anon wrote:
per point for the 500 million dollars AMEX paid. So, if AMEX bought 25
billion miles and has 50 million cardholders, that would be 500 miles
per cardholder

Only a small proportion of AMEX's worldwide customer base have chosen the
affinity AMEX card which yields Delta points.

One would have to know more about the relationship between Amex and Delta to
know how many cardholders are involved, and what their average spending per
years is and this how long AMEX expects this bank of points to last until AMEX
needs to buy more points.

Having such a big bank of points to distribute amy allow Alex to make some
more interesting offers (eg: 10,000 when you join, double the normal airport
allocation campaigns etc).