My esteemed friends, in case you have not caught up with the biggest story in the financial press this week (sadly the story has not appeared on Youtube), one of the biggest M&A deals in Australian history went down this week.
Robin Khuda (Aussie via Bangladesh) has just sold his data centres company, AirTrunk, to Blackstone for $24 billion, making Khuda an instant minted billionaire. The deal also made a lot of money for Macquarie, the company's backers and for all of Airtunk's 350 employees. This was Blackstone's largest deal in the Asia region.
Robin Khuda's story is remarkable. He emigrated to Australia, from Bangladesh, as an 18 year-old, and in 20 short years built a massive data centre company worth $24 billion from scratch. He built 11 hyperscale data centres in various countries with plans to build more. He had to convince financial backers, negotiate with local authorities and energy companies in many jurisdictions, and acquire customers/backers such as Microsoft and Google. All this in 20 years! From little old Australia.
This story reminded me of Nate Silver's book, "On the Edge (The Art of Risking Everything)". It can be downloaded from the Wall Street Journal website. Nate Silver is also known as the founder of '538' a polling company with a great record for predicting the outcomes of US presidential and Senate elections. A topical issue.
In his book, Nate Silver tells the story of two communities. The River People are Alpha Males, risk takers and entrepreneurs (such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Robin Khuda and ClarkKent). They are independent minded, imaginative and hard working. The Village People on the other hand are unimaginative, dependent and political - beta males - (such as stay at home dads, chartists, share traders, swing traders and the like). They watch Youtube videos all day.
No ClarkKent post would be complete without a cultural reference, my esteemed friends. The Village People were an American disco group and gay icons of the late 1970's. Ray Simpson, pictured below, was the lead singer of the Village People
In later years Simpson re-invented himself as a trend follower (without success, mainly because he did not quite understand what trend-following was) and has since become a Swinging Retail Trader (with even less success). However, he was recently spotted Googling terms such as 'Carry Trade", "Deleveraging" and "Information Asymmetry", so it is expected that Simpson will soon be a Macro Trader.
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