The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After being unceremoniously fired from their previous hardware chain at ages 48 and 35, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank took the words of their New York banker Ken Langone (who had also just accidentally caused their firings) to heart: they

In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corporate raiders circled, salivating over offers to sell off the film library to MGM and offload the parks to hotel operators. But what followed instead was the greatest turnaround in media history under Michael Eisner and Fr

The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it’s the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual property rights to the childhood memories of billions of people (including, likely, all of you) and is a reliable, predictable profitable business. But it didn’t start that way. During Walt’s era, Disney operated like an unhing

Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, on behalf of 50 million clients (including, likely, many of you). And yet Vanguard itself is essentially a communist organization — it has no shareholders, makes no profits, and operates more like REI

Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermès sells that many Birkins and Kellys roughly every 2 years, and Rolex moves that many watches every 3 months. And yet this ultimate luxury product also lives under the same roof with a widely beloved professional sports team

Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history! Their products are comparable to a Hermès Birkin bag in price, luxury status and waitlist times… yet they produce over 1m units / year (roughly 10x annual Birkin production). They make the most unive

Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create incredible company value. For instance: Costco has the cheapest prices of any major retailer in America — and also the wealthiest customer base. They pay their hourly workers 30% above the industry nor

Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality televi

The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays and holidays too) to watch the world’s most beautiful ballet of violence. It generates the most revenue of any sports league globally and sets new records for team valuations each year. But it wasn’t al

Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or video. Hardly the standard-issue playbook for podcasting success! And yet well over a million smart, curious and exceedingly busy humans share their (your!) valuable time with us every month. Why? This is the exact parad

Coca-Cola is… sugar water. And somehow it’s also America, Christmas, summertime, friendship and happiness. Today we tell the story of how The Coca-Cola Company amazingly transmogrified a beverage into emotion in all of our collective psyches, and ALSO built one of the most incredible scale economy businesses of all-time. And oh yeah, there’s also cocaine, WW2, Mad Men, Warren Buffett, James Dean,

Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000+ at normal supermarkets. Their parking lots are famously terrible and they're constantly out of your favorite items. Shoppers brave long lines and cramped aisles while overly-friendly employees in Hawaiian shirts try to

Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). They employed nearly all the top AI talent: Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei — more or less everyone who leads modern AI worked at Google circa 2014. They built the best dedic

It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film” — the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, Barry Diller, and cameos from around the Acquired Cinematic Universe including Christina Cacioppo, Ben Clymer, and Howard Schultz. To watch the full production on any device,

In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its next six years from 2005 to 2011, Google built seven (!) more billion+ user products: Gmail, Maps, Drive and Docs, YouTube, Chrome, Android, and Photos — all either started from scratch internally or acquired as startups that wer

We sit down with Jamie Dimon for a live conversation at Radio City Music Hall, covering the incredible journey from his 1998 firing at Citgroup (where he was widely expected to become CEO) to building the most powerful bank in the world. Today JPMorgan Chase is a juggernaut — the most systemically important non-governmental financial institution in the world, with over twice the market capitalizat

We tell the story of the single greatest business ever created: Google search. From its origins as a Stanford research project called BackRub, Google became the front door to the internet. Today it’s an essential service for over half the world, and one that generates more profit than ANY other US company — more than Apple, Microsoft, or Berkshire Hathaway. But it wasn’t always so obvious. When La

We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listened to our Microsoft episodes and had some thoughts to share — and boy, did he deliver. Steve takes us point-by-point through the original IBM DOS deal that started everything, how he built Microsoft's enterprise business from scra

What if we told you that the most important company in US healthcare was run from a farm in rural Wisconsin? And that farm contained the world’s largest subterranean auditorium, as well as Disneyland—style replicas of Hogwarts and the Emerald City? What if we told you that the person who started, runs and owns this establishment has legally ensured that it will never be sold, never go public and n

When you saw this episode pop up in your feed, you either jumped for joy and hit play immediately (in which case you’re not reading this), or you said “Huh. That’s a surprising episode.” Well, if you’re in group two, boy do we have a treat for you! IPL is the fastest-growing, most dynamic and most disruptive force in the sports industry today… and this may come as a shock to many Americans, but it