Keurig Green Mountain, the Luxembourg-owned company behind the near ubiquitous coffee pods, announced Monday it would buy Dr Pepper Snapple Group for $18.7 billion in cash.
Germany's extremely wealthy Reimann family — the owners of JAB Holdings, which took Keurig private in 2015 — turned to someone they could trust for financial advice: Byron Trott.
Trott runs one of the most secretive investment banks in the world, BDT Capital Partners, which caters to the world's wealthy elite who value privacy and discretion. It's in-house merchant-bank, BDT & Company, acted as financial advisers to Keurig on the transaction, the company said. Entities affiliated with BDT Capital Partners are also investing alongside JAB.
Not heard of Trott or his eponymous company? That's by design. Despite having more than $12 billion in assets under management, the firm 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, Germany, who advise extremely wealthy clients with family-owned businesses.
The firm intentionally flies under the radar to court billionaires — like Warren Buffett, the Waltons, and the Webers, to name a few — who value privacy.
Byron Trott, a Midwest native who founded BDT, still helms the company from its downtown Chicago headquarters. Here's how he 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 Association.
When a teacher used him as an example of a "chubby boy," Trott doubled-down on athletics, and he was named a "scholar-athlete" by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper.
He graduated in the top 5% 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