Who Is Kenneth Chenault? DNC’s Only ‘Business’ Speaker Tuesday Is Former Amex CEO

Chenault is scheduled to speak during the 9 p.m. EDT hour.

Chenault, who spent 17 years as chairman and CEO of American Express—one of just 19 Black chief executives ever at a Fortune 500 company, according to The Washington Post—is now the chairman and managing director of venture capital firm General Catalyst and chairman of fintech Bilt Rewards for home and apartment renters.

He also sits on the board of several other companies, including Airbnb, Berkshire Hathaway, the Harvard Corporation and numerous nonprofits, like the Smithsonian Institution’s Advisory Council for the National Museum of American History and Culture and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Chenault served on former President Barack Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and attended a White House meeting between President Joe Biden and other business executives in October to discuss consumer behavior.

Chenault, along with former Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, led a campaign to defeat restrictive voting law proposals, like a new ID requirement in Georgia for mail-in ballots that critics said could introduce roadblocks to ballot access for minorities, and successfully recruited a roster of big-name companies to join the movement.

Chenault has been an outspoken critic of efforts to deny the 2020 election results, calling them “mind-boggling” during the Forbes Future of Work Summit in 2022, while lamenting the “serious issues with respect to the threats to our democracy.”