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Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball

Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball

(Bloomberg) -- One way of dealing with an early sunset is to make the most of a longer evening, say by putting on a tuxedo for dinner by candlelight.

Sounds fancy for a Monday night, but for some fancy people in finance, it was just the ticket.

In the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paul Tudor Jones, Lee Ainslie and Chase Coleman circled around Ken Langone. The occasion was NYU Langone Health’s Violet Ball, honoring Langone and his wife Elaine for their mega donations and service.

Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball
Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball

Langone couldn’t get a sip or a word in as he accepted congratulations and posed for photos with Lori and Larry Fink, Fiona and Stanley Druckenmiller and Robert Kraft.

“It’s about 15 seconds with everybody,” he said. “I won’t sleep tonight, I’m so insecure I’m going to miss saying hello to someone.”

Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball

That left others to make small talk. Thomas Murphy, former head of Capital Cities/ABC, said the center owes its success to the partnership between Langone, its chairman, and Robert Grossman, its chief executive and the dean of the medical school.

“He’s a giant,” Jones said of Langone, “and it’s a who’s-who of New York who turned out for him.”

Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball

Almost a year to the day until the next presidential election, guests were trying and failing to put politics aside for a few hours.
Allison and Leonard Stern (whose name is on NYU’s business school) spent a moment on who’d they like to see living in the White House: Nikki Haley. “She’s my lady,” Allison Stern said.

Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball

Meanwhile, at the New York Public Library’s gala, Mayor Bill de Blasio described Senator Chuck Schumer as “the future majority leader of the U.S. Senate.”

Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball
Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball

De Blasio then shifted (to everyone’s relief) to the less polarizing subject of the role of libraries in a democracy.

“No worldview is shunned, no faith or ideology is denigrated,” the mayor said. “Here, all thoughts are valued, all people are valued.”

Tony Marx, the library’s president, elaborated. “All libraries are predicated on the ethos of access and egalitarianism,” he said.

As for the guests: it might be an exaggeration to say they were from all walks of life. Goldman Sachs was represented by John Waldron and Chris Kojima; Blackstone Group’s Steve Schwarzman brought Michael Chae.

Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball
Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball
Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball

And at another table covered in pink velvet with bouquets recalling Dutch paintings was Yomayrah Mena, a 23-year-old page at Inwood Library and senior at Lehman College.

“The daily life lessons of being a page are amazing,” said Mena, who’s held the job since she was in high school. “It’s cool to connect with your own community.”

Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball
Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball
Langone Has No Time to Gab as Billionaires Swirl at Violet Ball

During dessert, Mena lined up with other guests including Davidson Kempner’s Tony Yoseloff to get books signed by the 2019 class of Library Lions: Elizabeth Alexander, the poet and head of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; documentary maker Frederick Wiseman; writer and novelist Jamaica Kincaid and Harvard historian Jill Lepore. Composer Philip Glass was also honored but couldn’t make it due to illness (Marx said the library had sent over some chicken soup).

As for what will happen a year from now, actually, the library plans to skip its Lions gala, which is generally held the night before Election Day. Instead, it will let its patrons gear up to vote on their own, and hold a gala to celebrate its 125th anniversary in October.

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Peter Eichenbaum at peichenbaum@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill

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