Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
29 published records
01 / belief
“Since those are preorders, I imagine they can't quite use that. I think you have to be very careful in how you spend that $80 million.”
02 / belief
“I think that's an important piece of upgrade here which is the SPAC vehicle but the insider as of the SPAC and the SPAC shareholders acquired 50% of the company.”
03 / uncertainty
“I don't know exactly what the narrative they sold to Wall Street or talked about internally was, but those three eras of the company make a lot of sense to me.”
04 / belief
“I think the big one, it’s been 16 years and still, there has not been a passenger flight.”
05 / belief
“The idea of when you know you're early to a market, having no shame about sort of passing, then coming back and saying, nope, still lots of runway ahead, I think that's an important one and one not to be missed.”
06 / commitment
“If I am going to spend $250,000 to go and do four days, it better feel like Disneyland the entire time, Disneyland in space; that is what you should be promising me for this price tag.”
07 / belief
“What you can basically do is go put the link in the show notes, you can go to their website, you can fill out a form, I think you can put your credit card information in and put down a thousand dollars and say, put me in line and contact me when I can pay.”
08 / belief
“In September of 2014, Branson goes on David Letterman, he says, we’re so close, I think we’re going to have the first passenger flight in the beginning of next year in February or March of 2015.”
09 / belief
“I would say the merry-go-round, musical chairs, or whatever you want to call it, that's continued.”
10 / uncertainty
“Here we are, it's Monday morning, November 16th, 2020 as we're recording this and they announce this morning that that flight from Spaceport America is now delayed indefinitely supposedly due to new guidelines from the New Mexico Department of Health to disrupt the spread of Covid-19 which makes sense that very well could happen. I don't know what the New Mexico new governments are.”
11 / uncertainty
“One other classic Acquired theme that I’ll pull out here is this $875 million valuation, I don’t know what discounted cash flow you do to arrive at this company being worth that.”
12 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if that was part of what was behind the acquisition, but certainly it was a few years later after that that Burt retired.”
13 / uncertainty
“Indeed. I don't know the actual story of how they got introduced. I wonder if Hedosophia and Ian had something to do with it, given that they're based in the UK, as is Branson, of course.”
14 / belief
“I think Branson actually got a start in the magazine industry, then moved into the music industry with Virgin Records, and then retail with Virgin Megastore.”
15 / belief
“When we think about that $5 million rent a year, that's 40 years to just pay back the construction costs.”
16 / belief
“There’s actually quite a cool story that I think that you hear about how they fund about half of it, but the biggest donor ends up being the Ansari family, which is a super cool story on its own.”
17 / belief
“I think to run this playbook, you have to have something that is so sexy that people are going to want to do it.”
18 / belief
“I think at the end of the day, the biggest thing though and why this has traded so well is there's just no other way or very few other ways for people who don't have access to venture capital as an asset class to make these kinds of bets.”
19 / belief
“Oh yeah. I think Facebook won. They partnered with HTC to make a Facebook-specific phone.”
20 / evaluation
“Normally, when winged things come back down—think the X-15 or the Space Shuttle—it needs an incredible amount of heat shielding because these things go crazy fast in the atmosphere.”
21 / evaluation
“He designed the record-breaking Voyager aircraft, which, for folks who have been to the Air and Space Museum in Washington—it’s hanging there (I think) right in the atrium when you walk in—in 1986 was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, which is just incredible.”
22 / evaluation
“We’re going to go back to 1919 and the announcement of the Orteig Prize, which was a $25,000 prize—that’s backed by the Orteig family, I believe, is behind it—for anyone who could fly a plane, an air vehicle nonstop from New York City to Paris or vice-versa.”
23 / evaluation
“I’m not sure this was the intention behind it but all these prizes since then have realized you get an amazing amount of leverage on your dollar. This $25,000 prize (I think) had $400,000 poured into the research and development by all the different teams who are competing for it, so not a bad return there if you had to go to raise that $400,000 100 years ago by yourself.”
24 / evaluation
“Of course, there's way more losers because if you don't win the prize then you spent your millions trying to achieve something, not only did you fail, but you also didn't win the prize to get reimbursed for your costs.”
25 / evaluation
“A big component of that (I think) is SpaceX’s strategy to go get those government contracts and basically have an enormous amount of capital in the form of revenue from government customers to launch satellites.”
26 / recommendation
“What they have done because they need to know as a business is their demand for this thing and if there's a continuing demand, are our marketing efforts working.”
27 / evaluation
“I remember, of course I didn't really remember before for the Virgin Galactic announcement when it was just a SPAC and they didn't know what they were going to buy because that wasn't well marketed.”
28 / prediction
“We also thought it would be very timely because, in the next week, Virgin Galactic expected to make their first flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico, followed by next year in early 2021, Sir Richard Branson himself flying on their first commercial trip.”
29 / evaluation
“He enters the Saudi consulate in Turkey and never comes out. It is assumed and very likely that he was murdered by the Saudi government inside the consulate, which, of course, (a) is just horribly, but also (b) for the tech industry, specifically causes all sorts of problems because there’s so much Saudi money all over the tech industry at this point, and this is a major international event.”