This Audio gives great insight about how minds of great investors work, First at the peak of crazy real estate boom year 2007 Stephen Schwarzman bought Equity Office at an offer of $55.50 a share, or $39 billion in a bidding war.

The takeover battle, perhaps the most entertaining of recent years because of the big financial players and big egos involved, was being referred to as "New York at the Gate," as it pitted two very different New York financiers against each other: Stephen Schwartzman of Blackstone, the leading figure in New York's financial and charity circuit in recent years, and Steven Roth of Vornado, the former strip mall king of New Jersey.

The Equity Office deal is the biggest leveraged private equity buyout ever till 2007, surpassing last summer's $32 billion deal for the hospital chain HCA, which itself was the first to surpass the previous high-water mark, the $30 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco.

Its been said Sam Zell started the bidding war by sending out the email - "Roses are red, violets are blue; I hear a rumor, is it true?"

Strange as it sounds, that strained line of poetry set off the fiercest buyout battle since the epic bidding for RJR Nabisco in the late 1980s.

Samuel Zell in an e-mail message last month, invited a rival bid topping an offer of $48.50 a share for his Equity Office Properties.

The reply: from Blackstone "Roses are red, violets are blue. I love you Sam, our bid is 52."

was not good enough.

Blackstone who were the initial bidder, won the bidding war for Equity Office finally with an offer of $55.50 a share, or $39 billion.

but the amazing thing here is right after this deal was done Stephen Schwarzman sensed “we are in market top” & just buying this $39 billion worth of real estate Schwarzman thought was dangerous so, they decided to “sell half of what they bought the same day they bought it” Schwarzman said when he said that’s what we gonna do people in Blackstone looked at him asked - “the same day ?” his response was yes, I don’t want to take any risk the world is gonna change and we going to stuck with all this.

This is something I personally found very profound and that’s how great investing minds work - first you bought the expensive selling s**t to win ego war then you were humble enough to recognize you have get rid of it on the same day and if they hadn’t done that they could have ended into Financial trouble given most of the people bought from them went insolvent and they ended up making 3x (due to leverage involved) money on this deal they did at the top.

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