“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
— Warren Buffett
Quintin Kneen has watched the tide go out twice. The first time it took his company. The second time, he was already out of the water. This post is about what happened in between, and what he did with his own money near the top and after the first collapse.
May 17, 2017
Picture the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware on a Wednesday in May 2017. Two offshore supply vessel companies file for Chapter 11 that day. Not that week. That day, in that courthouse, seven docket numbers apart.
Case 17-11132 is Tidewater, the company that invented this industry, filing for the first time in 62 years. You read that story last week.
Case 17-11125 is GulfMark Offshore. Its shareholders will be left with 0.75 percent of the company and some warrants struck so far out of the money they might as well be lottery tickets. Roughly $430 million of bonds, borrowed while a man named Quintin Kneen was the CFO, get converted into ownership of the company he had been running as CEO since 2013.
Most executives do not survive a wipeout like that. Kneen kept his seat, collected a $510,000 retention bonus approved shortly before the filing, and steered GulfMark through the exit. Eighteen months later he merged it into its courthouse neighbor, Tidewater, and took the CFO job. He later called stepping down from CEO one of his greatest risks, because he believed the combined company would be the greatest franchise in offshore energy.
Ten months after that, Tidewater’s board moved on from its own CEO, paying him a without cause package on the way out, and gave Kneen the keys to the company that invented the industry.
What happened next is the part nobody argues about. Five year total shareholder return of 485 percent. Two completed acquisitions that look better with age, and a third pending. A balance sheet with near-zero net debt in a sector famous for dying of leverage.
In seven years as an officer of this company, Kneen has traded his own stock in the open market during exactly one calendar year. 2024. What he did in those eight months, and what the rest of the boardroom did in the same six week window, is the most complete portrait of insider psychology I have ever assembled. The full ledger is below, dated to the day, alongside the five tests and the grades.
