· David Senra, Kurt MacAlpine
[00:00:00] S0: How many years into this are you like, "Hey, maybe we should find a partner and go private"? [00:00:00] S1: So, we were always going to go private, which I was very, very transparent about with the market. And the way that I was assuming we were going to go private was through a share buyback program. So, during the course of my entire tenure at CI, we were doing two things. We were building Corient, diversifying and globalizing the business, while at the same time reducing our share count. And again, I thought, and the way I've described in the media many times, is I felt like our shares were, in my opinion, criminally undervalued. I thought there was a tremendous disconnect between the underlying value of the company- ... and what we were ultimately trading at. Part of that, like I mentioned, was tied to these underlying dynamics. Like, if every single morning you wake up with somebody having to sell your shares, for things outside of your or their control, that creates a tremendous buying opportunity. And then the question is, do you have conviction or not in yourself and what you're doing to actually transform the business and buy the shares? And we did, so that's what you saw, us buying a tremendous amount of shares back while at the same time as transforming the business. [00:00:00] S0: What was the financial outcome of those share buybacks? [00:00:00] S1: So, we took ourselves private, so- [00:00:00] S0: No, I know, but like how much?
· David Senra, Kurt MacAlpine
[00:00:00] S0: No, I know, but like how much? [00:00:00] S1: It depends. We were buying over a period of time, but it was a significant return, and we were buying a lot of those shares back at $12 or $13 a share, right? So, it was very, very meaningful return from a shareholder perspective. [00:00:00] S0: The reason I bring that up is because my friend Adam, who's the founder of AppLovin and one of my biggest partners- [00:00:00] S1: Yeah [00:00:00] S0: ... he was sitting in that chair where you are today, and he has the same kind of conviction that you do. And his whole thing was like, he went public, told the story on the podcast, I think every day for like 200 days, his stock price just dropped. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: I think it went from like 28 billion down to three. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And then he's just like, "Well, I'm not running a $3 billion company." I think at the time he thought it could be like a 100 or $200 billion company. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Now I think he thinks he can get to a trillion. But he's like, "Either this thing is 100 or 200 billion, or it's nothing." [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: Then he's just like, "This makes no sense. My stock price is three billion. We're doing a billion of EBITDA." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And so he winds up taking all the cash flow from that, buying back the stocks, and I think he borrowed like another five billion or something. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah.
· Kurt MacAlpine, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And everybody around him was like, "You're fucking crazy, dude." And he says very nonchalantly on the podcast, he goes, "Yeah, that worked out very well for the company. We made like 50 or 60 billion from that share." [00:00:00] S1: But here's the interesting thing between the disconnect between public and private markets. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah. [00:00:00] S1: So, what you're describing in a public market, people have this visceral reaction to. If you describe that to a private equity investor, they would say, "That is the standard blueprint under which we operate business and extract value." So, it is amazing to see the underlying disconnect between how people think about the business as an owner and an operator of the business, versus how people think about the business through, "Am I going to buy some shares of this public company or not?" as well. And oftentimes, when you're going through these transformation stories, you have to think about the end game, right? Again, we were sitting on, in my opinion, very vulnerable earnings, entirely driven by the Canadian mutual fund industry. Yes, it was a lot of earnings, but as a very, very- [00:00:00] S0: But it's not going to be a lot of earnings in the future. [00:00:00] S1: Correct, and that's the thing. So then the question is, everyone wants it to instantly be diversified without the time or the investments or the capital required to do it. That's just not practical. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah.
· David Senra, Kurt MacAlpine
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah. [00:00:00] S1: Right? So, you need to effectively, like the example you just described, you just need to have conviction in yourself. So for us, we said, "Look, we want to do two things. We think there's a tremendous opportunity in building Corient, while at the same time, we're not letting these shares trade the way they are without buying them. There's no way." And so we were buying and buying and buying and buying. So, the notion of, back to your initial question of going private was, so I was approached about two years ago right now, actually, by Mubadala Capital. In fact, we received an inbound call, and the message was, "We love the business. We love the strategy. We understand exactly what you're doing and why you're buying the shares. We think it's going to take you about nine years to effectively buy the shares remaining that you ultimately want to buy." [00:00:00] S0: Did you also think that at the time? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Okay.
· Kurt MacAlpine
[00:00:00] S1: And so they said, effectively, "We think it's going to take about nine years, and we think along that journey, there's going to be trade-offs around your ability to execute the Corient strategy, just given the capital requirements on both sides." I had agreed with 100% of that. And so we really hit it off and had conversations from there, was around how do we take this business out of the public markets, deliver a great return for the shareholders of the business, and then put the business in a private context where we could kind of own and operate it outside of a public company? And I felt like, see, I never belonged, even before I showed up, like a Canadian mutual fund company never really belonged in the public markets anyway, and this just created a phenomenal opportunity for us to do it. The context by which we went private, I think, is also equally unique. So again, that was kind of the message. So, we took ourselves private with no incremental debt on the business. There was actually deleveraging or an equity infusion tied to it. There were no cost synergies, no change of strategic direction. In my opinion, I picked up the best strategic partner on the planet with an equal amount of ambition to see this thing forward. And I think from their standpoint, look, if you take a look at the Mubadala Capital or just Abu Dhabi Inc. more broadly, it is an incredibly ambitious place, right? They have done a phenomenal job of creating wealth, building wealth, diversifying wealth. And fortunately for me, the entire team at Mubadala saw what we saw from a business perspective, saw the end game, saw a lot of similarities, I think, in terms of how they were building Mubadala Capital. It was effectively started inside of Mubadala Investment Company, a sovereign, built it into this phenomenal business, and just saw, I guess, a lot of us in them strategically and ambition-wise, and it's been absolutely amazing. So, we took ourselves private. We announced it in November of 2024. We completed it in August. We completed it on August 12th of 2025. On September 3rd of 2025, September 2nd or September 3rd, we announced we were buying, on the same day, the largest ultra-high-net-worth wealth manager in Europe and the second-largest ultra-high-net-worth wealth management business in Europe.
· Kurt MacAlpine, David Senra
And as an example, if we were still a public company, back to how people respond, in a public context, that would have been an impossible transaction to execute, just given a lot of the dynamics that you've mentioned. In a private context, in my opinion, it was the best possible thing we could have done for the company. And the reason I say that is, everything that I said about the opportunity in US ultra-high-net-worth wealth management is equally true in the rest of the world. I firmly believe that there are no global ultra-high-net-worth wealth managers that exist in the world today outside of Corient. And to me, that was a tremendous opportunity for us to go capitalize on. [00:00:00] S0: Why do you think no one else pursued that strategy? Because it seems obvious in hindsight.