Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, more than anybody. Lots of troubles and losses. They ran into terrible trouble. They created the wrong kind… they made lots of mistakes. They were lucky to be on the cutting edge of this electric car business. It's way more acceleration than most people. So you have a car with more oomf than most people need. So the young macho male has a real lively car. There are a lot of things, where electric cars really work in some ways that are better! At making a 90-degree turn. You can go right opposite a parallel parking space, you just move the wheels, it turns the wheels 90 degrees and goes in. Nobody's ever done that. If your car goes flat, you could run a hundred miles on three other wheels or soemthing. Do they have better economics, because they don't have nearly as many parts? It's simpler. Have you ever had an investment like that before? I think you've invested something like $270 million that's now worth something like $8 billion in BYD. Well, very few people have an investment […]. That's a venture capital–type investment. It happened to be a thinly-traded public company, and we bought it as a venture capital–type company. But it was a venture capital–type play, and they just put the foot right in the floorboard and played it hard. By the way, both BYD and we tried to talk them out of going into the car business. They were gonna buy a bankrupt car business, and go into the car business. I said that's a graveyard for you, so why would you want to do that? And he paid no attention to us and went right ahead.…

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