Brad Jacobs (entrepreneur)

In 1979, Jacobs co-founded Amerex Oil Associates Inc., an oil brokerage firm with offices in New Jersey, Houston, London, and Tokyo.[8][14][15] He served as Amerex's chief executive officer until the firm was sold in 1983. During that time, the company's annual gross contract volume had grown to approximately $4.7 billion.[8]

In 1984, Jacobs moved to London and founded Hamilton Resources Ltd., an oil trading company.[9] In founding the company, Jacobs had used the bulk of his savings and a $1 billion line of credit from Banque Paribas.[15] He grew Hamilton to approximately $1 billion in annual revenue.[9]

In 1989, Jacobs founded United Waste Systems in Greenwich, Connecticut, and began consolidating small garbage collectors that had overlapping routes in rural areas.[14] Jacobs served as chairman and chief executive officer,[16] and in 1992 he took the company public. In August 1997, after the company had made more than 200 acquisitions,[17] Jacobs sold United Waste Systems to USA Waste Services Inc. (now Waste Management, Inc.) for $2.5 billion.[15][18][19] When United Waste Systems was sold, it was the fifth-largest solid waste management company in North America, and its stock had outperformed the S&P 500 Index by 5.6 times since its IPO.[8][18][20]

In September 1997, Jacobs formed United Rentals,[14][18] serving as the new company's chairman and chief executive officer. He took the company public three months later on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol URI.[21][22][14] Jacobs grew United Rentals through a strategy of consolidating equipment rental dealers in North America.[16][23][24] In the 10 years that Jacobs led the company (1997-2007), the company completed more than 250 acquisitions and its stock outperformed the S&P 500 Index by 2.2 times.[25][26][27] In 2007, Fortune magazine ranked United Rentals as the 536th largest public corporation in America, with $3.9 billion in revenue and 690 locations.[28][8]

In 2011, Jacobs invested approximately $150 million in Express-1 Expedited Solutions, a third-party logistics and transportation service provider trading at the time on the American Stock Exchange as XPO.[15] He assumed the roles of chairman of the board and chief executive officer,[29][30] gained ownership of approximately 71 percent of the company,[17] and renamed it XPO Logistics.[31] Jacobs listed the company on the New York Stock Exchange, retaining the ticker symbol XPO.[32]

In February 2012, Jacobs announced plans to grow XPO's revenue from $175 million to $5 billion within five years through M&A.[33] By the end of 2016, he had turned XPO into a $15 billion global company.[34] XPO reported revenue of $16.3 billion in 2020.[35]

Jacobs was ranked the Best CEO in Transportation in Institutional Investor's 2022 All-America Executive Team awards.[36] In 2018, he was ranked 10th on Barron's list of the World's Best CEOs[37] and listed 7th on Glassdoor's Top CEOs of 2018 list in France,[38] and 20th in the UK.[39]

In December 2020, Jacobs announced plans to spin off XPO's logistics segment as GXO Logistics, creating two, independent companies: XPO as a provider of freight transportation services and GXO as the world's largest pure-play provider of contract logistics services.[40] The spin-off was completed in August 2021. Jacobs became non-executive chairman of GXO's board of directors and remained chairman and CEO of XPO.[41]