‘Every Strategy’
He was “mostly the kind of person that would evaluate every strategy possible, even the most unthinkable, and really question why not," said Daniele Seitz, who was a utilities analyst at the time Wilder ruled TXU and is now vice president at Ascension Asset Management. “There were very few people who did this.”
Gavin Wolfe, now a managing director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, worked at Credit Suisse from 2000 to 2012 and represented TXU during its sale. He recalled Wilder as a thoughtful leader who sweated the details.
“I remember quite vividly that, from the moment John got hired, he had a plan,” Wolfe said by phone. “Analytically and tactically, I’d put John up against virtually anyone in the energy industry.”
Wilder took advantage of a rally in natural gas prices to focus TXU on generating electricity, successfully navigating the company through the state’s transition to wholesale markets. The end result: A $1.7 billion profit line in 2005. The company’s shares responded in kind, rising almost 400 percent from when he took over in 2004 to when he left in 2007.
Wilder stepped down at TXU after orchestrating the KKR buyout in a deal so convincing it drew the support of Warren Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Buffett bought about $2 billion in debt carried by the company renamed Energy Future Holdings Corp. His investment didn’t prove as rewarding as it was for Wilder. Gas prices started plunging in the second half of 2008 and, six years after TXU was sold, Energy Future joined a number of independent power producers in filing for bankruptcy. Berkshire took a pretax loss of $873 million in 2013.
Buffett’s Regret
“Most of you have never heard of Energy Future Holdings,” Buffett said then in a letter to his shareholders in 2014. “Consider yourselves lucky. I certainly wish I hadn’t.”
Buffett didn’t respond to a request for comment sent to an assistant, while Exco and KKR declined to comment.