David Weidman

The company was German, the buyer was Blackstone, and the man who ended up running it was a chemical engineer from Tremonton, Utah. Celanese AG traded in Frankfurt and reported net sales of $4,603 million for 2003. In April 2004 a Blackstone vehicle bought about 84 percent of its shares at 32.50 euros each, moved the headquarters to the United States and, in December 2004, made David Weidman, the chief operating officer since 2002, chief executive of the new Celanese Corporation. The initial public offering priced on January 20, 2005: 50 million shares at $16 on the New York Stock Exchange. Wikipedia's phrase is that he was instrumental in the change from a German-listed company to a global one listed in New York, and the SEC filings bear out the sequence if not the adjective.

He had been at Celanese since September 2000, which made him one of the few senior executives who had seen both regimes. The board made him chairman as well in February 2007.

Fifty million shares at $16, January 20, 2005: a Frankfurt company becomes a New York one.

The early markers are the kind you see on a lot of Utah résumés. A finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1973, a chemical engineering degree from Brigham Young University in 1978, an MBA from Michigan in 1980, and then fourteen years at American Cyanamid before AlliedSignal hired him in 1994.

The numbers at the end are cleaner than the numbers at the start, because the start was a leveraged buyout. By 2010, the last full year before he announced his departure, Celanese reported net sales of $5.9 billion, about 72 percent of it from outside North America, with roughly 7,250 employees, and the company had been listed for six years. On November 7, 2011 the board announced that he would retire on April 2, 2012 and that Mark C. Rohr, a director since 2007 and until that September the chairman and chief executive of Albemarle Corporation, would take both of his titles. The release counted his tenure at eleven years, and the two men spent the winter on the handover. The industry's own bodies had already made their judgment: he chaired the American Chemistry Council in 2009 and had chaired the board of the Society of Chemical Industry, which gave him its Chemical Industry Medal in 2012, the year he stepped down, and the Petrochemical Heritage Award followed in 2017. The Marriott School at BYU named him International Executive of the Year at a banquet on September 21, 2018, an award it has given since 1974 to people like Rex Tillerson and George Bodenheimer, and what he told the students that night was not about chemistry: "These characteristics of success are based solely on you and your personal choices." The characteristics he had in mind were integrity, knowledge and persistence. You can find the same list in any number of commencement speeches; the difference is that he had spent three decades in fibers, fluorine and polymers before saying it, and by the time he said it he had already left the industry.

On March 3, 2011, while still chief executive, he and his wife Rachel, both BYU graduates, gave $10 million to endow the Weidman Center for Global Leadership in the Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology, housed in the Clyde Building. The premise matched the business he ran, which sold most of its output outside North America. His statement at the time: "Today's engineering and technical talent must be capable of operating on a global stage, leading multi-cultural teams and creating new markets." BYU's release noted that nearly 70 percent of the college's 3,440 engineering students already spoke a second language, most of them from missions, and that the college was sending more than a hundred abroad each year. The Weidmans had sat on BYU's President's Leadership Council since 2009, and the gift was paid in full at the announcement, so the center opened endowed rather than pledged. The college said it would hire a director to build the overseas placements.

• National Advisory Council, Marriott School of Business, BYU
• Advancement council, Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology, BYU
• Board member, The Conservation Fund and The Vanishing Cultures Project

In 2013, a year after leaving Celanese, he and Rachel were called to preside over the California Los Angeles Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a three-year assignment that ended in 2016. They went from there to the presidency of the Provo Missionary Training Center, and he then took a staff role as director of missionary effectiveness in the Church's Missionary Department. By December 2024 the Church News was introducing him on its podcast as the department's managing director, working with what he described as several thousand professionals on curriculum, training-center instruction and the process by which missionaries are assigned. That is a larger organisation than some of the businesses in the table above. The record does not say what he is paid for it.