The Maestro Of Mergers

Billionaire roll-up artist Bradley Jacobs has spent more than $7 billion assembling a sprawling logistics company. Now he’s tuning it up to deliver big profits.

- Antoine Gara

Decades ago, Bradley Jacobs studied math and piano (classical and jazz) at Bennington and Brown before dropping out to make money. Now the balding 61-year-old CEO of XPO Logistics invokes that background to explain how he’s parlayed sequential roll-ups in the gritty businesses of garbage collection, heavy equipment rentals and delivering stuff into a $2.6 billion net worth. “Anyone can buy a company. You just have to sign a contract and wire the money,’’ he says. But conceiving how those acquired company parts can be integrated into an organically growing entity takes a special creative talent. “Even though I’m not writing a song [in integrating companies], I’m thinking of ideas that are abstract. It’s a combination of math and music. I’m visualizing them as clearly as I possibly can in space and time and then actually executing on them.”

If that sounds a tad highfalutin, consider this: In September 2011 Jacobs’ family investment firm ponied up $62.5 million to gain control of Express-1, a Michigan-based freight expediter doing $170 million in sales a year. He renamed Express-1 after its XPO stock symbol, moved its headquarters to Connecticut and over four years spent more than $7 billion on 17 acquisitions. Today XPO’s stock trades at $102, giving it a market cap of $12.3 billion, for a compound annual return of 38% under Jacobs’ watch. That’s more than double the S&P’s return and better than Amazon’s.

Jacobs’ own stake is worth $2 billion, making up the bulk of his fortune, which includes a 50acre Greenwich estate, a 17,000-square-foot Palm Beach waterfront mansion just down the road from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, and a starter modern art collection with works by Picasso, de Kooning, Calder and Lichtenstein.