David Bonderman hasn't had this much press since he hired the Rolling Stones to perform for his 60th birthday party. But this was less flattering coverage.

Bonderman and his firm, TPG Capital, took a drubbing in the press after their investment in Washington Mutual Inc. was wiped out Sept. 25, when federal regulators took over the savings and loan. "TPG lost $1.35 billion faster than you can say option adjustable-rate mortgage," The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column quipped.

"He should have known better," an analyst told The New York Times. That was a cheap shot. Bank regulators, after all, were satisfied after TPG led a $7 billion equity infusion in April. Institutional shareholders stumped up $5 billion alongside TPG in April, as well.

But that was before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. went down. WaMu never laid to rest concerns that losses on its mortgage and credit-card portfolios would prove worse than projected. It hemorrhaged $17 billion of its $188 billion in deposits from Sept. 15 to Sept. 25, the Office of Thrift Supervision revealed after WaMu was seized. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. didn't want to absorb the losses a collapse would entail, so it arranged for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. to buy WaMu for $1.9 billion. It was creative finance worthy of Wall Street: By wiping out WaMu's equity and most debt, the FDIC protected depositors without shelling out a cent itself. If Bonderman expected gratitude for stepping up in April, he got none.

"We are dissatisfied with the loss to our partners and ourselves," TPG said in a statement. "The unprecedented turmoil in global financial markets and resulting macro crisis of confidence has radically changed the dynamics for all financial institutions."

By any measure, $1.35 billion is a big hit, even for a firm managing more than $50 billion in assets. It ranks as one of the biggest private equity losses ever. But in relative terms, it pales next to wipeouts on investments made between 1998 and 2001, because buyout funds were so much smaller then. TPG's investment came in equal parts from its fifth and sixth buyout funds and a new $6 billion pool for investments in distressed businesses in the financial sector. The losses would represent about 7% of that fund but only 2.3% or so of its latest, $20 billion LBO pool. By contrast, Forstmann Little & Co. bet $2.5 billion, or more than 60% of its committed capital, on XO Communications and McLeodUSA Inc. in 1999 and 2000.

Finally, if it's any consolation to Bonderman, finance company Conseco Inc., a Thomas H. Lee Partners LP holding that ranks among private equity's big wipe outs, was brought down by a plunge in the bond market that forced Conseco to take big mark-downs on its debt portfolio.