Richard Jenrette

Jenrette was born on April 5, 1929, in Raleigh, North Carolina, the son of Joseph M. Jenrette, an insurance agent, and his wife, Emma Love Jenrette, a homemaker and an avid gardener. They lived in the Raleigh suburbs, according to Jenrette, in "a comfortable Tudor home." He graduated from Needham B. Broughton High School in 1947, and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1951. Jenrette worked for the New England Life Insurance Co. from 1951 to 1953, and was in the North Carolina National Guard from 1953 to 1955, after which he enrolled in the Harvard Business School where he earned an MBA in 1957.

After graduating from Harvard, Jenrette worked at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. from 1957 until 1959, when he co-founded Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette ("DLJ") with William H. Donaldson and Dan Lufkin. The firm concentrated on in-depth analysis, setting a new industry standard for institutional investing. Jenrette was instrumental in taking DLJ public in 1970, making it the first publicly traded investment firm in the United States.

Taking the helm of DLJ in 1973, he shepherded the firm through the recession of 1980–1983, and managed the firm’s sale in 1985 to the insurance firm The Equitable Companies Inc., where he became the chief investment officer. Jenrette was chairman and CEO of AXA Equitable from April 1990, until his retirement in 1996.

In addition to his career at DLJ and Equitable, Jenrette was a member of the Harvard University Board of Overseers; a director of the Associates of the Harvard Business School; a trustee of The Duke Endowment; and chairman and founder of the Classical American Homes Preservation Trust (renamed the Richard Hampton Jenrette Foundation in 2024).

Jenrette's longtime partner, William L. Thompson, died in 2013. Jenrette died of cancer on April 22, 2018, aged 89, in Charleston, South Carolina.