Home: Las Vegas, NV. Birthplace: New York, NY. Profession: Aviation and finance executive. Organization: Jet.AI Inc. (NASDAQ: JTAI). Title: Interim chief financial officer and director, Jet.AI Inc.; chief financial officer and director, AI Infrastructure Acquisition Corp. Alma mater: The Wharton School (MBA, with Distinction); University of Pennsylvania (B.A., Economics, 1980).
Current project: Leading Jet.AI’s transition into AI data center infrastructure, including divesting its aviation business to flyExclusive, while deploying AI Infrastructure Acquisition Corp.’s $138 million in trust funds toward its first business combination. Recent recognition: Profiled in CEO Magazine’s executive interview series for my aviation and finance career. Latest accomplishment: Closing AI Infrastructure Acquisition Corp.’s upsized $138 million IPO on the NYSE in October 2025. Hobbies: Flying. I hold multi-engine commercial pilot and instrument ratings and still enjoy time in the cockpit. I also enjoy golf, tennis, sailing and skiing. Recent travel or adventure: Lived and worked for seven years in Beirut, Lebanon.
Personality profile: Entrepreneurial, drawn to hard problems and comfortable with high risk. Moral compass: Whether the assumptions underneath a decision are actually realistic—the same test I apply to any transaction. How do you define an ideal business relationship? Two people who complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. What occupation, other than your own, do you most admire? Restructuring advisors who can tell a distressed company what its assets are actually worth and restructure it into something that can move forward and thrive. What is your go-to workout? Cardio. What ingredient is essential to your perfect vacation? Relaxation and disconnecting from the office.
What was your first paying job? Commercial bank lending officer to the mining industry. What book have you repeatedly read? Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. Besides your parents, who has had the greatest influence on your life? Mark Schulte, my mentor in Merrill Lynch’s transportation group in the late 1980s. He nurtured my critical thinking and attention to detail. What’s the best advice you received in your career? Be willing to be wrong publicly and recover. Careers that look linear from the outside are almost always nonlinear from the inside. What modern technology innovation do you most appreciate? Artificial intelligence. It has revolutionized how I approach problems and produce work. What company or organization do you most admire? Merrill Lynch’s transportation banking practice, where I spent nine years. It taught me to underwrite a deal like a banker and an operator at the same time. What world event has had the greatest influence on your life? September 11, 2001, and the restructuring it forced across the regional airline industry. It brought me to Mesa Air Group in 2002.
What is your big idea?
The capital-and-operations discipline built through decades of aviation and restructuring experience is directly transferable to how AI data center infrastructure gets financed and built.
What message do you want to send out into the world? Be willing to hold both the operating job and the financial job at once, even when specializing would be easier. The decisions are better for it. What widely held belief do you reject? Private aviation can be made as frictionless as booking a rideshare. The interface can; the safety and operating structure underneath it can’t. What mega-trend most excites you? AI infrastructure buildout. Compute demand is outrunning the asset base the same way international air cargo did when I joined Atlas Air in 1995.
Who would you like to spend an evening with, in heaven? Leonardo da Vinci. As a kid, what did you first want to be when you grew up? Astronaut. How would you choose to spend tomorrow, if you knew it was your last day on earth? With my family, at home, relaxing. What advice would you give your younger self? Take the operating role even when the finance job pays more. The compounding return over thirty years is worth more than the salary gap ever will be. What day in your life would you choose to re-live? The birth of my children. What period in your life would you do differently, if you could? My college years.
Personal mission: Applying three decades of aviation finance and operational discipline wherever complex problems arise. Personal motto: The financial structure and the operating structure are the same problem viewed from two angles.
