Charles Elvan Cobb, Jr. (born May 9, 1936) is an American businessman. He is currently the chief executive officer and senior managing director of Cobb Partners, Ltd., an investment firm.[citation needed] He was the chairman and chief executive officer of Arvida Corporation[1][2] and Disney Development Company during the 1970s and 1980s. Arvida was a public company and then a subsidiary of Penn Central Transportation Company and later of The Walt Disney Company.[3]
He has also served as a member of the Walt Disney board of directors and the executive committee of the Disney board. Prior to this, he was the chief operating officer and a director of Penn Central Transportation Corporation, a multi-industry company that had approximately 40,000 employees. He led a leveraged buy-out of Arvida Corporation from Penn Central[4] with the Bass family in Texas and subsequently merged Arvida with Walt Disney. Earlier, he was an investment manager with Dodge & Cox and the chief executive officer of subsidiaries at Kaiser Aluminum.