Randy Knight, co-founder of Knight Transportation, joins private equity firm

One of the four family members involved in the founding of the company, he was gone by the time it merged with Swift

Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves

One of the founders of Knight Transportation, which gobbled up Swift Transportation in 2017 to form Knight-Swift (NYSE: KNX), is joining a private equity firm.

Randy Knight, one of the four Knight family brothers and cousins who founded Knight Transportation, is joining Frontier Global Management. The Southern California-based firm has hired Knight to be a senior adviser, though he is listed on the company’s website as fund adviser.

Randy Knight was a major shareholder of Knight Transportation but had left the company prior to its merger with Swift. He had been with Swift prior to the founding of Knight Transportation in the late ’80s.

Knight became a public company in 1994. Randy Knight also founded Total Warehousing.

The website for Frontier Global Management does not list any of the company’s investments. In a prepared statement, Joe Shapiro, the company’s managing general partner, said Knight “has unrivaled depth of experience founding and leading the world’s largest and most successful trucking transportation company. He will bring invaluable knowledge and insight across a range of [the company’s] investment areas, including autonomous transportation and logistics.”

Among the other fund advisers at Frontier is Peter Guber, the legendary Hollywood producer who is chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment. He also is at least part owner in multiple sports franchises.

Frontier Global Management did not respond to an email with additional questions by publication time.

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.