David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…This thing's hemorrhaging cash. The government's like, all right, $60 million to take a loss making thing off our hands, okay. Right, hemorrhaging cash, but doing well over $1 billion in revenue. This is a large asset. The Arnault family puts up $15 million. Lazard goes out and rounds up investors and I think invest some of their own balance sheet into this for the other $45 million. Amazingly, this 35-year-old, I don't want to say kid. If you're 35, you're not a kid. But in France at the time, the successful business people, the industrialists of France were not 35. Maybe by the time you were in your 60s, you could run a business like this. Here's this relative kid coming back from America going to take over one of the largest companies in the world. It's crazy. The thing he recognizes here is, again, very Buffett-esque. Even though the financials of this business show one thing doing over a billion in revenue, but doing even more than that in costs, there exists something in here that doesn't really show up on the balance sheet, which is the asset of the Dior brand. If I can do the right things to skinny the business down just to that and then lean into that, how successful could I make Dior once I have it?…

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