Moelis & Company MC

The business

Moelis is advisory in its distilled form: no markets desk, no lending, no funds business, just merger, restructuring and capital-markets advice sold by managing directors Ken Moelis has recruited for two decades. The customer is a board or a sponsor paying a success fee measured in millions per deal. The moat is the bench, and the current expansion says so: six managing directors joined this year across private credit secondaries, energy, chemicals and healthcare technology, with six more committed. The balance sheet is $481.1M of cash and short-term investments against no debt and no goodwill, the cleanest in the group.