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
91 published records
01 / evaluation
“I'm also super excited to do the analysis on this one, David, because the luxury industry is like business strategy bizarro world.”
02 / evaluation
“Brand is that unique attribute that will cause people to pay more for a product because it has a certain name or logo on it.”
03 / belief
“I think he realized that it was worth diluting shareholders to go and make a bunch of acquisitions in order to accomplish that scale.”
04 / belief
“The next chapter after that, which is a whole order of magnitude more, is China, which I think I'll put a pin in for now because I think we can talk about it more as it relates to modern day LVMH.”
05 / belief
“I think some of the reasons why Gucci survives is because even if you don't know Gucci being good in the last 10 years, there are a lot of people alive who recall it being something prestigious.”
06 / belief
“I think that as we talked about a lot earlier in the episode at the holding company level, there is now no doubt in my mind that LVMH has extreme scale economy power.”
07 / belief
“There's also another dimension to this, which maybe you could lump into the advertising economies of scale, but that I think is maybe something a little different, which I would call cultural economies of scale that have come out especially in the social media era.”
08 / belief
“I think at one point, Hermes almost got delisted from the stock markets because there was no longer any trading in the stock.”
09 / belief
“When his grandfather passes away, I think Bernard's 10 or so at this point in time.”
10 / belief
“In particular, I think one innovation that we probably didn't do enough justice in history and facts that Bernard brought to the industry and LVMH brought to the industry, is the professionalization of business management within luxury, partnering with creatives, and that there is an art to the business, too.”
11 / uncertainty
“We're now five-plus hours into recording. I don't know what time this will be in the edited version.”
12 / belief
“Yup, I think that's right. All right. Moving out of playbook and closing our analysis, we're replacing grading.”
13 / belief
“I believe neckties were the first, but women's hosiery, hats, gloves, handbags, you name it, there was a Dior license label out there.”
14 / evaluation
“The fact that that is responsible for a quarter of all revenue and still makes the product that is the best business, I mean fashion and leather goods is 50% of all of LVMH, but half of fashion leather goods is Louis Vuitton, that's not exactly a bear case on the business, but it is interesting to observe.”
15 / belief
“I think one of the most interesting ones is, Bernard had the insight that with scale economies, there are going to be massive profit pools in the luxury industry.”
16 / belief
“I think a lot of it depends on how long Bernard lives. I don't think he's given up the reins anytime soon.”
17 / belief
“I think the calculation for Jay-Z, Beyonce, Rihanna, and anybody of that stature, is not a purely financial one in these things, I don't think anywhere close.”
18 / evaluation
“The fashion line doesn't work, but Fenty beauty is likely doing close to $2 billion in revenue, I think, at this point.”
19 / belief
“I think there was one other bidder. Certainly, the political influence and lobbying from both Arnault and Lazar really helped him get this.”
20 / belief
“I would say he also knows where to find artists. That's been an interesting shift toward celebrities in luxury, where, of course celebrities have distribution, but I think LVMH and a lot of the other companies now are recognizing the dual benefit of working with a celebrity music or film artist because they are a creative person.”
21 / belief
“I think the most compelling argument around why luxury needs to exist is that it is a deeply human thing to signal your standing in the world.”
22 / belief
“Of course, like all the corporate raiders at the time, they carved it up, they sold off all the assets, and literally made billions. I think he made about $5 billion from this.”
23 / belief
“I think what we haven't talked about is Gen Z buying luxury three years to five years earlier than Millennials did, which I think is pretty interesting.”
24 / belief
“I think, again, you can probably look to the car industry as a really clear example of this.”
25 / belief
“His next door neighbor there happens to be a guy named John Kluge, which almost nobody I think listening now will know that name, but at the time, Kluge was the wealthiest person in America.”
26 / uncertainty
“Was he a corporate raider? I don't know. He used corporate raider tactics to acquire control.”
27 / belief
“I suspect that Bernard did have a view that almost nobody else had, which was that both those luxury brands, and particularly, Louis Vuitton and leather good luxury brands could get bigger than anyone imagined, and he was right on that.”
28 / belief
“I think that profit margin, that 25% operating income, is actually depressed because of how forward-looking they are.”
29 / uncertainty
“Jobs supposedly said, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that people are still going to be drinking Dom Perignon champagne in 30 years.”
30 / evaluation
“If you look at Tom Ford and Dom De Sole, that is the right structure to lead a house.”
31 / uncertainty
“I don't know if it was a retiree home, but I imagine this is for snowbirds from the northeast.”
32 / belief
“I think I'd rather do something under my own name than revive this old brand and boost access.”
33 / uncertainty
“I don't know, I think that's a big risk for a celebrity of the stature of a Beyonce to do that.”
34 / belief
“Based on everything I could find in the research, I think Fenty beauty is significantly larger than Kylie Cosmetics at this point.”
35 / belief
“I think he wants to take this concept that he just learned from his neighbor in America and bring it back to France.”
36 / belief
“Unlike other succession battles, which are highly reported—I think the Murdoch family is a great one, people leaking things about each other—this seems ridiculously amicable.”
37 / belief
“The two of them announce, without telling Arnault, and I think without telling Guinness, either, that they're going to break up LVMH.”
38 / belief
“I think the whole succession battle is something that the press wants to exist that isn't real.”
39 / belief
“I think that the press definitely thinks that Delphine is the leading candidate.”
40 / commitment
“Finally then, like you say, in October 2010, it gets announced the CEO at that point in time of Hermes, and makes a very famous comment that you can go look up about Bernard Arnault's intentions that we won't say here on the podcast.”
41 / belief
“A key aspect, I think, of luxury products is that their value and status is durable over time, where so much of fashion is the opposite of that.”
42 / belief
“The best summers in the world, I think we rival Lake Como, but the winters are tough.”
43 / belief
“At the brand level, yeah, but I think the holding company level is interesting and different.”
44 / belief
“If you look at Alexandre's resume, it looks like a lot of yours, listeners. I think that's a really interesting thing to point out.”
45 / belief
“I believe the position was called the royal malletier, I think. It was like a royal appointment.”
46 / observation
“Most companies, the only way to advance is your boss retiring. We're all very fortunate to have worked in, especially in the tech industry, the finance industry, or in businesses, where there are lateral moves to be made all over the place.”
47 / belief
“I can tell you brands, but I cannot tell you any of their products. I think that that's a really interesting difference about selling the dream.”
48 / belief
“I think the way that the leadership of the company talks about them—the durability, the craftsmanship—those are signs of premium objects, not luxury objects.”
49 / belief
“I think that one of the biggest things for me as he just really figured out how to make sure that he owned not only the locations of the value chain, like brands that they were going to accrue to, but the brands in particular that all the profits were going to accrue to.”
50 / belief
“I don't think Louis Vuitton is at all counter-positioned against Hermes. I think the other way around, it definitely is.”
51 / belief
“I think the Kylie Cosmetics and Kylie Jenner paved the way here, and then Fenty has been even more successful than that.”
52 / belief
“I think if you're going to have a really successful creative products company, the creative leaders need to understand business and respect business, and the business leaders need to understand creative and respect creative.”
53 / belief
“The reason I want to do that is because I think the reason we're doing this episode at all was our fascination with brand power.”
54 / belief
“I think a lot of the narrative around LVMH recently has been this like, oh, the succession thing.”
55 / belief
“Do you know how much of Dior he owned at this point? I think at this point, he's formed Groupe Arnault, which is his family office.”
56 / belief
“As part of it, they're going to cancel this ESOP thing. They all agreed in principle on the deal, and Pino's like, I got one more thing I think you're going to like.”
57 / belief
“There's the masstige segment, but then there are also the products that they have that are actually ultra premium rather than being luxury, so people are going to evaluate them on the merits of how useful are they. I think luxury travel is actually ultra premium travel.”
58 / uncertainty
“As Boussac is going down the tubes, they start trying to sell off pieces of the empire, monetize, and do anything they can. I don't know that Boussac really cares about saving the company.”
59 / belief
“Developing vacation homes is the family business. He's like, I think there's an opportunity in the Palm Beach market.”
60 / belief
“All of its multiples are double the rest of the industry. I think LVMH's PE. It actually trades pretty close to a tech company, like big tech, at something like 4½ times sales and 24 times earnings.”
61 / belief
“Lazard goes out and rounds up investors and I think invest some of their own balance sheet into this for the other $45 million.”
62 / belief
“" I think that's the best framing for luxury of anything I found, which is, you really can't think of it as stuff that's expensive.”
63 / belief
“I think he really gets where the power of a luxury brand stems from in the design and manufacturing having a sense of place, origin, and story.”
64 / uncertainty
“Would Jay and Rihanna trust the old stodgy, old Tiffany's, when they said, hey, we want you to be the global face, and we're going to totally blow everything up and appeal to a completely new set of people? I don't know if you do that deal.”
65 / belief
“I suspect most stories involving leverage end in the blow-up, not in the great success.”
66 / belief
“I think that that is the most important thing for luxury brands, which is why when you look at all this stuff that Bernard Arnault has gone out and bought, they're anywhere from the 1300s to the 1800s with some stuff recently, but it's all about selling that this stuff, this brand, this way you're choosing to identify yourself, is part of something much bigger and longer than you, and will stay valuable for a long time in the future.”
67 / belief
“The holding company, Groupe Arnault, gets to go from 37% to about 48% economics, and I think somewhere like 63% of the control of LVMH by basically doing stock swaps.”
68 / belief
“I think about this a lot on Acquired where we're like, wow, yet another very, very unlikely set of circumstances.”
69 / belief
“The Buffett analogy is a good one. I think also, he's like Kluge, but he's also like Murdoch.”
70 / belief
“LVMH says, you know what? I think we're going to make the biggest luxury acquisition of all time.”
71 / uncertainty
“I don't know what those percents are, but they definitely have a class of things that they sell to people who are billionaires.”
72 / belief
“Yup, I think that's right. Lastly, I do think at the group level, a cornered resource power is coming into play.”
73 / uncertainty
“I don't know if both of them ultimately collapse under brand value, but I think there might be an element of cornered resource here in that you think about what's so important for these luxury brands is heritage, provenance, and the physical story of the goods.”
74 / belief
“Even then, they made $700 million and this whole time had been generating more and more and more revenue. I think in 2000, they did $12 billion in revenue.”
75 / belief
“The Boussac entity itself, I think, had been renamed Agache after the Willot initial bankruptcy.”
76 / belief
“Two years later, by 1949, Dior fashions were literally 75% of Paris's fashion exports and 5% of the entire nation's export revenue. I believe to this day, the luxury industry is the largest export of France.”
77 / belief
“There's actually some deeper stuff to all this that I think is worth going into here.”
78 / belief
“To your observation earlier that Bernard realized that luxury groups could be much better businesses than luxury brands, and have completely different methods of profitability and sustainability, I think that was super astute.”
79 / belief
“I think so. Maybe I'm exaggerating with the crappy, but he did not move to America with this idea of getting into luxury.”
80 / belief
“I think the likelihood that that would happen is extremely low, because whatever company is currently managing that brand, would go bankrupt at a certain point, or would change control or whatever.”
81 / belief
“Although, I think if you were to ask him today and he were to be honest, he lost here.”
82 / evaluation
“The other thing that I think he learned from this first transaction is he really discovers the power of what he calls star brands, where if a brand is truly luxury, you are able to generate much higher margins from it, not a little bit, but the whole step change different of margins because you're serving a customer that has very little sensitivity to higher prices.”
83 / evaluation
“You said that $800-ish million, that's the capital that he had come up with through this war chest that he was doing. But the strategy that Arnault and Lazard design here is so brilliant because he retains majority control in each of these entities.”
84 / evaluation
“Racamier and Chevalier are newly reunited in their desire to break up the company, offer Arnault a parting gift of gifting him essentially back Dior perfume so he can reunite his business, and then go on his way. This is where Bernard reveals his true intentions, which is he's coming at the king, not because he wants to steal his scepter or something like that, he wants to be the king.”
85 / evaluation
“When act this way and over time, he won the battle where department stores said, okay, we need your stuff in the stores to bring people in because you're starting to spend all this money on advertising, you're the products that people want, you're the brands they want to associate with, so we have to capitulate.”
86 / evaluation
“Yes. This is very, very self-interested on Lazard's part, but it's actually also, I think, pretty good advice because Guinness is a much larger company and has much bigger financial resources.”
87 / evaluation
“Which is funny because even though both of them detected that there might be activist investors, there's a bunch of their shares being bought up, it's a red herring because in combining, they actually assured their own destruction versus if they had stayed separate.”
88 / evaluation
“This is my favorite weird twist in the story, where Bernard Arnault, who goes on to become this unbelievably wealthy, high taste, high class, high fashion, everyone looks up to him in every walk of life because whatever you're doing, whether you're a rap artist, a champagne maker, or a president, he has something that you want.”
89 / prediction
“There were market inefficiencies, and then Arnault created even more market inefficiencies to make it so that the perfect price discovery of this Boussac empire was not found. But he figures out how to do this over and over again, where he finds things that are much more valuable than the price they will end up selling for because of weird idiosyncratic things in that market and the people that own those assets at that particular time.”
90 / preference
“No matter what crazy, cool clothes they're wearing, a person is singing, or a crazy light show is happening, I will tell you, if you've not watched a fashion show in a long time, go to Louis Vuitton's website and just watch a video of what a show is today.”
91 / prediction
“He says, "I told my team at the time that we will build the first luxury group in the world.”