Invest Like the Best

“The thing about Trump that I think very few people took advantage of last time is that he's very accessible and very pragmatic... the people who reached out and went and sat with him and shared their ideas, he always listened. And most of the time they were able to achieve outcomes that were very good.”

“Uber versus Lyft. And, you know, there's there's so many examples of winners and losers getting way more pronounced. And a lot of that's strategic decision. A lot of that's leadership, honestly, and execution.”

“with the cost of capital coming back and largely going to persist... you're seeing just winners and losers across industries in ways that we have not seen for a really long time”

“we see this now, I would say, like in the alts space, for example, where these businesses are now, you know, they're all mostly public. And that's like Apollo, correct? Yeah, KKR, or Aries and their ability to offer unparalleled customer service, product innovation, opportunities for talent development, new channels of growth is just it's spinning on its own in terms of this flywheel”

“One is they, at a first brush, are recession-proof. So if people aren't buying luxury fragrances, they're buying hand soap, right? So fragrance is in 90% of the products in your household.”

“So first of all, I'm not as worried about AI as everybody else is in the content creation side. I happen to feel it's going to be a big benefit in production, especially in production planning. With respect to creativity... There's no emotion now. Will they get there? Maybe. It's still a handmade craft.”

“One of the investments I sort of cut my teeth the most on where I first had a lot of success was in the construction equipment rental business. And that is also a Cournot oligopoly.”

“in the case of nicotine, inhaled through a cigarette or a vaping product, Nicotine is incredibly powerful, and the respiratory system is a very fast delivery mechanism. So you get this very rapid stimulation of people's pleasure sensors, and lo and behold, it creates these very strong secondary reinforcers which make people very brand loyal.”

“this is a perfect example of Cournot oligopoly. The number of cruise ships is fixed, and in the short to medium term, so they maximize yield, which basically means they're adjusting price.”

“There's some Austrian guy that owns Red Bull, that is turning down his... he turned down multiple offers where he would have made $20 billion for his 49%.”

“He's founded Citadel, I think 35 years ago. And I think he founded Citadel Securities 23 years ago. And he just said, we've had the most, the best financial years of our entire life in the last 4 years.”

“When there's no cost to spreadsheeting... We just came up with so much more spreadsheeting that you could do. And it's bigger than ever.”

“the previous sort of VC model... was you make a big upfront investment and then you amortize and you get to almost zero marginal cost. That's how software worked. That's not how AI works. The marginal cost is high and you need to cover it.”

“individuals are starting to be able to go into private equity through their wealth management, which didn't used to be a thing.”

“we have a high-level view that all assets are going to get more liquid over time. And so the question is, what's that going to do to returns and what's that going to do to volatility of those returns”

“Our growth vector is just higher because we have a lower cost of capital. We get better talent, we get better companies to go public. We have a $50 trillion debt market. Just amazing tailwinds.”

“Multi-trillion-dollar opportunity to take assets out of the banks into private credit and create tons of liquidity to fund all these growth projects with Germany and France and the rest of the eurozone need to do because they've underspent on lots of infrastructure and defense.”

“There's a really interesting post by Hester Peirce... this post called A Creative and Cooperative Balancing Act argues that maybe blockchain is the path to fix the IPO market, which is provocative.”

“when Deepseek hit and took off... Alibaba made Qwen open source. Xiaomi has a model out now... And Robin Li at Baidu had kept his model proprietary and he said in June it's going to be open source.”

“Yale has announced that they're in the market looking to sell $6 billion of private equity. The fact that Yale is the one doing it is super important”

“huge focus on SaaS, huge focus on all things AI, and huge de-emphasis of consumer-based internet businesses. And so I think that's actually a pretty interesting opportunity where one can be contrarian and we continue to see interesting private opportunities that I think most of the world's not focused on.”

“I'd compare like this phase in like AI models training off of like copyrighted data is like the Napster moment”

“The power of the individual is only going to strengthen in this current culture. There's no doubt about it.”

“Banana Republic is having the best year in probably decades.”

“What makes us feel good? Olive Garden, country music, Applebee's is booming, you know, Banana Republic is having the best year in probably decades.”

“Victoria's Secret is, is right up there too, right? Um, they had an Epstein connection because the founder Les Wexner had one. They had totally lost that kind of connectivity with the customer.”

“We did Affirm, Max Levchin's company... a $20 billion partnership with them where we formed a joint venture with them so they could originate more assets and have more operating leverage.”

“we started doing data centers back in 2017 with, with Airtrunk... which is actually just got bought by Blackstone for, I think, $16 billion or something like that.”

“the wealth channel... they're underexposed to private alternatives relative to, say, a pension fund at, call it, 40% or an endowment at 50%. So at 3 to 5%, that should probably go up.”

“there are some private credit firms that are spectacular. I mean, superior... Firms like Ares or let's say Golub are stellar at what they do and they have great credit cultures. They have really complete teams that deal with underwriting and workouts”

“I can make a pretty strong argument that public companies will actually benefit from the tariff regime. And, you know, again, I'm going to assume that the West Wing is being thoughtful in its analysis and its dealmaking strategy, and they've probably come to a similar conclusion.”

“So I think the bear case on software Hey, I could just use Claude to write my next SAP. We're not losing any sleep over that. Because that's not what software ever was. It was never a technology barrier. It was always a business knowledge barrier.”

“How do you deal when the business model, instead of being the audience reaction to it, is to take a subscription to Prime, whose business model is to get you to buy products on Amazon... They could not care less whether one person or 9 billion people see it.”

“publishing— all publishers— what's happening with Google is just— it is going, you know, they say it goes slow and then it goes fast. It's going fast... If you depend on your life traffic from Google, from search, you're going to be close to extinct if that's what you do.”

“I would approach this, this next super period, uh, in the same way, which would make me very wary of, uh, what now seems to be the cat's meow, which is huge expenditures in areas in which there is no known revenue,”

“now you add this AI part of it, you've now added a humongous COGS, right? Your cost of goods sold in any AI software is really hard and really big.”

“The other end of the spectrum is what Nebius just signed. I'm signing fucking $19 billion to Microsoft.”

“I'm not really a big bull on the accelerator companies, I've never been. Companies make competing with NVIDIA... not a big bull on those kinds of companies.”

“US economy kind of freefalls, right? 'Cause we can't make refrigerators without Taiwanese chips. We can't make cars. We can't make AI data centers.”

“I was pretty bearish Google like 2 years ago, but I'm like super bullish Google... They're waking up on every front. You know, they're taking the TPUs, they're selling them externally.”

“I think Meta's got the cards to potentially like own it all... the next paradigm in human-computer interface is we don't actually have to touch it at all. We tell the AI what we want”

“Oracle is making a massive bet... he signed a $300 billion deal with OpenAI.”

“OpenAI slash its partner spends $50 billion on the data center... $35 goes into NVIDIA. NVIDIA's gross margin is 75%.”

“I'm very bullish on Google, actually.”

“Today, I think that the US still has a decisive lead on most aspects of artificial intelligence, mostly because it has the compute resources here. It has the leading NVIDIA chips and China does not.”

“Chinese companies are really capable, and China's economy has grown by an average of something like 9% over the 20 years, and what has been happening to China's stock market, it's been essentially flat”

“Prices are going way up.”

“If I'm a betting man, first of all, if I'm a betting man, I'm betting on that dude. I bet on him on SpaceX, X, XAI, Twitter.”

“China is fascinating... It's the fastest change in terms of per capita GDP in modern history of any country at scale... tremendous amount of innovation.”

“I know we're going to have a moment where we're all going to wake up and say we've invested too much. I don't know if it's 3 years away or 18 months away. I don't think it's happened yet. For sure it hasn't happened yet.”