Meet the Silver Lake Partner Who Helped Engineer the Qualcomm Bid
- Ken Hao made the original approach to Qualcomm executives
- His partnership with Broadcom’s Hock Tan transformed industry
Hock Tan is the man most associated with Broadcom Ltd.’s $105 billion offer for Qualcomm Inc., but he couldn’t have mounted the audacious bid without Silver Lake managing partner Ken Hao. It was Hao who recruited Tan and helped him become one of the firm’s most favored executives. And it was Hao who originally approached Qualcomm.
Over the past dozen or so years, the two men have helped Silver Lake generate huge returns and turn the Silicon Valley PE firm into a leading actor in the rapidly consolidating chip industry. Now the duo’s partnership is being tested as never before. Qualcomm’s flat-out rejection of the deal has forced the bidders to go hostile. That’s unfamiliar territory for PE firms, which generally abandoned unfriendly takeovers about two decades ago when competition to win over management teams started steadily heating up.