High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / belief

Published · transcript-backed

Ben Gilbert: belief

7 Jun 2021 Acquired Berkshire Hathaway Part III

“I think he actually finishes the article citing the most perfect example of arbitraging profits away by over a hundred year period going from pure innovation to sheer commodity, which is the airline industry.”

— Ben Gilbert

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Ben Gilbert
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
7 Jun 2021
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…It’s this analogy at the annual meeting this year too, I think, right? Yup. Just because there is innovation, sure, that's great for the innovator in the short term but for the investor, for the shareholder, that doesn't mean you're going to be able to capture value. You have to be able to create a mote. You have to be able to figure out what about the business creates that durable, competitive advantage so all the prophets don't get arbitraged away. I think he actually finishes the article citing the most perfect example of arbitraging profits away by over a hundred year period going from pure innovation to sheer commodity, which is the airline industry. He highlights, I don't think this is exactly true anymore, but it was true at the point in ‘99 when he wrote it that the sum total if you add up all the profits and subtract all the losses from the whole airline industry since the inception of airlines, it was a loss. Yeah. And then he says, this is sort of gruesome, but I think he ends the article right with saying that he'd like to think that if he could go back in time to was in 1903, and Kitty Hawk, when the Wright brothers flew that he would do capitalists a favor and shoot them down.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Search evidence