The $6.3 billion take-private of Amex GBT by Long Lake Management landed a few weeks ago with the usual noise. I spent the day pulling apart SEC filings with my team, calculating who made money and who didn’t. American Express walked away with a $975 million pre-tax gain, Expedia was underwater on the Egencia stake, and Certares’ total return was unknowable from public filings.
But as I kept reading the fine print — the merger agreement, the voting agreements, the proxy disclosures — one name kept appearing in unexpected places. Not on the deal documents themselves, but in the connective tissue between the entities that made the deal possible.
Kenneth Chenault.
He was CEO of American Express for 17 years, and is now chairman and managing director of General Catalyst, which backs Long Lake. He is also the lead director of Airbnb, chairman of Bilt Rewards, and a director of Berkshire Hathaway. He hasn’t run a company since January 2018, and you wil