Vikram Pandit Is the New CEO of Citigroup!Poor Vikram Pandit! He’s been on the Citigroup throne for only a few hours, and already everyone is raining on his parade. “There was some hope that somebody with a bigger name would be chosen, so maybe from that perspective there is some disappointment,” Lee Delaporte, director of research at Dreman Value Management, told Reuters. Business Week, along with everyone else, took it upon themselves to elucidate just how much this job sucks, and CNN called his résumé “flimsy.” Well, at the very least, they know he’s not going to pull a Jimmy Cayne. “I don’t play golf. Period,” Pandit told New York in 2002. “I’m sure I’d enjoy it, but I just never got good at it.” But what do we really know about Vikram Pandit? After the jump, the salient facts of the 50-year-old CEO’s life.
photo op
M&M’s Opens Times Square Store, Tortures Willing Pedestrians
If you’re anything like us, nothing attracts your sweet tooth like “heavy, thin, old and young New Yorkers” sprayed in candy coating. So when we received a press release from the M&M’s people announcing that they’d be marking the opening of their new Times Square location by spraying those folks in their favorite M&M’s colors — and then branding their chests with an M, candy style — we knew we’d have to attend. Intern Everett was on the scene, where he snapped some pix and reported that nothing says yum like bikini-clad people, standing in 40-degree weather, getting sprayed with cold paint. Hey, at least the victims froze in their mouths, not in their hands.
party town
Boldfaced Names Flock South for Art Basel WinterArt Basel has sucked New York’s boldfaced types down to Miami’s $4.99 early-bird dinner buffets. We are left with a surfeit of socialites, a David Mamet play without David Mamet, and Geraldo.
• Ugg Australia grand opening. 79 Mercer St., nr. Broome St., 7 p.m. Guests scheduled to include Molly Sims, Jacinda Barrett, and Dr. Lisa Airan, who’s the only socialite in the Socialite Rank Top 20 with a medical degree. She’s an emergency-room trauma surgeon in the South Bronx. Just kidding, she’s a dermatologist.