When Expedia boss Peter Kern dialled into an earnings call last May, hotels were closed, flights were grounded and the new chief executive of the world’s biggest travel agency had just asked Wall Street for $4bn in emergency financing. “I’m really excited about the opportunities ahead of us,” Kern said, before adding: “I’m not crazy.”
Bereft of revenue, Expedia urgently needed cash to cope with the economic impact of coronavirus. Yet most sources of liquidity were dry. Banks were in no position to lend quickly. Bond investors were in retreat. Even Warren Buffett, who had thrown multibillion-dollar lifelines to companies as mighty as Goldman Sachs and General Electric during the financial crisis a decade earlier, was licking his wounds from an enormous investment in US airlines whose collapsing shares he was now selling.
If Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway in 2008 provided refuge to companies whose crisis-inflicted injuries did not quite condemn them to bailout or failure, then in 2020 that role most often fell to Apollo Global Management, the $455bn investment group.