The man who may become the next Baron Rothschild

NEW YORK: Happy or unhappy, each family generation often resembles another, and that is especially true when it comes to the Rothschilds.

More than 200 years after Mayer Amschel Rothschild founded the family dynasty that offered discreet counsel and investment wisdom to kings, queens, emperors and industrial titans, his 35-year-old direct descendant, Nathaniel, has emerged as a kingmaker in his own right and an investor who some say may become the richest Rothschild of them all.

In five short years, the man in line to be the fifth Baron Rothschild is close to becoming a billionaire through a web of private equity investments in Ukraine, Eastern Europe and most significant, his partnership stake in Atticus Capital, the fast-growing $14 billion hedge fund.

The ascent of Rothschild is a vivid illustration of how the still glittering, if somewhat faded, prestige and wealth of Europe's most storied banking family has been reinvigorated from bold bets in this era's flashy new-money investment vehicles.

Like his forebears, Rothschild prefers that his influence remain unseen.

Rothschild is a principal adviser to Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest oligarchs in Russia and the owner of the aluminum giant Rusal, which recently merged with two other companies to create the world's largest aluminum company. Rothschild received no public credit despite having played a crucial role in getting the deal done.

And like a true Rothschild, he has a taste for the good life: An avid skier, he makes his principal residence in Klosters, Switzerland, and uses his Gulfstream jet to shuttle among his other homes in Paris, Moscow, London, New York and Greece.

But he is also a man of contradictions: He dates models and actresses, sits on an advisory board of the Brookings Institution, a policy research organization in Washington, and serves his guests the best wines from the Rothschild vineyards, which he does not drink.

He would not be interviewed for this article, yet he allowed his lushly renovated townhouse in Greenwich Village to be featured in Men's Vogue magazine. Despite his reputation as the most gregarious of men and the increasingly public nature of his life and career, he comes across as a pinched, reticent man in the few photographs that exist of him.

The burden of being a Rothschild can be a heavy one. In 1996, one of Rothschild's cousins, Amschel, having been asked to fill a leadership position in the family bank in London, hanged himself in a hotel bathroom at the age of 41.

Four years later, Raphael de Rothschild, also a cousin, died on a New York sidewalk at age 23 from a heroin overdose.

In the early 1990s, some thought that Rothschild might also buckle under the weight of the family name. He appeared to be a playboy with a taste for the slack lifestyle often embraced by the sons and daughters of Europe's wealthy families.

For Rothschild, whose ancestor Nathan Mayer Rothschild helped finance Britain's victory at Waterloo and whose father, Jacob, split from the family bank in 1980 to begin his own successful career as an investor, the family legacy was daunting.

So much so that until he started work as a 25-year- old investment analyst at the firm Gleacher in New York in 1995, Rothschild avoided it altogether.

He was the life of parties in New York, Paris and London, and in 1995 he eloped to the Dominican Republic with Annabelle Neilson, a London socialite with a reputation for dancing on dinner tables in her high heels.

"This is the story of Prince Hal turning into Henry IV," said Charles Phillips, who supervised Rothschild during his time at Gleacher. "He is one of the few sons of great men who has enhanced the family stature and created his own wealth."

While he undertook the drudgery of trainee investment banking work, Rothschild kept his eyes open for an opportunity more in tune with his growing ambition. In the spring of 1995, he found just that when he left the Gleacher offices to smoke a quick cigarette a few floors above.

Puffing away in an anteroom, he ran into Timothy Barakett, then a 29-year- old investor who was doing the rounds trying to raise funds for Atticus, his new hedge fund. Learning that Barakett was starting up a fund, Rothschild asked for a job. Barakett turned him down.

But the two men stayed in touch, and in the fall of 1996, Barakett took Rothschild on as a minority partner in the nascent fund, then with $90 million in assets, and gave him the title of director of business development with a mandate to tap his considerable Rolodex and family connections for new capital.

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