An investor generally knows how a story is supposed to end. Buy a business. Help it grow. Sell it. In a meeting in Bermuda in 2024, Bobby Le Blanc proposed a different ending for Convex, the insurer Onex had helped establish five years earlier. He wanted Onex to own it for the long run. For a private equity executive, choosing to stay can be a consequential departure.
The proposal eventually became part of a $7 billion transaction with AIG. It also offers a useful way into Le Blanc’s career. He had spent seven years at Berkshire Hathaway before joining Onex in 1999. By the time he became Onex’s chief executive in May 2023, he had worked there for almost a quarter of a century. His succession arrived with a question attached: what should this institution become under its second CEO?
That question has an unusually long shadow. Onex was founded by Gerry Schwartz in 1984. Le Blanc took charge of a firm with established investment teams, institutional clients and a founder’s imprint. An inheritance of that size includes habits as well as assets. The new chief executive’s task was to decide which deserved another decade.
An apprenticeship measured in years
Le Blanc’s route into investing began with a B.S. from Bucknell University, where he graduated in 1988. He later earned an M.B.A. at New York University. General Electric came first in his professional life; Berkshire Hathaway followed. Seven years there preceded the move to Onex.
Those names make a tidy résumé, although résumés tend to hurry past the most useful part: the time spent learning how businesses behave. A company can look very different through the eyes of its managers, its lenders and its owners. Le Blanc’s later responsibilities would require him to move among those perspectives. At Onex, investing and managing other people’s capital would become parts of the same job.
He joined the firm well before his name appeared at the top of its leadership list. In August 2020, Onex named him president, with responsibility for all its business units, and sole head of Onex Partners, its flagship private equity strategy. Schwartz remained chairman and CEO. The appointment put Le Blanc in a position to consider how the pieces fitted together, rather than looking only at the next acquisition.
The distinction matters. A good investment can still compete with another good investment for the same dollar. A successful team can still need a clearer remit. At the level of an entire firm, capital allocation means choosing among worthwhile things and accepting that some of them will have to wait. It is a profession in which an attractive opportunity can become inconvenient merely by arriving at the same time as another one.
Only the second chair
On May 11, 2023, the succession became official. Shareholders had approved an amendment concerning Onex’s multiple voting shares, and Le Blanc was appointed CEO. Nearly forty years after the firm’s creation, the count of chief executives had reached two. That is a rather small club for a rather long history.
Le Blanc’s opening remarks acknowledged Schwartz’s mentorship and the institution he had built. The public tone was appreciative; the responsibility was forward-looking. A successor has to make decisions that belong to his own tenure while working with people whose experience reaches into the previous one. Continuity is useful only if it leaves enough room to act.
His first annual letter as CEO gave that action a financial frame. Onex would compound its own investing capital while improving earnings from managing capital for clients. The firm also began an operations and expense initiative that gave business units more responsibility for profitability. In 2023, it repurchased 3.5 million of its own shares. Buying the house’s own stock belongs on the same decision sheet as buying another business.
There are two audiences for this work. Clients want their funds managed well. Shareholders want the publicly traded company to turn its resources into value they can recognize. Those interests overlap, but the measures differ. Fund performance, management fees and the earnings of an owned company tell different parts of the story. Le Blanc’s strategy increasingly asks readers of Onex’s accounts to see how those parts connect.
The investment that stayed
Convex makes the connection concrete. Onex was a founding investor in the specialty insurer in 2019 through Onex Partners V. Stephen Catlin and Paul Brand brought insurance experience to the new business. Le Blanc joined its board at formation. The relationship therefore existed well before the later transaction had a closing date.
On February 6, 2026, Onex and AIG completed the acquisition. Onex held approximately 63% of Convex, AIG approximately 35%, with the remainder belonging to Convex’s management team. A business that had sat inside a private equity investment structure became a core platform for Onex alongside private equity and credit. The intended contribution was recurring net income and cash flow.
Approximate ownership shares; the transaction was valued at US$7 billion.
AIG’s involvement extended beyond its Convex stake. It acquired approximately 9.9% of Onex’s subordinate voting shares and committed $2 billion to Onex’s private equity and credit strategies over three years. The arrangement joined an insurance investment to an asset management relationship. Each percentage described a different connection; together, they made the transaction larger than a simple change of owner.
For Le Blanc, the attraction included knowledge accumulated through years of ownership. That does not eliminate uncertainty. It changes the starting point. A management team’s decisions, a company’s systems and its response to difficult periods become things an investor has observed, rather than qualities presented in a sale process. The buyer can ask more informed questions, even when the answers remain uncomfortable.
The shift also changes the clock. A private equity fund must eventually return capital to its investors. Direct ownership gives Onex a different horizon for Convex. It still has to justify the investment, allocate capital sensibly and deliver results. Staying brings its own discipline: the owner remains present for the consequences.
A boardroom with classrooms attached
Le Blanc’s public life has another New York address in spirit: DREAM’s schools. He joined the organization’s board in 2017, serving through the merger of Harlem RBI and DREAM Charter Schools and the expansion of its work into the South Bronx. In June 2024, DREAM honored him at its annual gala at the Mott Haven school.
The evening raised $5.6 million for schools and programming. Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson was an honored guest; Hank Azaria and Broadway performer Elijah Johnson also appeared. The setting put an investment executive among people whose work is measured in classrooms, performances and opportunities for young people. Le Blanc’s recognition concerned his commitment to students and families.
His remarks placed equal access to the essentials of children’s development among his priorities outside work and family. The interest is reflected in other commitments. He serves on Lincoln Center’s board, and Bucknell’s 2023 management college report listed him on its Student Managed Investment Fund Board. The latter offers a small but fitting detail: an alumnus with decades of investing experience appearing in the orbit of students learning to make their own decisions.
These activities should retain their own meaning. A school is a school, and its students are people with lives ahead of them. What they add to this portrait is evidence of where Le Blanc directs attention beyond his executive role. Education and the arts occupy actual places on his board calendar.
The work after the announcement
In March 2026, Le Blanc became chairman of Convex. Catlin stayed on the board as Founder and Life President, continuing to provide counsel and mentorship. Paul Brand remained CEO. The arrangement preserved the founders’ involvement while placing the majority owner’s chief executive in the chairman’s seat. Familiarity and new responsibility arrived together.
Le Blanc has also described a practical approach to ownership beyond the largest transactions. In a 2024 contribution on sustainable investing, he outlined how Onex helped smaller portfolio companies address customer expectations without each having to build a dedicated sustainability team. The work involved company-specific assessments, measurements and operating priorities. Ownership here meant supplying expertise a business could use.
By September 2026, his discussion of Convex at Scotiabank’s financials summit returned to the people running the business. He credited Catlin and Brand with building a technology-enabled insurer and attracting the team needed to execute their plans. “People mean everything in business,” he said. A balance sheet may be the CEO’s instrument, but other people have to make its entries earn their keep.
“People mean everything in business.”
Bobby Le Blanc / September 2026
His next decisions will be judged by familiar questions. Does Convex produce durable earnings? Does the asset management business become more profitable? Where should available capital go, including into Onex’s own shares? Le Blanc has discussed further substantial investments within the firm’s areas of competence, with financial services a possible destination. The ambition is specific enough to assess as it develops.
There is no closing ceremony for the strategy itself. Acquiring a business supplies a date for the diary; owning it supplies work for the years that follow. Le Blanc’s career has already contained plenty of those years. His Onex chapter now turns on what he does with the freedom to keep a business, and with the obligation to make keeping it worthwhile.