This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Holds on Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, I have an extra special guest, David Einhorn, founder of Greenlight Capital. What a fascinating investor and what a fascinating career David has had.
He came to public attention for shorting, probably most famously Lehman Brothers about eight months before the company went bankrupt, but he has very publicly talked about other companies that he thought were either wildly overstating their results or actually engaging in outright fraud. He has put together an amazing track record at Greenlight in the middle two and tens.
The performance at the fun flagged, which sort of set him back hunting for what was going wrong with his style of value investing, and he came to some really fascinating conclusions which led him to change how they approached investing. And since that happens, I don't know, about four or five years ago, the fund has been putting up great numbers, outperforming, doing really really well. It's kind of rare to not only find somebody whose variant perspective has allowed him to
make some tremendous and successful investments. Early in their career, but when the world changed, they figured out they had a change, also made those adjustments, and did so successfully. I thought this conversation was absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also with no further ado, my discussion with Green Light Capitals. David Einhorn, thank you so much.
I'm excited to be here, bab.
I've been looking forward to this for a long time. You and I had met way back when You've been one of the people that I've really been enthusiastic about getting here. So I'm thrilled you're year. Let's start out talking a little bit about your background. You graduate from Cornell Suma cum laude with distinction of ply Beta Kappa, all the good stuff. What'd you study there? What was the original career plan?
I studied government. I was a government major. And the thing with me is that I don't really think too far out into the future. What I just try to do is do a really good job whereever I'm doing when i'm doing it, and figure that that will just create good options for me going forward. So in high school, I didn't worry where I'd go to college. I just tried to do well in college. I didn't try to worry about what my career would be. I just figured if I do well, I would be able to be
presented with good options. So I didn't even begin thinking about my career really until my senior year, and at that point I decided what I really wanted to do was be a PhD in economics. So I applied to half a dozen of the best programs. I got rejected at all of them, really, and that gave me an opportunity to enter the job market. So then I just started interviewing with companies as they came on the on campus recruiting to see what I could find. I interviewed
with the CIA. I interviewed with car Guilt they could put me running a grain elevator, Gosh knows where. I interviewed with consulting companies and banking companies. I interviewed with
some airlines. I interviewed with just whatever was coming on to campus, and eventually I got a job offer at Donaldson Lufkin Jenrett, which is no longer here, but it was an investment bank of some note at the time, and I joined their two year analyst programs so I get the full benefit of knowing what happened and hindsight bias, But I have a fairly good sense of you and your personality, and I know what DLJ was like.
I don't really see that as a great fit.
Oh it wasn't a great fit. It was miserable for me within three weeks of getting there. The one thing you get in college is you have control over your time, and so you study when you want to study, and as long as you get your work done, you know you can do great. And at DLJ, you know they control your time. And I never really I came from the West and in the Midwest where I grew up, like all the dads were home for dinner, not just
my dad, everybody's dad was home for dinner. And we didn't understand this thing about you know, overnights in the office, and you know, if you don't come in on Saturday, don't even think about coming in on Sunday, and all of this kind of stuff. So I didn't really understand what I was signing up for. And by the time I figured it out, I mean it was it was a tough, tough cultural fit for me.
I read somewhere you described it as similar to a frat Hazen.
Well, I was in a fraternity and there was hazing, but it wasn't bad. I actually didn't mind the hazing at all because it was combined with basketball and parties and beer and hanging out and people you want to spend time with. When you have that same behavior, and when they're done hazing you, then they're abusing you over your work and your schedule and the rest of it, well that's not fun at all.
So Siegler Collery and Company was next. Tell us what you did there?
Well, I went to Siegler Collery. I worked for Peter Collery. He was the research oriented of the two partners, and he basically would tell you, here's an idea, Go look at the idea, go figure it out, tell me if
we should invest in it. And I would go and read all the stuff and spend a week getting ready and making spreadsheets and talking to people, and I would give it to Peter and then he'd take it all home the next night that night, come back the next day and ask me fifteen questions and I wouldn't know the answer to any of them, and by the time I progressed the next time, I could answer maybe five of them. And then after that, eventually I could I could figure out how to answer most of the questions.
But it was an amazing opportunity because he would just show me what I should be asking, what I should be looking for, and ultimately I just learned how to do that. Huh.
Really interesting. Then nineteen ninety six you launch green Light Capital.
What were you.
Twenty seven at the time. What gave you the confidence to say, sure, I could raise some money and launch a hedge fund and have my entire income dependent on how well we do. Where did the gumption for that come from?
It came up on very very short notice. You know. I got to the end of nineteen ninety five and I was a little bit disappointed in how the compensation worked out, as was the fellow who was in the office next to me. And we went out to lunch that December one day and said, why don't we just go launch our own thing? And in early January there was a huge snowstorm and we were on the street looking for office space.
And how did you find the process of raising money for a hedge fund when you guys were a bunch of young tucks barely a few years out of school.
I would describe it as nearly impossible.
Really, yeah, and yet you guys still managed to raise enough to launch with a decent pile cap.
We didn't. We raised with with of outside money. We raised about just about one million dollars.
So not a lot of money.
Not a lot of money.
How did you ramp up from there? That that seems like it's tough to make a living trading a million dollars.
Well, the thing was, I didn't really view it as all that risky because I'd had some savings. I'd had you know four you know, small Wall Street bonuses. I had very little living expenses. There was no chance I give this work. Didn't work, I'd be on the street. So I would just go get another job similar to the one that I just left if I needed to. So I just didn't see this as so risky, and it didn't matter if I didn't make very much money.
I didn't expect to make any money right away. But the thing was is we did get to meet a lot of people, and as we began to tell our story and day with zero, they're not going to in bad but as one of the best things my original partner said was in April when we hadn't raised as much money as we thought. He said, we better get started, and I said, why are we going to get started? Well, you know, you're not going to have a three year record until you've been going for three years, so you
may as well get going. And that kind of worked. So as we got going, and then as the initial results just turned out to be, you know, extremely fortunate some of the people that we met with earlier that said, yeah, you know, two young guys. I don't know, but now they're putting up some results. And the results were following from the thesis that we were telling them, here's our style, here's how we implement it. We're going to buy these
five stocks. Then we bought those five stocks, and then they went up, and now we made this money, and here's the next five stocks that we're going to buy. That explaining that process in communication to people built confidence, and one by one they began to give us some capital.
So not that complicated. You went out and said here's our strategy. You executed on the strategy, and when people saw you were doing what you said, suddenly the capital access became a little better. When was it clear, hey, we're going to get through a billion dollars or more. How long did that take?
Yeah, I don't know about a billion dollars. But at the end of the first year we were at ten and at the end of the second year we were at one hundred. And that was our best year ever. We made fifty seven percent now and we have a dinner for our partners every year in January, and I remember going to that partner dinner and in January after our fifty seven percent year, and we announced we were going to close the fund for the time being to
absorb what we were doing. And we had about I don't know, we had about eight or ten tables and I do a presentation PowerPoint in the rest of it, and then you have questions and answers, and what we had essentially was a bloodbath. The partners were raising their hands and saying, you've raised too much money, How are you going to keep these returns up? This is really terrible, And I just couldn't believe, like this dinner didn't go well. It was like one of the worst partner dinners that
we that we ever had. And my answer was is we're probably never going to fifty seven percent again. And it doesn't matter what the amount of the capitol was, like, we just had an incredible it was just a perfect year nineteen ninety seven.
Yeah, there was a big drop in the latter part of the year and then the fast recovery. If you were on the right side of that, you would have done really well. And if you're in the right companies. There were some companies in ninety seven that really screamed high. So you close the fund, when do you reopen the gates to take capital in again?
We reopened I don't know sometime then. Nineteen ninety eight was a tough year. That was the long term capital year, and by the end of the year some people were beginning to redeem because we had six straight down months from like March to September, and so we opened again and we were able to replace the capital that wanted
to leave with new capital that was coming in. Then we stayed open until about two thousand and then in two thousand I don't know, we were maybe around six or seven hundred million at that point, and we closed the fund and then we left it closed until two thousand nineteen. We had four openings where we would say we're open, and we raised a capital around like in a week or like in a month or something like this.
But other than those grounds, we were hard closed for the better part of like nineteen years.
And there's nothing that makes a wealthy investor want in more than a closed fund, right, isn't that the psychology there?
Absolutely? Right now, we're an open fund and it's really hard to convince people to invest.
You want to get more capital, close announce your closing, and they'll be knocking your doors there.
You know, Well, maybe we'll get to that point.
So before we talk a little more about the style and the process at green Light, I have to mention that you've done incredibly well as an amateur poker player. You played in the World Series of Poker finishing is at eighteenth and the Poker Main Event finishing third or do I have that backwards?
Eighteenth in the main event, Yes.
And one of them was a four million in change, the other was six hundred and sixty thousand dollars pot, all of which donated to charity. Tell us a little bit about your interest in poker.
Yeah, Poker's just a hobby. I play it for fun. I enjoy the game, I enjoy the people. So you get some banter and then I like sorting out the card problems and just trying to figure out, like how to manipulate my way through a tournament or just even a game with friends.
Are you playing the cards or playing the person across the table from you both both The obvious question what are the parallels between poker and investing?
There are some There's there's you know, when solving a poker hand, there's things that you know like what cards can you see? And investing there's facts that you know like what was the actual in the press release? What was the financial statements? What do they actually say? Right? And then there's things that you can infer. You know, what do I infer in a poker hand for what's happened? What your behavior been? How what do I think your
bet means or something like this. And then in an investment, what can you infer you know, how did management's tone sound when they were on the conference call, how do they react to particular questions? Or if you're doing research in the field, like what can you find in the field that's not definitive, but what can you adduce from individual facts that lead you to a conclusion? Right? And then there's uncertainty, like what's going to happen next, Like
what is the next card? You don't know what the next card is going to be in a poker hand, and you don't know what the next you know, macro event is going to be in an investment, or what's the next actual development? And then you play those things out to a result and you manage your risk along the way.
Really interesting. Let's talk process. Long term value is a big aspect of what green Light Capital does. Tell us what your decision making process is, like where do the ideas come from, how do you screen them? And how do you figure out we're going to pass on this one but invest in that one?
Right? Our idea finding is very idiosyncratic. We generally start with a narrative. We start with a qualitative assessment. What is it that we think is likely to be misunderstood about something? And if we think something is misunderstood, then perhaps it's misunder misvalued. And since we're looking for narratives as opposed and then do valuation work second as opposed to cheap we don't screen, so we're not looking for quantitative measures like this thing is trading it half a
book value. Let's go figure out why it's a good thing to buy or not. We find we start with, well, what is it that we think that other people are likely to be overlooking about the situation? And if they are in fact overlooking something, and then we deem it to be important, perhaps it's mispriced. And so we're looking for those differences of opinions.
So how do you figure out what the variant perception is?
Meaning?
How do you suss out what's the consensus on a particular co company? And then tease out here's where the misunderstanding is.
Sure, I'll give an example. Why non I do that? You know, about a decade ago, we bought this company. You might have heard of it. It's called Apple. And at the time, Apple was trading at about nine times earnings, and yeah, that seems kind of crazy right now, But at the time we bought Apple at about nine times earnings. The narrative that was out there, the general belief was is they had this thing called an iPhone, and eventually Samsung would compete it away, and the Chinese would compete
it away. And people would look at the builds and say, you know, how much does the memory cost and how much does the processor cost? And hardware companies never make any money for a long period of time, and Apple would eventually go the way the Nokia flip phone went, which was followed by the BlackBerry phone and so on and so forth. So you didn't want to pay a
high multiple for Apple. And our assessment was was that Apple was not just a hardware company, that was actually a software company too, and also services company three and so you really had some blend that was needed between a hardware commodity margin and a software you know, high sustainable margin and a service which is a recurring cash flow stream. And as you bought one Apple product, then
you wanted other Apple products. And then once you had two or three Apple products, you weren't going to switch to another phone because it was, you know, fifteen percent cheaper, because it was too much of a pain to like pourt all of your stuff over. So we thought they were just building a recurring business and it deserves sort
of like a consumer branded multiple. And I made many speeches about this, and nobody cared about it at all, and we held it for I don't know, for a number of years, and eventually the earnings went up twenty five or thirty percent a year and the multiple went from nine to eighteen and we had a We had a great result.
That's really that's really intriguing. So it's narrative. First figure out where it differs from the crowd, and then look at the data to make sure that that above thesis is correct. So I asked this about the longside. How does the process differ when you're looking on the short side.
It doesn't. In the research process, again, we're looking for things that are misunderstood. What is it that we think is true that other people are the consensus or whatnot are overlooking or not putting weight on, or where they're putting too much weight on something that is unimportant, And then we decide whether we think that it's misvalued, and that as a result, whether we think that the risk reward of owning the stock is sufficiently unfavorable that it
makes sense to take a short position. Huh.
Really really interesting. So let's talk a little bit about the workflow between you and the other analysts in the firm. I'm assuming there are other managers as well. Tell us a little bit about how that back and forth works.
First of all, I love how you said you and the other analysts. Yes, because I view myself as an analyst. First, So I am I think that's fantastic. I'm the portfolio manager, and I'm actually the only portfolio manager, But I view my I enjoyed my analyst's job is certainly as much as I enjoy the best.
And let me interrupt and point out that when you've given presentations on not just Apple, but Applied Capital and Lehman Brothers and anybody else I've seen you discuss, you don't sound like a fun manager. You sound like an analyst who's saying, here's my review of the everything but great quarter. Guys, that's what the presentation looks like.
Well, first of all, that's fantastic, But I do have to acknowledge a lot of these presentations come with a lot of help, like these are team efforts. I usually have an analyst who is helping me. I have other people at the firm helping me prepare these these presentations. It's a it's a lot of work to do these things, to do these things correctly, but I really do enjoy it, and I love rolling at my sleeves and getting into the heart of things.
So let's talk a little bit about the team at Greenlight, So how many other analysts are there? How many people are thinking about Hey, this is an interesting story, let's dive into it.
I have six analysts, I have two traders who execute the trades, and we have a field researcher, and that's kind of the investment team.
Field researcher. Yes, just what it sounds. They're out there kicking tires and.
Yes, and finding people to talk to. You know, an analyst will say I need to find an expert about this, and he'll go around LinkedIn or through his network or whatever it is, or are some of these other services and help connect analysts with who that they might need to talk to and help bring them online. Or we'll do proprietary surveys, or we'll do you know what. We will travel around and look.
At things so you have a reputation as a value investor. I'm not sure that really best describes the sort of holistic approach that you guys bring to the table. But I have to ask a question. You found green Light in nineteen ninety six. Does it mean the same thing today to be a value investor that meant twenty thirty years ago.
I think things have changed a lot. I think the idea that we had back then, which a value investor to us means buying something for less than it's worth. So we don't view growth as the opposite of value. We view anti value as the opposite of value. Right, Growth is in our view, a component of value. So if something is growing fast, it's going to be more valuable. So I don't really see that continuity the same way.
But what we've learned over time. You know, when I started in nineteen ninety six, you know, the main thing people would say when we would pitch our services was, well, what do we need another hedge fund for? Right, there's a million guys trying to do what you're doing. In addition to the hedge funds, there were all these mutual funds, and so there were lots and lots of people trying
to pay attention and find undervalued things for customers. And that's changed a lot because the passive world has taken over and the number of active managers is down a lot, and the active long only managers are down a lot, and they still have people paying attention to certain stocks, but there's entire segments now, mostly in the smaller part of the market, where there's literally nobody paying any attention. Like these companies could announce almost anything other than the
sale of the company and nobody would notice. And so we've had to adjust our thinking because our thinking before used to be, if we buy this at this time's earnings, and they're going to do twenty percent better than everybody thinks, and the multiple rerates as a result of that, we're going to do terrifically. And that assumes that we're going to figure out what somebody else is going to buy six months, a year, two years before they come to
that conclusion. But what if those people aren't in business anymore, or to the extent they are in business, they don't have any capital to employ into new ideas. As those situations develop, they fire their staffs. There's way fewer people listening. And the result is is if we buy these things, we're not going to get the same kind of return that we used to get. So what we have to do now is be even more disciplined on price. So we're not buying things at ten times or eleven times earnings.
We're buying things at four times earnings, five times earnings, and we're buying them where they have huge buybacks and we can't count on other long only investors to buy our things. After us, We're going to have to get paid by the company. So we need fifteen twenty percent cash flow type of type of numbers, and if that cash is then being returned to us, we're going to do pretty well over time.
So I'm intrigued by that description, but buried within it is essentially the rise of passive has damaged either price discovery or the reaction to price discovery on the sell side. Is that a fair statement?
Oh, no question. I view the markets as fundamentally broken, like.
The fundamentally broken.
That's a big statement. Yeah, there's there's value is just not a consideration for most investment money that's out there. There's all the machine money and algorithmic money, which is which doesn't have an opinion about value. It has an opinion about price. What is the price going to be in fifteen minutes and I want to be ahead of that or zero day options? What is the price of the S and P or whatever stock you're doing for today, what's it going to be in the next half hour,
two hours, three hours. Those are opinions about price. Those are not opinions about value. Passive investors have no opinion about value. They're going to assume everybody else has done the work right. And then you have all of what's left of active management, and so much of it the value industry has gotten completely annihilated. So if you have a situation where money is moved from active to passive. When that happens, the value managers get redeemed, the value
stocks go down more. It causes more redemptions of the value managers. It caused those stocks to go down more, right, and all of a sudden, the people or performing are the people who own the overvalued things that are getting the flows from the indexes that are getting the re you take the money out of the value put in the index. They're selling cheap stuff and they're buying whatever the highest multiple most overvalued things are in disproportionate weight.
So then the active managers who participate in that area of the market get flows and they buy even more of that stuff. So what happens is instead of stocks reverting toward value, they actually diverge from value. And that's a change in the market, and it's a structure that means that almost the best way to get your stock to go up is to start by being overvalued.
Huh really interesting. I know value has had a rough I don't know since the financial crisis. Let's go it fifteen years. That's the most cogent explanation I've heard for here's why value hasn't mean reverted since that period. And it's the first time I've heard anyone say you can blame passive in the flows to the biggest company as a reason for that taking place. So let's dive into that a little bit. You go through the twenty tens, value is out of favor. I think your explanation makes sense.
What was it like on you when, Hey, I have this philosophy that's worked for one hundred years, it's not working anymore. How do you manage around that?
It took us a little time to figure out what the dynamic was really. From twenty ten to twenty fourteen, we were fine, but then things got a little tougher in twenty fifteen and we ran through five years where we had two awful years and three mediocre years, and it was very tough. You come in every day, you check your work. You see your stocks are undervalued. Whatever you think your shorts are overvalued. You see the news, the news actually is positive. Your lungs announced great results,
your shorts announced mediocre results. You feel like you should be making money. On the day they announced the earnings, you actually do make money, and then you spend the next ninety days until the next quarterly report losing money again as they kind of go up for a day and then roll kind of back down the hill to a lower level. And it was just super frustrating, and we didn't really understand what was happening. But what was happening was is what I just explained before. There were
just massive redemptions from people's style like ours. And I was always worried about co investors, but co investors usually meant like hedge funds, not like these long only mutual funds, And that's where the real redemptions were. Hedge funds are tiny piece of the market. But I mean there were many, many years where all anybody cared about what's fidelity going to do, what's Capital group going to do, what's you know,
a tiro price going to do. They were getting flows of retirement money on a continued basis, and as that money got redeemed or switched to index right then they had to be selling the things that we were owning, and then the index were buying things that we were probably short, the overvalued things. And we had just a rough go until we figured this out.
And to put some numbers on that industry is about to and have three trillion dollars. Mutual funds are a multiple of that. They're ten x or more. Throw an ETFs and passive and it's even bigger. What was the moment that the aha moment that oh, this is what's going on? How did you figure this out?
You know? I sat down I think it was sometime in early two thousand and nineteen with Michael Green, and he explained what was going on to me better with the index funds, and then I was able to take what he was singing along with a couple of other insights that I had relating to how the market structure was, and I kind of developed this understanding of what was going on.
Huh, really intriguing. I have to assume once you get through that difficult stretch and sort of reframe your perspective and understand what's going on, that has to make you a better investor going forward. How did it change how you approached what you were doing well.
We made two signals it can changes. First one, I kind of explained before, we're not going to buy something at ten times earnings thinking the earnings are going to be fifteen percent better and then think we're going to get a thirteen multiple at the end of that and have made fifty to fifty percent over a year and a half. Like that was our old way of doing it. Because that isn't going to work.
Not enough juice and that squeeze to make it worthwhile.
Well, no, there's just nobody who's going to pay attention to notice that the earnings were fifteen percent better. So if nobody notices, nobody's there, nobody's going to buy. Nobody's going to care. As Peter Coller used to say, a
bargain that remains a bargain is no bargain, right. And so now we can take that to we can realize, well, what has been created from this, which is what's been created is is is there's complete apathy in a certain segment of the market and you no longer have to pay ten times earnings for that type of a situation. I mean that there are ones at ten times earnings and we pass on those But we can find that same type of situation right now at four times earnings
and at five times earnings. And if you pay four or five times earnings and the balance sheet is not levered and they're able to return the cash and buy back ten, fifteen to twenty percent of the stock, in four or five years, they're going to run out of stock or the stock is going to go up. So you're literally counting on the companies to make that happen for you.
So I want to think about this in terms of the tradeable US equities out there. Willshure five thousand is kind of about thirty four hundred names, not quite five thousand. It sounds like you're looking at a huge percentage of those names and pretty much funding their uninvestable I don't know if it's the bottom thousand or fifteen hundred, but they're just too mediocre and underfollowed for it to be interesting to you.
Look, we have always had generally between thirty and sixty percent of our capital and our top five names m H. And we have maybe fifteen or twenty names that make any difference at all in the long part of our portfolio. So we don't need five hundred companies to invest in. We need fifteen.
And you're today. So since that change about five years ago, the numbers of the fund have improved dramatically. You're outperforming, you're putting up good numbers. That's on a concentrated portfolio when it's ten, fifteen, twenty stocks are the drivers? Yes, huh really interesting. Short sellers seem to be an endangered species. Value investors are thrown in the towel. What allows you to stick to your disciplines.
Well, it's actually much more exciting now. Like I mentioned before, in nineteen ninety six, there was just tons of competition, and right now I just feel like there's way fewer people competing with us for ideas trying to do what we're doing, and so I just think the opportunity is actually probably is good or better than than it's ever been, and that energizes me every day to come in and try to find ideas.
So Professor Andrew Lowe over at MIT was discussing the issue of price discovery and the rise of passive and his theory plays very much into what you're saying, which is, as passive attracts more and more assets and people exit things like shorting and value. It creates inefficiencies and suddenly where there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity pre shift, now those opportunities seem to be more and more available. Is that a fair I know he's an academic, but
is that a fair description of what you see going on? Yeah?
No, it really is. The competitors have essentially left the field. And it means, like I said, things that we used to have to pay ten times earnings for we can pay five times earnings for. And you think that the market is very expensive, but our names are not expensive companies. And these aren't terrible companies. They're just companies that are too small and nobody cares, and you know they're not in the sexiest of places.
So your strategies include long, short, and macro as well as hedged. Can you explain what you focus on in the macro portion of the funds or is that something that just colors everything?
No? No, No, Macro is a it's a separate category. And what we do and I'm the macro manager And what I've learned over time is if you have an idea, find the most direct way to express it. So if you want to be bullish about oil prices. Don't buy ten oil stocks. Buy oil. If you have an opinion about interest rates, don't try to buy a bunch of banks, buy sofa futures or sell sofa futures, or buy ten year futures, or whatever it is that you think you
want to do. And I find that if you can make your insight translate most directly into the investment, then at least if you're right or you're wrong, it's going to be for the reasons that you thought. And it's not going to be because you bought some oil company it turned out that they spilled the oil or the well turned dry or something like that. You don't really
have a lot of insight about that. If your view is is there's a great oil prospect and look at this well it's going to be amazing, well, then go ahead buy that oil company because that's what your insight is.
That sounds very different than the way a lot of macro oriented funds invest. They have a big, top down picture and they kind of spread the bets around. Hey, these are the sectors, and these are the areas we think are going to be most affected. If our macro col is right, you're suggesting much more focus, much more precise than that sort of thirty thousand foot view.
Well, I just think like a few years ago, we came to the view that there was going to be a bunch of inflation, and we could have bought a bunch of commodities, but the best thing to do or commodity companies or companies that would benefit from inflation, but the best thing to do was there's a derivative called an inflation swap where you actually got to bet on what will the reported inflation be versus the market expectations, and it's a derivative, and they pay you the difference.
And so if you think, if the market says inflation is going to be two percent over the next year, and you bet on the over effectively, and then it turns out that it's six percent, well you make four points times you're notional. And it doesn't matter what anybody's opinion is, because the CPI is the CPI and that's what defines the bet. So you don't even have to figure out what market sentiment is going to be or what other investors are going to do. It just realizes
all the way through. And so I always find if we can find a direct way to express an opinion. That's better than an indirect way.
Huh. Very interesting. Let's talk about shorting, which is really what made your name way back when it seems especially challenging these days, when the markets have been going up as much as they have last year and twenty and twenty one short funds are disappearing. How do you think about shorting today and how different is it now than the days of Allied Capital and and Lehman Brothers.
Yeah, shorting is very difficult. You know, a couple of years ago we had a great year shorting. Last year was not a good year shorting for us. You know, a lot of the absence of market participants figuring out what things are worth translates into more difficulty in shorting because value it's just not a consideration for so many investment strategies or so many investors. I mean, like all the retail investors, not all, but many of them. They
couldn't figure out value even if they wanted to. Many of the professional investors have completely lost their view of what value is. Again, they have opinions about price, but they don't have opinions about value. And the other thing is is the world has become very cynical, and so you know, if a company is like committing fraud, the market has been conditioned well. When they announced the fraud, that's a great time to buy the stock. And that
used to be like the opposite of that. And then you add in that the regulatory infrastructure is essentially gone, like they're.
Gone regulatory not not weekends, just gone exist.
There is no SEC policing corporate behavior, you know, they're not. Look, they used to do real things to companies. They used to go after the management and tell them they can't be directors or officers. They used to, you know, and for for a while they would, you know, they would they would find some companies. Occasionally they would make people even like, oh, well we'll just improve the disclosure, restate
the financials, stuff like that. Like these things don't don't happen anymore, like they've did.
They yell at Elon Musk for smoking weed on Joe Rogan's show.
Or I don't know, I don't think that. I don't think it was the SEC with that. What happened with the SEC was last year there was a story that there was a whistleblower who sent a letter to the SEC said there's massive accounting fraud at Tesla, and I have twenty thousand documents I'd love to show you. And the SEC didn't even bother to follow up with the whistleblower. Wow. So that that's kind of where we're at.
Wow, that's a huge, huge statement. The regulators are not doing their job. Do you think there's appreciably more fraud in corporate statements today than what we saw twenty years ago?
Right? Well, let me just say it's not like the SEC is completely gone. Like, if you have some inside information, you tip off your brother in law and he makes fifty thousand dollars, they're going to find that and come down a ton of bricks on that. What all kinds of regulations they want to deal with, like the hedge
fund industry and the rest of it. They're doing stuff in crypto and things like this, But in terms of their basic policing of financial statements, financial disclosures, corporate behavior, that's where the SEC has They've essentially stopped they're what they're doing there unless the company completely goes to bankruptcy, and once the bankruptcy has happened, possibly they will look at it.
That's a little little too late to help out the investors involved.
I don't think they view that as their role because they're The concern is is if they come in and do something to you know, before the money has been lost, that might make the stock go down a few percent that day, and then they'll be blamed because then they'll have helped cause investors to have lost money, and they don't want that responsibility.
So let's talk about a little more about those financial statements. There are four large accounting firms that do the vast majority of the orderling for most of the biggest companies in the US, and they're hired and paid by those companies. I've always wondered that seems to be a little bit of an incestuous relationship. Kind of reminds me back on the rating companies SMP and Moody's being paid by the
bonds underwriters, which wasn't how it always was. It sounds like you're implying that the entire system for identifying, policing, and punishing fraud before a company runs into trouble is not working.
Look, most people in business who are running companies try to conduct their business basically honestly, so they're they're they're selling their product, they're developing their product, they're paying their people, they're they're recording their books. The auditors come in, they're trying to show them the right results. Things work out
pretty good. The question is is for the handful that are that don't view the world that way, that want to take advantage of the system and you know, fake it or lie or cheat or whatever that is they want to do. And for those companies, there's there's probably that they can probably get away with what they want to.
And at one point in time, the regulators were aggressively policing that and that seems to have faded.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Huh, really really fascinating. So so, so let's talk about something related. You do these wonderful post mortems in your quarterly letters. It's kind of legendary. Here's what went right with this trade, here's what went wrong. Here's why this sector did well or poorly, or why this stock did or didn't work out. Explain what goes into putting these letters together together. It reminds me a little bit of the presentations you do.
Like the quarter letters is something I enjoy doing. I start thinking about it maybe a month before the quarter ends, like what themes are going on in the world that I might want to talk about. And then sometime after the quarter I get some information about like how we did in the market and what stocks helped us and the rest of it. And then I write a letter and I write the first draft. The first draft is
what I want to say. It's unedited and unfiltered, and then I pass it off to the team and they fill in the holes and then they help correct me about things maybe that I shouldn't say, and it gets edited down through a few cycles. But in terms of the post mortems, I've always been like, you know, if
something goes great, explain why it went great. If it didn't go well and we lost money on it, just say so, if we do a really, really good job, we're going to be wrong thirty five percent of the time, right, right, So what's the shame in writing in a letter we invested in this particular stock and it didn't work out the way that we wanted it to and we lost a whole bunch of money. It's in the result anyway, so you may as well describe it.
Huh, that's really interesting. So I know what your presentations are, like, I know what the quarterly letter is, like, what's a typical day like for you at Greenlight? What happens on a random Wednesday?
You know, the great thing about this business is every day you wake up and you just don't know what you're going to get.
You.
You know, you have things that are on your schedule, Oh, this company's going to announce earnings, or you're going to talk to this analyst, or you're going to talk to this management team or whatever it is. And you have a few things that are on your calendar, and then
you have the rest of the day. And the rest of the day is dealing with the incoming email, it's dealing with the news, it's dealing with developments that you did in particular really expect and deciding if there's anything that you need to research further or trade or do, and so you know, you just you know, you never know what you're going to get on any particular day, and that's what makes it so exciting.
Huh, really really interesting. In your most recent met letter, you mentioned the FED did they do a good job on inflation? What sort of grade would you give them for how well they've handled the entire post COVID era.
Well, I don't know how to award a grade. That's I'm not the professor, and I'm not here to grade the FED. I would observe that they've done some things very well. You know, they created a stability at the bottom of the crisis. They provided liquidity, they didn't let
lots of things go bankrupt and so forth. Now there's a moral hazard that comes from that, because you condition people to think that things won't be allowed to go bankrupt, and essentially you're socializing a lot of risk effectively onto the national balance sheet. Then they had the period of pretending that there wasn't going to be any inflation, no matter how much money that they printed, and then when that became evident, they spent a long time explaining that
it was transitory. And then they finally decided that maybe it wasn't transitory and they should do something about it. And then they decided after none of it was transitory, it turned out that some of it was transitory, and
now it's rolling itself back down. The basic thing with the FED, I think is they don't seem to have I disagree with their view relating to the relationship between interest rates and the economy and inflation and what they're actually doing, because I believe that when rates get low below a certain amount, they actually slow down the economy by lowering them further and when so as a result, I had this thesis called I called it the jelly
donut monetary policy. Where the first jelly donut tastes great, but the twenty fifth jelly donut, you're not really helping yourself anymore. And so you had these emergency fed policies, and that in an emergency, that makes sense. But then after the emergency passes, they kept the policies and you kept rates at zero for like some really long period of time, and it was essentially just like giving a
diabetic person more jelly donuts. Since the economy had a very gradual and slow recovery, and now as they had the inflation and the rates have come back up, they thought that they would be slowing the economy, but they're actually strengthening the economy higher rates getting off the zero bound. Not if you moved rates from five to ten, it would certainly slow the economy, but from zero to five
it actually strengthens the economy. I think that's why we have this really strong GDP growth that is that is persisting right now. I think it's surprised a lot of people, and so I think it's really weird now that everybody
thinks that they're going to lower rates. Things are pretty good, like employment is really pretty full right now, and the economy is kind of humming along, and I think the idea that they're going to rush back to really lower rates, and they may do it right, but I don't think that they're really going to to help anybody, you know, by by doing so.
The argument, the best argument I've seen anyway, for lower rates is, hey, you have all these people with three and four percent mortgages. We've had a wild shortfall in home construction in the twenty tens following the financial crisis. I know you were a big fan of the home builders. Certainly worked out well given the shortfall. And if we want to get some supply to the market, you have
everybody frozen in place with four percent mortgages. You got to get mortgages down from seven to at least low sixes or high fives, and all that supply will come out, and therefore inflation will come down in the housing sector. Do you buy that sort of analyst or economist commentary that that's what's going to drive rates lower.
Well, a couple of things. First of all, housing prices off the tenure. It doesn't price off the Fed funds. So if the Fed Funds goes from five and something to three and something like everybody thinks that it's going to do, it's not clear that that's going to move the ten year rate at all.
The ten year place, right, we went from just about five percent to.
Three eight or so great and the Fed Funds hasn't even moved yet, right, So it's not clear that these two rates correlate one hundred percent. And so you could even have a situation where you lower the rates and the inflation starts coming back and it causes the long rates to go up. It wouldn't surprise me at all, you know, relating to the housing. I mean, I'm the chairman of a homebuilder. It's Green Brick Partners, and we're building houses as fast as we can. There's a ton
of demand for the houses. The rates are. I mean, sure, we'd love lower rates to get people's monthly payments down a little bit. I mean that would be great, but it doesn't really matter. There's plenty of demand. The market is very very strong for us, and so you know, we're we're limited by how fast can we build the houses, and that's terrific.
So it's interesting how you discuss variant perception in various acre issues, in various stocks. It seems like the consensus for what the Fed's going to do and what the economy is going to do more broadly has been so wrong for so long. When you're looking at everybody predicting both the recession for two years and getting it wrong and FED cuts for two years and getting it wrong, how do you think about that in terms of analyzing the FED and what that means to deploying capital.
Sure, look, I think that the economy is strong. I don't think we are in a recession. I don't think we're about to be in a recession. And so as a result, I'm still more worried that if they lower rates a whole bunch, they'll get the inflation to come back. So I'm still long inflation, and I kind of don't think we're going to see anywhere near as many FED
cuts as people are talking about this year. You know, it's kind of funny people often look at just like the wrong thing or are they look at they find something very irrelevant and they spend a lot of time on it. Like recently, you know, it came out that the federal government was gonna borrow like fifty billion dollars less this quarter. So they're only gonna borrow seven hundred billion instead of seven hundred and fifty billion and.
Pass on the savings to you.
You know, it's it's it's fantastic. And so there's a lot of enthusiasm for like a data point, and this is like the world looking for data points, but they're missing like it's a forest for trees, Like who really cares if they're borrowing seven hundred billion or seven hundred and fifty billion. They're borrowing so much money that you just have to look at this and go like, where's three trillion dollars gonna go to lend to the Fed this year? Where's three or four trillion to go next
next time? So if you just take a step back and you say, like how sustainable is this and where is all of this money gonna come from? You realize, like, instead of being enthusiastic for hey, they're gonna borrow fifty billion less is if that's going to make all of the difference in the world. Hey, we could we can sell seven hundred billion of bonds, but we can't sell seven hundred and fifty Like this is completely strange to me.
And I think as you, as the market looks at it, over the course of the year, we're gonna at some point get back to the point where they're saying, you know, we're really borrowing, maybe more than more than we should. And when you talk to people in Congress, like they have no plans to do anything about this, Like it's not even like there's an intermediate plan for fiscal responsibility.
So the idea that the market is focused on fifty billion here they're of incremental treasury borrowings or how many ten year bonds they're going to sell, or how many thirtyer bonds. What it is is underneath that is an acknowledgment that there's a big problem, because otherwise they wouldn't be focused on it. But they're distracting from the problem by trying to find like a second derivative incremental data point.
And I think that the easier thing to do is to keep the eye on the bigger picture, which should play itself out, maybe over the more intermediate term.
So here's the pushback to the to the deficit challenge. You know, we're not that far apart in age. My entire adult life, I've been told deficits are a problem. They're going to cause inflation, destroy the dollar, crowd out private investments. None of that seems to have happened over the past couple of decades. Do we really need to make the deficit our biggest priority? Tell us what the risk factors are from that.
Well, we can't make the deficit our biggest priority. It's our biggest problem. Like Congress can't do anything about this. If you talk to a congress person and say or a Senator and say, well, what are you going to do about the deficit? Like the amount of change that would need to happen to move the needle, it's kind of almost like a waste of time because nobody's willing to make the major major type of tax increases or
the major major types of spending cuts. You know, they're willing to like nickel and dime away at the other side's constituency. So the Republicans are willing to stick it to the Democrat voters a little bit. The Democrats are willing to stick it to the Republican voters a little bit. But at the end of the day, like there's nobody who's serious about it. It's more like, well, it's unsustainable, and we're going to go up the roller coaster and at some point it's going to go down, and then
we're going to deal with it then. And what is that crisis going to look like? I don't know what that crisis is going to look like. And I know this has been a long time building, but it's going
up at an accelerating pace. I mean, we're now well over one hundred percent debt to GDP, right, So if interest rates are four percent or something like that, you're paying out four percent or more of GDP in interest, right, And so you're paying out a big percentage of your tax collections in debt service, even before you get to what you actually want to have. And you're at a six and a half percent deficit to GDP with full employment, which is something we've never seen before outside of a war.
And so if we have a recession, you know that number is going to get much much worse. And at some point, you know where is the three trillion dollars going to come from. We just talked about the hedge fund industry, the whole hedge fund industry, three trillion dollars. So the government's going to borrow the entire hedge fund industry this year, and then that just tides them over for twenty twenty four. Where's it going to come for
twenty twenty five? Figuring this out to the nearest moment is impossible because it's a question of confidence, it's a reflexivity. It's George Soros's theory, like this is all fine until it's not fine. But when it's not fine, then we're going to have a really interesting.
Problem, really interesting. Let me pivot a little bit and talk about the Einhorn Collaborative. What is that? Why did you start this organization?
The Einhorn Collaborative is my philanthropic effort, and it is a view that we have a crisis of connection, that people are not connecting to one another, that the society is becoming more divided, and that we need to work on bridging people back together.
So that requires stronger relationships, embracing differences. Do we have any general resources going in that direction or is this something that really isn't happening.
Well, it's really interesting because like seventy percent or so of America is not politically polarized. It's just a fifteen percent on the far of each side that get all the attention and drive everybody else crazy. Most people don't care that much and they kind of want to get along. Our efforts are not just political. In fact, they're mostly
not political. They're cultural. We are working on helping mothers bond with their newborn babies, for example, because if you can develop a connection with a newborn baby, between the mom and the baby in a dual kind of way, sure it's great for the mother, but it teaches the baby also how to have a normal relationship with somebody, and then they can take that forward into the rest of their life.
Let's stay with that a second. How does a philanthropy help a mother bond with a baby.
Well, we're literally starting a program where we've done a
lot of research. We've done clinical studies, and essentially, if you teach the mother to hold the baby, you teach the mother to talk to the baby, You teach the mother what to say to a baby, how to get the baby to make eye contact, back and forth, and how when the baby becomes disregulated, you know, crying or whatever it is, how do you regulate back and calm And once you learn to calm yourself, and once the mother learns to calm the baby, and sometimes actually the
baby calms the mother. By creating this kind of dual relationship, you wind up with a healthy relationship between the mother and the baby, which they're then both able to take out positively into the rest of their lives.
Huh, that's really interesting. What other work does the collaborative do? Where else do you focus?
We focus on what we call that bonding. We call another aspect of what we're doing, bridging. That's where we're
trying to bridge across difference in communities. We're getting some people together of different religions or different political persuasions or different cultural views and giving them opportunities to experience things together, whether it's service, whether it's dinner, it's going to the church of the different religion, or going to the mosque of the different religion or the synagogue, and creating you know, bonding between religious groups and so forth.
How do you measure success in these different areas? How can you tell, Hey, the philanthropic capital we're putting to work is actually having an impact?
Well, well you can because like like in the in the bonding thing I was talking about with them with the babies and the mothers, you can actually follow them on a longitude and no basis and say, how are these people performing? How are these people behaving? How are they you know? Are they healthy? Are they how are their relationships? Do they make friends when they get to middle school and so on and so forth?
You're tracking this over time? Yes, huh, really interesting. Let's stick with philanthropy. You've been very generous to your alma Mada Cornell. We've seen a lot of pushback, especially amongst alums from various IVY leagues to their campuses. You seem to still have a great relationship with Cornell. Well, what do you like that's going on there? What are they doing right and wrong that you Penn and Harvard seems to have dropped the ball on.
Well, I think Cornell. Look, everybody has problems, and Cornell has problems too, And I'm not going to point anything at any of these other universities that I'm not as involved with. My philosophy for this is to try to bring about positive change. I think when you have a crisis, it creates an opportunity for change. And I think that
that you do this internally. You do this by discussing it with the President, You discusseduss it with the Provost, you discuss it with the other trustees, you discuss it with the deans. I've been very involved in many, many conversations, and some things I'm very happy about, and some things I feel like there's a lot more that can be done.
But I believe in trying to work this out through the system and not coming out in a very public way and criticize in the newspaper or on this interview or something like that.
You seem to be very quietly going about bringing positivity to a rancorous debate as opposed to just throwing gasoline on the fire.
I think that's right, and because I believe in bridging, like I believe, you know, people on both sides of this argument think that they're right, and they don't think that they're bad people. Right. No matter which side you're on, you think you're the good guy, right, and so at some level maybe they are, or maybe we've got at least understand it. And then you've got to figure out how to engage in it. And then how is it
that you can find some commonality? What values do we all have in common even if we disagree in important ways about what policies are being being performed or what the you know, what the behavior is and and yes, you do need some base level of societal norm and if you don't have that, you can't have anything. But once you get through that base level, then you can try to figure out how you bring people together. And
sometimes just agreeing to disagree is fine. Right. Another major initiative we have is something that we call the New Pluralists, and the New Pluralist is a funding collaborative. We've gotten twenty two funders of very diverse views, everything from the Cochs to the Hewletts. And what we do is we pool our money and we're working on these cultural problems.
We've created a fund essentially what we do, and then we make grants out into the field, a field builders of people who are doing things to unite and bridge differences.
And so what's interesting is is first you have just the funders figuring out how they can sit at the table together because some of these people don't like each other or they don't like what they do in other areas of whatever it is that they're doing, and they've agreed to come together, and then you put them together, and then you actually have to say, what is it that we have in common that we can fund for the good of the country, right, and then you do
the funding and you get the benefit of that from the good of the country.
That's something to collaboration.
That's a real core effort from the onhearn collaboratives. We've actually kind of got this thing going for the last three years.
So let me ask you a philosophical question. How much of this division amongst different people and you know, actively disliking the other side just stems from a lack of
empathy to people who have different views. It seems like that was something that used to be a little more available in the pre online, pre social media era, and you're trying to get back to that working around what do you do when you look at a Facebook or a TikTok or a Twitter where the vitriol and just the insanity goes off the charts.
You know, I saw a little caption saying like I need to spend more time arguing with strangers on the internet about politics. Like this sounds like a really bad idea to me. I don't really spend very much time myself on these kinds of social media. I don't think that they're helping. In fact, they're probably hurting. It's hard, you know, having some humility makes a lot of sense. And that's like admitting that you're not right about everything
and learning that you're wrong. And you need to spend time with people that you disagree with. You know, if you only spend time with people who agree with you, you don't learn anything. It's the people who you disagree with that can point out your biases and you can notice their biases, and it helps you learn and helps you grow, and it helps you develop your thinking. And so it makes a lot of sense to engage with people that you don't agree.
With, stay out of the echo chamber a little bit, and look for diverse voices. Let's talk about the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. You serve on that board. Tell us a little bit about what you do for them.
Well, for them, mostly I host poker tournaments. Oh really, yeah, because I'm not very good at the science part. Like this is really really hard problem that they're dealing with. I mean, this is a brain disease and there's nothing more complicated than the brain and trying to figure out like how to ameliorate this is really really hard work. But Michael J. Fox has put together the world experts on this, gathered a ton of funding, and is actually
making real important progress. Last year they had a major major breakthrough where they have developed what they call a biomarker, which basically means that they can tap into your back and take out some of your material and figure out whether you're likely to have or maybe even already have Parkinson's and so if you're on the course to it, that means they can identify and diagnose it earlier, which means we can get to treatment faster.
And I'm assuming the poker tournaments were raising a ton of money for them and everybody has a great time.
Though the poker tournaments are best are the best kind of fundraiser because people want to support the cause, but they don't really want to hear all about it for an hour, and so it's way better than these dinners with the PowerPoint presentations and the speeches and the and the stuff like that. I mean we do that too,
and a lot of the things that we support. But poker tournaments are fun because people are just gonna have a great evening and we're going to raise a bunch of money, which is kind of really what we want to do.
And what about the robin Hood Foundation, what are you looking to do there and what's you're involvement with that group?
Well, I've been involved with robin Hood for a long time. I was actually the chair of it for a couple of years, but that ended a while ago. We're onto even more effective chairs than me, which is really which is really great. You know, the Robinhood Foundation is truly remarkable. It's when you talk about measured impact. They measure like
everything that they're doing. But then if you take a step back further and you ask yourself, you look at these I'll just call them blue state big cities and the problems that they have across the country, and you see what's going on in Chicago, and you see what's going on in San Francisco, and you see what's happening in you know, and some of the other major cities. And you look at New York. You know, New York's doing a lot better than a lot of these other cities.
And I think that a lot some of this is from the cumulative effect of the Robin Hood Foundation. Real thing, I'm very very proud to be involved with.
Huh really really quite fascinating. Let's jump to our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests, starting with what have you been either watching or listening to? What's been keeping you entertained?
Entertained? Well, I just finished watching the last season of Fargo, which is deep, and it's dark, and it's fantastic, and it's right there with the previous four seasons. You know, there was the movie a long time ago. Yes, and they've done a series on FX and and and they're fantastic. They get a different cast and a different story each time, and and it's it's it's dark, and I enjoy that.
I have a vivid recollection of the scene of her trying to get rid of the body with the wood chipper and the movie that stays with you a long time. That was pretty dark thing.
Yeah, Well, they've built five seasons since, five different casts, five totally different casts, different stories, but the theme is always the same, you know, the stories told exactly where it is except the names have been changed to you know, protect the survivors and so forth.
So let's talk about your mentors who helped to shape your career.
Yeah, I don't think I ever really had like a single mentor. The closest would have been my boss, Peter Collery when I was at Siegler Collery. But he was really more my boss, I think, and I learned a lot from him. I think I've just taken on knowledge from various people and things that I've observed along the way.
Let's talk about books. What are you reading now and what are some of your favorites.
Well, I read a baseball book every year, usually the baseball perspectus. I read a poker book every year. Last year's was on physical tells, reading people's expressions and figuring all of that out. I don't get to read a lot of books. I'm really maybe three or four books a year at this point.
And mention you read a baseball book every year? Of what went wrong in twenty twenty three for the Mets, and do we have a chance this year? What are you thinking about?
You know? The thing is is it's January, and January is about the season. You really don't think a lot about baseball. It wasn't a great year for the Mets. There's been lots and lots that have been written about it. I'm also a Brewers fan. I'm from Milwaukee, so i still do Brewers, Bucks and Packers, and I'm a little still recovering from the loss to the forty nine ers from a couple of weeks ago.
Our final two questions, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either investing or finance.
My advice for all young people is figure out what you're good at and find something that you can do that plays to your strength. Right, people have strengths and they have weaknesses, and you want to improve your weaknesses. But don't do that at your job. Do that in your social life. Do that for your hobbies. You know, if you want to get physical stronger, go lift weights or something like that if you're not strong. But you know, if you're not strong, don't try to become an athlete
because that doesn't play to your strength. Figure it out. What is it that you are good at where you have the best advantage over other people, Because there's plenty of people who are going to be competing for whatever it is that you are trying to do, so you may as well at least be trying to play to your strength.
And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today you wish you knew thirty or so years ago when you were first starting out.
Well, I guess if I had to pick one thing, I think it's been just the change in the dynamic of the market, the way that it's broken from active and passive and all of the rest of it. And to also just kind of realize that, you know, people act to follow their motivations. If you figure out what the motivations are, you can often understand people's actions. Huh.
Really interesting. Thank you David for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with David Einhorn, President and founder of Greenlight Capital. If you enjoy this conversation, check out any of the five hundred pass discussions we've had over the previous ten years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
Be sure and check out our new podcast at the Money, where each week I speak to an expert for ten minutes about the most important aspect of your money, investing, earning, and spending. That's at the Money. You'll find that in your Master's and Business feed. Sign up for my daily reading list at ridults dot com. Follow me on Twitter at ridults, Follow all of the Bloomberg Family of podcasts at podcast I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps us put these conversations
together each week. Kaylie Lapara is my audio engineer. Attika Valbrunt is my project manager. Anna Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ridolts. You've been listening to Master's Business on Bloomberg Radio.