Meet the secretive banker behind Warren Buffett's latest deal
BDT Capital Partners
When Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought 38.6% of the Pilot Flying J truck stop chain on Tuesday, it did so with the help of a firm you've probably never heard of: BDT Capital Partners.
That’s by design. Despite having more than $12 billion in assets under management, the merchant bank doesn’t even have a public-facing website.
It does, however, have more than 150 employees spread out over four offices in Chicago, New York, London, and Frankfurt, who advise extremely wealthy clients with family-owned businesses.
The firm intentionally flies under the radar to court these billionaires — like Buffett, the Waltons, and the Webers, to name a few — who value privacy.
Byron D. Trott, a midwest native who founded BDT, still helms the company from its Chicago headquarters inside the historic Wrigley Building.
Here’s how Trott went from a small-town football player to an investment banker advising billionaires:
Byron Trott was born in 1958 and grew up in Union, Missouri, a small town about an hour from St. Louis.
Source: Horatio Alger Society.
When a teacher used him as an example of a "chubby boy," Trott doubled-down on athletics, and was named a "scholar-athlete" by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper
He graduated in the top five percent of his class, too.
He eventually left Union to attend the the University of Chicago, where he played first base for the school's baseball team, before graduating in 1981.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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