George Murnane spent the back half of 2025 raising $138 million for a blank-check company built to buy AI infrastructure, and spent the first half of 2026 as interim chief financial officer of a separate company that has now shed its aviation business to become one. Both jobs report to the same person.
Two Structuring Problems, One Signature
The two efforts look unrelated from a distance. AI Infrastructure Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: AIIA) is a special purpose acquisition company that closed its IPO in October 2025 and is still hunting for a target to buy. Jet.AI Inc. (NASDAQ: JTAI) is an operating company that closed its merger with flyExclusive, Inc. in July 2026, shedding its aviation business to stand alone as an AI data center developer.
One entity is looking for an asset. The other has already become one, having shed the business line it no longer wanted.
George Murnane is interim chief financial officer of Jet.AI and, separately, chief financial officer and a director of AIIA.
He shifted into that Jet.AI role effective Dec. 31, 2025, when Nasdaq’s requirement for a seasoned public-markets CFO prompted a leadership restructuring; Mike Winston, Jet.AI’s Executive Chairman, became interim chief executive officer at the same time, and Murnane is expected to revert to CEO once a permanent CFO is hired.
Both titles put him on the finance side, literally as well as functionally, of a company trying to convert public-market capital into AI infrastructure exposure in the same 12-month window. He’s doing it through two different legal mechanisms.
The Search Vehicle
AIIA raised its money before it had a target. The SPAC closed an upsized initial public offering on Oct. 6, 2025: 13.8 million units sold at $10 apiece for $138 million, with the full amount placed in trust and Maxim Group LLC as sole book-running manager.
The registration statement had been declared effective on Sept. 30, and the units began trading on the NYSE on Oct. 3 under the symbol “AIIA U,” with the underlying Class A ordinary shares and rights set to separate into their own listings, “AIIA” and “AIIA R,” once the offering’s terms allowed it.
Michael Winston is AIIA’s chief executive officer, a separate role from his position as Jet.AI’s Executive Chairman and interim chief executive officer, and Murnane is AIIA’s CFO and a director. The mirroring runs in both directions: Winston is interim CEO at Jet.AI and full CEO at AIIA, while Murnane is interim CFO at Jet.AI and full CFO at AIIA.
“I got in that room because the SPAC structure rewards three things, and I’ve spent three decades doing all three,” Murnane said. “First, identifying a sector being mispriced by generalist capital because the asset complexity exceeds the typical allocator’s evaluation framework.
Second, having operating credibility that lets you assess targets the generalists can’t. Third, having the financial architecture to hold capital efficiently while the right transaction materializes.”
The third point describes AIIA’s current state precisely. The trust holds the cash. No acquisition has been announced. “The $138 million we raised at AIIA in October sits in trust precisely because the right asset isn’t obvious yet,” Murnane said. “The SPAC is the instrument designed for that situation.”
The finance background behind that read isn’t new. Murnane priced two convertible note offerings as EVP and Chief Financial Officer of Mesa Air Group in the early 2000s, a $75.1 million issue in 2003 and a $100 million issue in 2004, both underwritten on fleet economics that a generalist fixed-income desk would have had trouble evaluating without an operator’s eye.
AIIA’s board hired the same kind of read, applied to data centers instead of regional jets.
The Operating Company That Became the Asset
Jet.AI’s route to the same destination ran through an operating merger rather than a trust account. Under the Amended and Restated Agreement and Plan of Merger and Reorganization dated May 6, 2025, Jet.AI’s aviation business transferred to flyExclusive through a purpose-built entity, Jet.AI SpinCo, Inc., while Jet.AI kept its NASDAQ listing and its AI infrastructure mandate.
The vote to approve that transaction is resolved. At Jet.AI’s reconvened Special Meeting on July 2, 2026, stockholders approved the transaction, with 768,718 shares, about 99% of votes cast, voting in favor, clearing the majority-of-outstanding-shares threshold the merger required.
Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis had both recommended stockholders vote for the deal, and the merger closed on July 13, 2026, with Jet.AI’s aviation assets transferring to flyExclusive the same week.
With the deal closed, Jet.AI keeps none of the charter fleet, jet cards, or fractional operations that got it public in 2023. What remains is a GPU infrastructure and AI cloud services developer with three active North American site projects, exactly the kind of company AIIA’s trust account was built to find or fund.
Where the Two Cap Tables Touch
The two structures overlap financially, and not only in theme. Jet.AI holds a minority-owned investment in AIIA Sponsor Ltd., AIIA’s sponsor entity, an economic interest of roughly 49.9%.
On Jet.AI’s balance sheet as of March 31, 2026, the company’s holding in AIIA was carried at $17.23 million, split between Class A shares and rights valued at $1.35 million and Class B shares valued at $15.88 million. The $17.23 million figure has since moved with AIIA’s own share price, and the current mark-to-market value sits closer to $23 million.
The arithmetic means Jet.AI’s shareholders are exposed to AIIA’s outcome twice over: once through Jet.AI’s direct holding, and once through the fact that the same CFO is running the search for AIIA’s acquisition target.
A deal AIIA signs wouldn’t touch Jet.AI’s balance sheet directly, but it would move the value of a position Jet.AI already carries. It is being evaluated by the same person who is simultaneously trying to make Jet.AI itself into the kind of asset AIIA is searching for.
Two Clocks, Running at Different Speeds
AIIA’s search clock started in October 2025 and is still open. No target has been announced, and the trust structure exists specifically to let the search run until the right deal appears.
Jet.AI’s clock started far earlier and ran far longer: the original merger agreement with flyExclusive was signed Feb. 14, 2025, the amended and restated version followed on May 6, 2025, and flyExclusive’s Form S-4 registration statement was not declared effective until April 30, 2026, more than 14 months after the first agreement.
The shareholder vote that followed was convened and adjourned twice, first from June 11 to June 23 and then to July 2, before stockholders approved the transaction and the merger closed on July 13, 2026.
A CFO managing a fresh, open-ended search mandate at one company was operating on a fundamentally different clock than a CFO closing out a 14-month-old merger at another, and Murnane did both in the same stretch of 2026. The AIIA search still has the luxury of patience that the Jet.AI transaction no longer needed once its vote closed.
Why the Same Person Ends Up in Both Seats
Murnane’s presence in both chairs traces to a specific credential: financial architecture built for asset-heavy, regulated businesses that generalist investors tend to misprice. It starts with nine years in Merrill Lynch’s transportation banking group, where he raised more than $42 billion across upward of 150 transactions in aviation and logistics.
He led the Atlas Air IPO from Merrill Lynch in August 1995, then joined the company as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer once the offering closed.
He holds an MBA, with Distinction, from The Wharton School, and the Mesa notes were not an isolated data point.
He also spent six years as Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Financial Officer of International Airline Support Group working through two restructurings, and the Mesa CFO years that followed round out his prior executive leadership at three other publicly listed companies — Atlas Air, IASG, and Mesa Air Group — credentials that predate AIIA by decades and describe the same underlying skill applied to a different balance sheet each time.
AI infrastructure and regional aviation are different asset classes, but the pricing problem is structurally similar: power procurement, uptime, and the gap between a stabilized and a pre-leased facility are opaque to allocators who have not worked the operating side, the same way fuel exposure, code-share economics, and maintenance reserves were opaque to airline investors who had never run a fleet.
AIIA’s board hired a CFO who had already spent three decades pricing that kind of opacity in a different industry. Jet.AI’s shareholders are now being asked to trust the same read applied to the company’s own transformation.
What the July 2 Vote Resolved
The reconvened meeting on July 2 didn’t resolve AIIA’s side of the ledger. That SPAC still has to find and sign a target before its trust converts into an operating asset, on a timeline that runs independently of Jet.AI’s now-completed transaction.
What the July 2 vote resolved is that Jet.AI finished the transformation Murnane was managing on the other side of his desk: it exited aviation and became the kind of pure-play AI infrastructure company that a generalist SPAC investor might one day recognize as exactly what AIIA was chartered to buy.
Two structuring problems, one signature. As of July 2026, only one of the two is resolved. AIIA’s search continues.
