Insiders: Silver Lake's Seagate deal continues to pay off

By Chris O'Brien
Mercury News

Almost six years ago, a little known private equity outfit named Silver Lake Partners created a stir by spending $2 billion to buy esteemed disk drive maker Seagate and take it private. It was an incredibly complex deal that involved a Cayman Islands partnership and spinning off a Seagate software division to create Veritas Software.

While Silver Lake was a new name to most, its investors included an all-star lineup of tech heavyweights such as Oracle's Larry Ellison, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Dell's Michael Dell. And since then, the Menlo Park-based firm has grown to become such a formidable deal maker that it was included in a recent list of private equity firms contacted by the U.S. Justice Department as part of an informal probe into the firms' collaboration on leveraged buyouts.
But even now, Silver Lake continues to profit from the deal that helped put it on the map. Between Nov. 1 and Nov. 8, Silver Lake partner James Davidson, who sits on the Seagate board, sold 11 million of his firm's Seagate shares for $244.45 million.

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