The name on the door stayed the same. On October 1, 2025, the person running Moelis & Company changed. Navid Mahmoodzadegan, who had helped found the investment bank eighteen years earlier, became its chief executive. Ken Moelis became executive chairman. In a business fond of announcing transformations, this was an unusually interesting exercise in continuity.
Mahmoodzadegan brought something difficult to obtain through an executive search: a memory of the firm before there was much of a firm to remember. He had been there in 2007. He had worked with Ken Moelis for three decades. The promotion gave a familiar colleague a broader brief, while leaving the founder involved with clients. Everyone changed chairs; nobody needed directions to the room.
There is a useful tension in that arrangement. An adviser develops a reputation by helping other people make consequential decisions. A chief executive must also make decisions about the institution doing the advising. Mahmoodzadegan’s career now joins those two responsibilities. To understand the appointment, follow the work that preceded it: legal practice, media banking, an independent firm, and transactions involving businesses whose products people actually argue about over dinner.
A law degree, then a different sort of argument
His route began with an A.B. from the University of Michigan, earned with Highest Distinction and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Harvard Law School followed, with a J.D., magna cum laude. His first profession was law, at Irell & Manella. The documents came before the dealmaking title.
By 1995, he was an investment banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. He remained there until 2001, then worked at UBS through 2007. At UBS, he became Global Head of Media Investment Banking and served on the Americas Investment Banking Executive Committee. Across those appointments, the field of responsibility widened from individual assignments to an industry practice and the management of a banking business.
Legal training and investment banking share a practical problem: a transaction must survive contact with its details. Ownership, obligations and the wording of an agreement matter. His early career supplies that context without requiring a grand conversion story. The documented sequence is enough. A lawyer moved into banking, developed a media specialty, and eventually joined the team creating a firm of its own.
The banker behind the entertainment business
Media gives financial advice an unusually visible set of consequences. A studio has a balance sheet, but it also has an audience. A talent agency has investors, but its business depends on people whose names appear above the title. A football club can change owners without changing the loyalties of the people in its stands. The numbers arrive attached to institutions that already mean something.
Mahmoodzadegan helped build Moelis’s media and communications business. His assignments have included Atairos’s acquisition of a 30% stake in Opry Entertainment Group, Apollo’s minority investment in Legendary Entertainment, and EQT’s minority investment in United Talent Agency. He also advised the ownership group led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital on its acquisition of Chelsea Football Club.
Those deals involve different relationships between money and control. A minority investor joins an existing ownership structure. A buyer of a club assumes a different responsibility. Put together, the assignments show the range inside an apparently narrow specialty. Entertainment is a convenient heading; the work underneath it involves talent, intellectual property, live experiences and the terms on which new capital enters established businesses.
There is also a geographical logic to his career. His official base is Los Angeles, close to the entertainment businesses that helped shape his advisory work. The CEO role carries a wider map. The move from specialist to firm leader makes an old professional question newly personal: how do you preserve the knowledge that made you useful while creating room for other people’s expertise?
A handover with the founding team still present
The June 2025 succession announcement set out three connected changes. Mahmoodzadegan would become CEO and join the board. Ken Moelis would become executive chairman, continuing to advise clients. Jeff Raich, another co-founder and co-president, would become executive vice chairman. All three appointments took effect on October 1.
Ken Moelis called Mahmoodzadegan “a trusted partner to me for 30 years.” The phrase explains more than a conventional endorsement would. Their working relationship predates the company itself. The decision therefore carried the weight of repeated experience together, including the years when Mahmoodzadegan served as co-president, a position he had held since September 2015.
For Mahmoodzadegan, the public commitment was equally direct: keep the firm focused on its clients. That is a familiar promise in financial services. Its usefulness depends on what follows: which people get hired, which capabilities get built, and how attention is divided between running a business and advising the clients who sustain it.
“We will continue to put clients first”
Navid Mahmoodzadegan · June 2025
The arrangement also avoids treating experience as something that must leave the building when a title changes. The outgoing CEO retained a client-facing role. The incoming CEO had helped shape the business already. For employees and clients, the question became how the responsibilities would work in practice. Familiarity supplies a starting point; it does not complete the assignment. The new structure asks the partners to distinguish between the relationships they share and the responsibilities each now holds. For Mahmoodzadegan, that means accepting accountability for the whole organization while colleagues with long experience remain central to its work.
The next business is already being built
One clue to Mahmoodzadegan’s priorities appeared before the CEO transition took effect. In 2025, Moelis announced the recruitment of Matt Wesley to lead its Private Funds Advisory business. Further appointments brought Jeff Hammer and Paul Sanabria into the buildout. Mahmoodzadegan spoke publicly about the ambition to expand in private capital and secondaries advisory.
This is a different part of the ownership story. Alongside advice on buying and selling companies, private capital advisory addresses transactions involving funds, portfolios and liquidity. It extends the conversation with financial sponsors beyond the next corporate acquisition. An investor’s need to sell, retain or reorganize an interest can create work even when the underlying company is staying put. The distinction helps explain why a bank would develop this business alongside its sector teams. Ownership can change at more than one level, and each level brings a different set of participants to the negotiation.
His involvement is revealing because it connects a specialist’s background with an executive’s responsibilities. Hiring experienced people and giving them a platform can broaden what an advisory firm offers. It also creates a management task: encouraging established sector bankers and new teams to work together. The new capability has to become useful to existing relationships, rather than remain an impressive collection of appointments.
The numbers arrive on their own schedule
The financial context matters, with the dates kept firmly attached. For 2025, Moelis reported $1.517 billion in GAAP revenue and $1.536 billion in adjusted revenue. The adjusted measure rose 28% from 2024. Mahmoodzadegan became CEO in the final quarter of that year, so the annual result spans both sides of the handover.
By the first half of 2026, revenue reached $729.2 million, up 9% from the comparable period. The firm reported first-half GAAP net income of $97.4 million, compared with adjusted net income of $97.2 million. These are company results, the product of work across the organization. They provide a measure of the business he leads without turning a succession date into an explanation for every dollar.
First-half revenue
+9% year over year, rounded. GAAP revenue; comparable six-month periods. 2025 figure from Moelis’s July 2026 comparative results.
Advisory revenue can move with the number, size and timing of completed transactions. A busy conversation and a booked fee do not necessarily arrive in the same quarter. That makes patience part of reading the business as well as running it. The CEO’s challenge includes investing in people whose contribution may develop over several reporting periods, while answering for results that arrive every three months.
A different kind of captaincy
On September 9, 2023, Mahmoodzadegan had another public assignment: honorary captain for Michigan’s football game against UNLV. Michigan won 35-7. For a banker associated with a major football ownership transaction, the university appearance supplies an agreeable change of scale. This time, the record concerns a game rather than an acquisition.
His connection to Michigan also includes service on the university president’s advisory group. Other public responsibilities include the Taft School’s board of trustees and the Partnership for New York City’s board. Earlier service included chairing the Carlthorp School board and membership of Jumpstart’s national board. These roles put education and civic institutions alongside the banking career.
The Michigan appearance is worth keeping in view because executive biographies can make a life look like an orderly procession of business cards. Here is a former student returning in a different capacity. The degree, the advisory service and the football captaincy are distinct moments connected by the same institution. A professional life has room for attachments that do not require a transaction announcement.
Now his most consequential title is the one attached to the firm he helped start. The name on the door offers continuity. The work behind it keeps changing: clients, colleagues, ownership questions and new areas of advice. After decades in the room, Mahmoodzadegan has responsibility for how the room itself works. That is the part of the handover no announcement can finish for him.