How Billionaire Wes Edens’ Big Energy Dream Hit the Rocks
New Fortress Energy went all in on a concept it called Fast LNG. Slowly that commitment has become the company’s undoing.
For 20 minutes, Wes Edens barely pauses as he talks about the sunny prospects for his beleaguered liquefied natural gas company, New Fortress Energy. Dressed in an open-collar blue shirt, his once-blond hair down to his neck, the effervescent 64-year-old billionaire from Montana appears relaxed, flicking through a printout of a PowerPoint presentation he says he prepared himself. It outlines NFE’s operations in Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua, as well as the global growth potential of liquefied natural gas, or LNG.
It’s a cloudless November morning in Puerto Rico, where NFE supplies more than a third of the island’s natural gas and operates a handful of power plants. Edens, who made his fortune in private equity and co-owns both the Premier League team Aston Villa and the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, has invited Bloomberg Businessweek to his company’s facility at the Port of San Juan to explain why, in spite of evidence to the contrary, NFE’s future is bright. “This is an amazing constellation of assets,” he says, waving the presentation. “We’ve invested $7 billion, millions of hours. But public markets aren’t always the most patient.”