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
68 published records
01 / belief
“I also think that even as we're heading into a more depressed macro environment in the past few years, I suspect Porsche will be more resilient in their growth than other luxury brand manufacturers.”
02 / commitment
“If you would like to come deeper into the Acquired kitchen, you should become an LP, where we will, at least once a season, have you help us select one of the episodes, in fact, completely defer to you to select one of the episodes.”
03 / commitment
“Up until 2008 and 2009, which we will get to much later in the episode, that is the company that makes Porsches.”
04 / belief
“I think the best I could figure out is that Piech was not happy with the then current CEO of Volkswagen, and was looking for a way to get his first successor out.”
05 / belief
“Brand, scale economies enabling the SUV line, I think that was a good one. There's not really counter positioning, I don't think.”
06 / belief
“The broader universe of BMW and Mercedes, all the Japanese brands, Tesla, et cetera, in America, all the Ford brands, the Chevy brands, I think Porsche is very well-positioned.”
07 / uncertainty
“Wiedeking, I don't know how much this was his thinking all along, or that he was just emboldened by the success of the Boxster.”
08 / belief
“Once you reach that level, that's when you have real brand power. I think Porsche is at that level.”
09 / belief
“I suspect in the next couple of years, they will come out with the next supercar, which will look like this.”
10 / belief
“I could not think of any other model, I believe the original Beetle is likely the single longest-produced and largest both in terms of length of time and number of units produced of a single generation model of car.”
11 / belief
“I think probably because development started about when they started Mission E, and that was in 2015, and sedans were still a big part of the market.”
12 / belief
“In 1931, he starts a consulting firm to advise other car companies, not Daimler Benz, but other car companies in Germany, Europe, and I think in America, too, on their designs, do some work for them, and maybe even design cars for them.”
13 / uncertainty
“Totally. They invented it all, and now they're like, electric, I don't know. They're still waiting and seeing electric.”
14 / belief
“I'm speculating here, but I suspect Ferry and Louise didn't have a lot of acrimony over.”
15 / belief
“I believe, certainly to the public and probably also to the families, Wiedeking positions this as like, hey, we're deepening the partnership.”
16 / belief
“When you're earning $40 billion of revenue, yes, that's a great business. I think I'd go seven again on profitability.”
17 / belief
“I think a lot of people, if you were to mention a sports car, they would say the 911.”
18 / commitment
“I will have to be for something else, though. It can't be for racing. It's something else related to the cars.”
19 / belief
“Here's the nail in the coffin, in my opinion, argument on is it a separate company or not.”
20 / belief
“I think Wiedeking's thought was, the entry level Porsche has always been looked at as a second class citizen like Fuhrmann literally said, which was true.”
21 / belief
“The next crop of supercars will probably be full electric. That transition, I think, is going to be more controversial.”
22 / belief
“Almost zero. I believe, also at that time, they didn't have any debt. Truly, the markets believed that Porsche was worth nothing.”
23 / belief
“I think he said something like, there were still tensions, but we could go to each other's birthdays again, something like that.”
24 / uncertainty
“The Koreans have been around for 25 years, and there's no emotional attachment to any of those cars, even the older ones. I don't know.”
25 / uncertainty
“Volkswagens got out either like, we don't know what the hell to do with this thing.”
26 / belief
“Doug, what you're alluding to, this is the Porsche Boxster, which becomes a huge success. I think the reason for it is that it genuinely is.”
27 / belief
“I think there were just a lot of wealthy people out there and a lot of status-focused people that were like, yeah, there's an SUV I can spend $100,000 on.”
28 / commitment
“We're going to talk about all of the amazing things that this guy creates, but we also got to state this upfront—this is as good place as any—Ferdinand Porsche and many other folks in the family and in the early Porsche and Volkswagen (as we will see) days, were also huge Nazis.”
29 / belief
“I think Ferdinand Piech took over as CEO of the whole VW Group, I believe, in the same year that Wiedeking became CEO of Porsche in 1993.”
30 / belief
“I think you're right that scale economies enable them to be in the SUV business, which has great margins.”
31 / belief
“I suspect most of these cases, though, to take advantage of it, you would have had to have been insane.”
32 / belief
“I think for a long time, that expressed itself in reliability of Porsches relative to other luxury car manufacturers.”
33 / belief
“I think you have a video where you say, the Cayman GT4 RS, which is the Cayman and the Boxster are the same, it's the same lineage we're talking about here, is the best modern Porsche.”
34 / belief
“From doing the research now, I think a large part of the intention of it was to really target the China market. It became successful globally, too, but I think the Panamera and the Cayenne too really helped Porsche enter China.”
35 / uncertainty
“How many of those SUV customers are leasing and don't really care if things stays reliable? I don't know.”
36 / commitment
“We will pay you for all cars that we make, every Beatle, regardless of whether you distribute it or not.”
37 / uncertainty
“I don't know if Ferrari uses the Toyota Production System, but this wasn't new technology at this point in time.”
38 / belief
“I think he enters working within Audi, but then very quickly becomes the head of the Audi brand for Volkswagen.”
39 / belief
“A long time. In 1993, I believe he was chairman until 2015, 2016 maybe? A long time.”
40 / belief
“I think people are a little unsure at first, but then it's super well received within three years.”
41 / commitment
“When I go on vacation, I typically won't stay in a really fancy hotel. My wife and I will just book a condo, an Airbnb, or something.”
42 / belief
“I think there also might have been a technical reason, which is, even though this new Volkswagen was reconstituted as a company, it's only shareholders at this point in time who were the German government.”
43 / belief
“I compared the brand to Rolex earlier. I think from a brand perception, that's true.”
44 / belief
“Let's say they did. This is what we learned from the LVMH episode. Gucci, everything you could think of to kill a brand, they did that.”
45 / uncertainty
“Not everybody was sure that was going to catch on. Electric vehicles, I don't know.”
46 / belief
“I think if it were not for this refounding that we'll talk about in a minute, it would not exist today.”
47 / belief
“The other thing that it's emblematic of, which I think we haven't really talked about yet, of what makes Porsche special, is this unbelievable heritage.”
48 / uncertainty
“Even though we didn't spend that much time on the details of it throughout the history, I don't know that we've covered any other companies, where there is this adjacent activity to the core business of the company that adds so much to the brand value and is worth investing in.”
49 / evaluation
“To keep coming out with other cool stuff, reinvestment of performance, like you said. They used this new factory that Cayenne was built in to also create the supercar, and that was important.”
50 / belief
“If I were to guess, I would say, maybe Bernard Arnault has kick the tires on Ferrari or Lamborghini, but more on licensing agreements than trying to own those businesses, because I just don't think it actually works into the rest of the flywheel in the same way.”
51 / belief
“Honestly, I think five is the highest score you can give in the auto industry on profitability.”
52 / belief
“I think there's an element to being able to own one of the premier luxury companies in the world without having to commingle it with a bunch of other stuff.”
53 / belief
“I think that is a differentiating factor against Ferrari. But obviously, lots of other car brands are in the SUV business.”
54 / belief
“I think about that a lot. I think that will continue to help the values of these cars increase.”
55 / belief
“Prospects going forward, though, for revenue growth, I think are still quite strong.”
56 / belief
“I think the technical thing they got them on, which is why they only had two years, was for the forced labor that they took the imprisoned Jews and forced them to work in the factories.”
57 / commitment
“The deal that they give them does come with an implicit string attached, which is they basically say to Porsche and other companies, we're not really going to give you a license to print money. Instead, we will give you a license to essentially create enterprise value.”
58 / belief
“I think the same is, again, true here at the end of the 80s, but they've still got the 928 and the 944 on the market.”
59 / preference
“I haven't went and got a Porsche SUV. Truthfully, the reason is ridiculous. I don't want to drive things of that name brand on a daily.”
60 / evaluation
“That was the conditions under which Porsche agreed to build the car. They said, we will do it, but we don't want to compete with our cars as a coupe, a sports car, so they built the station wagon, which essentially touched off the high performance station wagon thing, which Audi is still known for to this day more than almost any other thing.”
61 / evaluation
“That deal is an enormously wide-ranging partnership, because you're trading distribution from one side of your business with the ability to create a product on your other side. It's basically merging the companies because it's so massively intertwined now in this partnership, where it's not like, oh, yeah, we partner with them on this one small little thing.”
62 / evaluation
“Porsche, previous to this, had all been rear engines, the 911, the 356, so this was a mid-engine, which was starting to really take hold in the car world as the right design because the engine in the middle is really the perfect balance.”
63 / uncertainty
“I could be wrong on this, but (1) I believe 901 was the name of the engine project that Ferdinand Piech was working on.”
64 / evaluation
“Like you said, it's not a world class powerful fast car, but it elevates the 356 into a much more… You can really achieve a lot more with this than you could with the 356s. This becomes super important from a business side for Porsche because they priced the 911 about 50% higher than they had the 356.”
65 / evaluation
“One thing to provide some context, it's important to keep in mind, the number of sports cars startups happening in Europe at this time was significant, most of which listeners viewers will never really heard of because they all died.”
66 / prediction
“He didn't invent the six-cylinder boxer engine, but the engine that ends up in the 911 that is, still to this day, the model for the 911 engine, comes from him, I think.”
67 / evaluation
“I think to this day, the rivalry between Mercedes-Benz and Porsche has some bad blood there.”
68 / prediction
“I suspect the reason this worked out is because these companies didn't want to be the ones who were distributing all these cars across and doing all this.”