attempted to stonewall KKR's access to financial information from RJR. Rival private equity firm Forstmann Little & Co. was invited into the process by Shearson Lehman, and attempted to provide a bid for RJR with a consortium of Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Procter & Gamble, Ralston Purina and Castle & Cooke. Ultimately, the Forstmann consortium came apart and did not provide a final bid for RJR.
In November 1988, RJR set guidelines for a final bid submission at the end of the month. The management and Shearson group submitted a final bid of $112, a figure they felt certain would enable them to outflank any response by Kravis and KKR. KKR's final bid of $109, while a lower dollar figure, was ultimately accepted by the board of directors of RJR Nabisco. KKR's offer was guaranteed, whereas the management offer lacked a "reset", meaning that the final share price might have been lower than their stated $112 per share.
Additionally, many in RJR's board of directors were concerned about disclosures of Ross Johnson's unprecedented golden parachute deal. Time magazine featured Johnson on the cover of its December 5, 1988 issue along with the headline, "A Game of Greed: This man could pocket $100 million from the largest corporate takeover in history. Has the buyout craze gone too far?". KKR's offer was welcomed by the board, and, to some observers, it appeared that the elevation of the reset issue as a deal-breaker in KKR's favor was little more than an excuse to reject Johnson's higher bid of $112 per share. Johnson received $53 million from the buyout. KKR collected a $75 million fee in the RJR takeover. At $31.1 billion of а transaction value including assumed debt, RJR Nabisco was, at the time, by far the largest leveraged buyout in history.
Early 1990s: The aftermath of RJR Nabisco The buyout of RJR Nabisco was completed in April 1989 and KKR spent the early 1990s repaying the debt load through asset sales and restructuring transactions. KKR did not complete a single investment in 1990, the first such year since 1982. KKR began to focus primarily on its existing portfolio companies acquired during the buyout boom of the late 1980s. Six of KKR's portfolio companies completed IPOs in 1991, including RJR Nabisco and Duracell.
In January 1990, KKR completed the sale of RJR's Del Monte Foods to a group led by Merrill Lynch. KKR had originally identified a group of divisions that it could sell to reduce debt.
KKR contributed $1.7 billion of new equity into RJR in July 1990 to complete a restructuring of the company's balance sheet. KKR's equity contribution as part of the original leveraged buyout of RJR had been only $1.5 billion. In December 1990, RJR announced an exchange offer to swap debt in RJR for a new public stock in the company, effectively an unusual means of an initial public offering and simultaneously reducing debt on the company.
RJR issued additional stock to the public in March 1991 to reduce debt further, resulting in an upgrade of the credit rating of RJR's debt from junk to investment grade. KKR began to reduce its ownership in RJR in 1994, when its stock in RJR was used as part of the consideration for its leveraged buyout of Borden, a producer of food and beverage products, consumer products, and industrial products. In 1995, KKR divested itself of its final stake in RJR Nabisco when Borden sold a $638 million block of stock.
While KKR no longer had any ownership of RJR Nabisco by 1995, its original investment was not be fully realized until KKR exited its last investment in 2004. After sixteen years of efforts, including contributing new equity, an IPO, asset sales, and exchanging shares of RJR for the ownership of Borden, KKR finally sold the last remnants of its 1989 investment. In July 2004, KKR agreed to sell its stock in Borden Chemical to Apollo Management for $1.2 billion.
Early 1990s: Investments In the early 1990s, the absence of an active high yield market prompted KKR to change its tactics, avoiding large leveraged buyouts in favor of industry consolidations through what was described as leveraged buildups or rollups. One of KKR's largest investments in the 1990s was the leveraged buildup of Primedia (now Rent Group) in partnership with former executives of Macmillan Publishing, which KKR had failed to acquire in 1988. KKR created K-III Communications (now Rent Group), a platform to buy media properties, initially completing the $310 million divisional buyout of the book club division of Macmillan along with the assets of Intertec Publishing Corporation in May 1989.