Colors

White Knight (Business)

"White knight" is an expression that refers to a friendly investor in or acquirer of a company, i.e. one who will not fire the company's current management nor make significant changes to the company's strategy.

Although less common and an extension of the original usage, the expression can also be used to refer to non-profit institutions:

“Three weeks ago the art world waited breathlessly for word on whether the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles would survive or go bust. The museum’s problem wasn’t the economic downturn so much as stupidity. During flush times, when it could have and should have been building a nest egg, it ran through its savings. As museums go, this one, just 30 years old, is still young, and young is sexy. So of course a white knight, the billionaire art collector Eli Broad, rode to the rescue with a $30 million bailout plan.”—Holland Cotter, “Museums Look Inward for Their Own Bailouts,” The New York Times, January 11, 2009.

How It's Used

“That might set the stage for a bankruptcy filing, if a white knight financing deal does not materialize.”

"Fantasies about a white-knight businessman who might 'save' the Times with a cash infusion abound in the newsroom and in media circles across the city. Most of them feature Michael Bloomberg, who has denied interest in buying the paper, or Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire who bought $127 million in Times stock. Another notion floated in the newsroom is the hiring of a future-forward CEO, like Google’s Eric Schmidt, an executive who clearly 'gets' the Internet and might just be able to reengineer the Times to profit from it."

“The summit was originally called by Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek to discuss concerns about rising protectionism in stimulus plans being proposed by individual nations. With the recent collapse of the government in Latvia, Eastern Europe's growing problems became the main focus. But leaders left Brussels with few concrete decisions and no indication that the richer EU states of Western Europe would be white knights for the East.”

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