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Bruce Berkowitz

lines on the record: 97
first: 2024-02-18
most recent: 2024-02-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Enterprise. Duncan family, Mr. Duncan with Alibu is two gas trucks. And he's turned it into a, well, he's passed away now, but the company's a $75 billion enterprise. They basically have critical highway system of getting hydrocarbons from point A to point B. It's gigantic logistics company. They take it, separate. They upgrade, they store, you get it to where it needs to be. And they do it for a fee for a very small fee. And they do it quite honestly, beneficiently. They will help to lead to a cleaner environment. They're very much involved with the company process. And enterprise isn't the only one. But in the substitution of natural gas for coal.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To lighten the load and sanctuate. And when I find other investments, I will start to make them. St. Joe has been a lot of hard work and just seeing the beginnings of progress.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not at all. I mean, I keep selling St. Joe. I've been selling St. Joe for years and years and years. I sell it. It's growing. People have taken money out of the fund. I am now my affiliate. So on about 38% of the fund. So between 38% plus cash in the fund. I mean, I don't find it unreasonable. The worst case may be that I'm the only shareholder left and owning St. Joe. But it's not as if I bought more or I've been holding it. I mean, I've been selling St. Joe to try and get that down. But St. Joe had a very good year last year. Sorry. It's back to 80% at a certain point. I'll sell some more and we'll see. Shareholders don't like it. I'll end up being the only shareholder. But I'll continue to continue.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disney World on St. Joe's land. It had the ocean, the beaches, the freshwater lakes. It had the elevation. A lot of people don't understand St. Joe's land, the average elevations, 20, 30 feet up. You have the beach. Then you have a bluff, except on the bays, and then it slowly rises to about 70 to 100 feet, the highest elevation in the Floridas in Walton County, which is one of St. Joe's counties. So Walt Disney figured it out. This was the place for Disney World. And Bald said no. So then he quietly started to buy up farmland and Orlando. You know the story.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quadruple, quintuple learnings, and you do it with using very little, a small percentage of the land, you start to get a sense of what's possible in the future. It's no more than the history of what happened in Miami or Fort Lauderdale or Sarasota or Naples or any community that's developed. I'll give you an example of about Orlando. Years and years ago, a gentleman comes into the St. Joe office way before my time, decades before my time, and wants to talk with the Edin Ball, the CEO of St. Joe. Ed Ball's a busy and pulleth man in Florida. He keeps him waiting, waiting, waiting, and then eventually this gentleman has passed a note, a medball. He opens the note and he reads it, says, Dear Mr. Disney, I'm sorry, but we don't do business. With carnival people. Disney wanted to create”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it's I'm a masochist. I don't know. I'm constantly taking five steps backwards in order to hopefully advance much further. But this now is about my remaining investors, my family, and trying to lay in some durable investments that I don't have to worry about. I mean, you always have to study situations and the only constant is change. There have been multiple generations of success with real estate. And it's been initially a slow game and it's a little hard to understand because of the end values. Most people really can't see beyond a few years. And then after five, ten years, everything's discounted to zero, which, you know, you go through 10 years and you court.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We bought a third of the company, 37% of the company back at a very good price. They're net debt free at the corporate level, plenty of liquidity, very conservatively leveraged, and building up, going from 100 homes a year to approaching 2,000 homes and home sites a year from zero apartments to over a thousand apartments, one small hotel to over 10 hotels, a club, thousands of members, golf, beach. It's the whole ecosystem. And St. Joe does a very good job of helping the community, donating land for whether it was the international airport or school systems or for medical campus. It's nice to see it working. It's nice to see the cash flows too.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Me too. To keep going, my pursuit is towards running businesses and to better understand the dynamics. I think investing. Businesslike. That doesn't mean I haven't made mistakes, and clearly I have, but St. Joe is a very good example about defense, not losing, protecting against inflation, making time a valuable asset and population growth. And there's a lot of elements to it. I feel comfortable being the chairman of saying that I have a great management team, really doing quite well, continuing to progress. And it's showing. It's showing in the area is a blank canvas. It's showing now in hotels and apartments, which were never done, residential communities going up everywhere. It's the development of a town sort of reminds me a little bit, remember the game SimCity, where you had a blank canvas and all of a sudden you had a lay.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I'm building a home there. I don't know if I can convince my wife to move there, but I'm going to give it a shot. It's very pleasant. People like to work. There's a sort of libertarian freedom. There's respect for law and order's fantastic. Cost of living is quite reasonable. The school systems are all developing nicely. The infrastructure is being laid in. And it's working and the company is making very nice progress on a yearly basis and has a 50-year road ahead of it where as long as people keep moving south, the company has a huge amount of land and resources to take advantage of that migration.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Given away or burned up when it was cold out that they had to go and that the company could be run for much less and needed to focus on their shareholders, their owners, and everyone had to be treated well. So I ended up putting myself in that position. So I thought I might as well carry on. And St. Joe today is doing more in a year than they've done in 10, 15 years. And we're witnessing the great migration south now. Florida is the place to be, Texas, the migration trends are quite amazing. Property values, the ability to get work done. All important issues, safety. It's all coming across and St. Joe is a major beneficiary of those trends.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you have to be responsible to all shareholders. I mean, my fight with the Joe people that they were wasting the shareholders' money. They really did not know what they were doing. You have to understand how St. Joe started, the ownership of St. Joe was basically, St. Joe, I should say, was basically owned by two trusts, the DuPont Trust and the Moores Trust. So it was from a DuPont who passed away, his brother-in-law took over a couple more executives, but it was really a charitable trust, which were the owners of St. Joe. And the trustees, the directors of St. Joe, they treated it as their own personal playground. So I made a concerted effort to ask them to leave. And I thought that this company had such wonderful. Wonderful assets and still does, and that they were slowly.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was worried about not enjoying Florida, so the house in the Hamptons was her 50th birthday present. Say, let's give Florida a shot. And of course, comes to you, you can move to the Hamptons”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coast, and I thought it was just a matter of time that such events would happen in northwest Florida, which is very, very reminiscent of the Hamptons with the east-west beaches, except the dunes are much nicer northwest Florida than they are in the Hamptons.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the last 10, 15 years, I've been trying to figure out a way in which I can make certain investments that potentially can stand the test of time. That's something that I'll feel comfortable with my children and their children owning to the extent that that is possible. So one study, when you look at wealth in the United States and around the world, it does fascinate me to the extent that that wealth is built upon real estate. income producing income producing real estate. And I tried to understand why I ended up moving to Florida. I learned about St. Joe Company, which is developed by a DuPont around the Great Depression, who at one point was the largest landowner in Florida. And I saw everything that was going on in my Miami and up and down the East Coast and in Naples, the West.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To have 82% in one company is very unusual. And you have to understand how that developed. I mean, when I bought St. Joe, it was a 2-3% position in the Fairhome Fund. And then over the years, the position grew and the huge success that I had in the fund was followed by huge declines in the shareholders of fund. So it became a bigger and bigger position as there was less money in the fund and as the position appreciated. So as you know, if someone's selling the fund, remaining shareholders are buying more of what's left in the fund unless you decide to sell it on a pro router basis, which I did not. I've been involved in the company. For a long time, I'm chairman of the company.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it did matter in the asset management area. I mean, there was no way I was going to manage one of their funds. I had my clients. My clients were fine with my style, but it was totally against what every so-called portfolio manager was doing with the money. They're closet indexers who need to be in a lemming-like group so that no matter what happens, no one gets blamed.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway Feumman's Fund at the time. Fund American Enterprises or at one point it was a huge position. Wells Fargo, when the banks were getting hit. Yes, I always enjoyed getting into the minutiae and trying to understand the business as opposed to sort of roughly understanding a lot of things I wanted to try and better understand or fewer industries.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And you could see the behavior of the people there. They knew deep down inside. They knew what they were doing was wrong. And they were very self-destructive. But I remember before going back to the United States when I joined Lehman Brothers, I started, again, investing the fixed income markets. We're doing unbelievably well. But I decided there's a better way to invest. And as most people by accident, you find out about Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett or Peter Lynch or Phil Fisher, you read and you read and you say, all right, this makes sense. This makes a lot more sense than what you're hearing from brokerage firms. And then you try and do it in your own way. But that is a different way to invest. And it's not as profitable for the brokerage firm or for the broker. So there was a process that you have to go through where you're literally taking two, three, four, five steps back in order to go forward. The idea of buying something and holding it, it's not very profitable.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's purest form. It's a bucket shot. There were people, you know, just figuring out ways to take money from people who had it in the form of commissions and hidden fees. It was shocking.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One tip and hat and started a portfolio management program. And then I was the only employee that left Lehman Brothers to go to Smith Bronney Asset Management at the time when Lehman Brothers was being separated out.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moggs Club, Harry's Bar, it was great. But it went on and on. I started to make some reasonably good money. Then I was approached by a Lehman Brothers. I wanted to do more Merrill Lynch. They were very happy with what I was doing. We wanted to go into the asset management side because I thought that, you know, I need now, I've made enough now. I want to start to do, you know, I want to start to invest my own money and I want to develop a rule where I'll only invest other people's money the way in which I will invest my money. And that didn't really go over very well in the brokerage world. That was considered a conflict of interest. So I ended up opening up the Lehman Brothers office in the West End.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You didn't have to be good because we were in that period from Volker ultra high interest rates starting to head down from 1980. So if you were involved in fixed income and you were bullish, you couldn't help but make money. And those are the days of zero coupons and 30-year securities and tigers and cats and warrants. And did very well. And it did very well. And every time I wanted a bonus, I ended up with a membership to a club.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just build it was right. It was no fabulous building. And so I told the managing director there what he wanted to know and ended up with a job. He said, you know, why should we hire you? You don't come from any money. You're not from England. I said, yeah, but I think I'm going to make you a lot of money. And for some reason, he appreciated that. He hired me as a young broker. And I was very lucky.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started to make money in the management consulting. And it was a 24-7 job, so moved down to London, living out of a hotel. So it was great. Hotel was paid for, four meals a day. It was paid for, learned all about afternoon tea and had to quickly gain 20 pounds. And you were able to take your salary check and just bank it. And that's yes. I opened up an account at Beryl Lynch and started to invest and realize that this is just another form of bookmaking. But this is a legal form of bookmaking. This is great. No matter what I do, the broker wins. There's something to this. I learned about at that time London was considered part of the Middle East. It was London and the Middle East. And it was an old Bond Street on Time Life building.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Algebra, I have no idea, but got it done. They needed work done. So I did the research forum, which ended up getting me a job with a management consulting firm in Cambridge, the strategic planning institute, which was a cross between General Electric and the Harvard Business School about how you can, using statistical analysis, you can sort of drill down to the basic characteristics of successful business. And then you have a bunch of people with no experience then go to business managers and explain to them how their businesses worked. And yeah, eventually went over to London, started an office in London because there was a professor at the Manchester Business School, who was a consultant for the firm. So we went to the booth school, I believe it was. School of business in Manchester, just in time for the moss side riots.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started that with a friend during high school where I wasn't old enough to have an account. So I opened up his account. And then when I was at university, instead of taking normal courses, I would just take independent studies to help professors publish finance papers on how to beat the stock market or management consulting or Growth Share Matrices or do regression analysis, which I really didn't understand at all. But whatever they needed. So I really went four years at university of, you know, working for young professors who were looking for tenure. And so I ended up as economics courses, much of which I don't have the slightest idea about to this day in terms of Langrangian multipliers and linear.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, they got to see the beginning. Father died young. Mother made it. Yep, my father died knowing he didn't have to worry about anything. And so did my mother. So I think in the end they felt they accomplished their mission. Taking care of their children.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the first generation to, I think, to graduate from high school, let alone to go to college. So she was a typical stay-at-home mom who, together with my father, dreamt the dream, the great American success. They never kind of figured out how to do it, but the strategy was mostly one of hope.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work very hard, work from five in the morning to nine at night, and work like a mule, but never got ahead and always couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure out the formula.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a tough life driving a taxi, but by nature my father was a gambler and he wasn't a very good gambler. So no matter what he earned, it disappeared. So I learned a lot from the failures of a gambler. Taught me a lot of what not to do. And it didn't bother me much. So I felt as if I was having an out-of-body experience growing up.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never gambled. I used to, a couple of times I went to a casino with someone who did gamble and I immensely enjoy just watching the action. And he gave me a lesson on how to get comp in every major casino in Vegas without spending any money. I did enjoy that. But for a day or two, but I never went back and never gambled. I don't have the memory for gambling. And gambling done well is tedious, but I don't know. I don't see how it helps anyone. And a lot of people have built a lot of beautiful casinos.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in its most extreme form, it's a sickness because it's a sickness to the point where people would prefer gambling and losing than not gambling at all.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we'll show the house. I have a friend in London who owned Crockford's same person who owned Stanley Leisure. And I would go to the casino and I would just watch these individuals, mysterious individuals come in with a cashiest check for five million pounds and they go from one roulette wheel to another. I mean, they did not even wait for the num to see which number the ball landed on. They would just depend upon the croupier, whoever it is, to tell them, and they couldn't spend it fast enough. And my friend had one recurring nightmare that they would win, but then they would lose it somewhere else. He was very happy for people to win. It was the greatest marketing in the world. He just always hoped that they would come back and lose its place where they wanted.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, not, you know, you put yourself in the other person's shoes, right? I wouldn't not want to lose all my money playing roulette, knowing that you're going to lose all of your money.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can understand if someone has to feed their family and they don't have any savings and they're making a living the best way they know how and they're not hurting anyone physically hurting anyone but you know once you start to make some money and you know you have enough hamburgers to eat enough pizza I just don't see the point of it it's it's not beneficial to society”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was very much interested in how to make money. And Corner Shark was interesting, very hard work. The bookmaking was much easier, but was much riskier. You had to deal with people that, I don't think it was that healthy to deal with. I knew I was going to have a very short career in the bookmaking business. It wasn't as if I was in London or England or I was at Stanley Leisure and so on. or Lad Brooks at the time. And I once looked at investing in the business, but in the end I couldn't because I saw the people, the Friday comes around, you take your check to the corner store or to the bookmaking shop. You cash it. And by the time Friday evening comes rolling around, you've already lost most of the money and your family isn't. Going to eat. Now, your family needs a loan. I just don't think it was a very honorable way to make money.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in the early days, I wasn't adverse to loss because I had nothing to lose and no one did my family. I mean, the whole neighborhood, I mean, that was my world. You know, when you grow up in a certain neighborhood, some people never leave that neighborhood until they're an adult, until they have to get on a bus to take a job. So I was.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's greed and envy. It's as simple as that. You just see everyone around you making money on Tesla. You go out, you listen to people who you're sharing a dinner with, telling you how much money you've made. And on TV, you hear about all of these positive outcomes. You never hear about the losers and people are wiped out, wiped out their college savings or whatever. You just hear the good stories and no one tells you really about their losses. They want to tell you about how good they are in their wins. And it gets to be too much for you. Why am I? Why am I not part of this? I remember it happened to me. I was living in New Jersey. I told my wife at the time that, you know, we can't go out for dinner anymore. If I listen to another person tell me about how much money they're making day trading and the”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other line person took it. And of course, the horse won. And a mysterious person comes in with two sharp bags of money. Person comes and collects their winnings. And that mysterious voice calls me and says, kid, never give me a bet like this again. So something made me say, no, no, no, something wrong. This bet is out of it. It just doesn't make sense. The risk is way too high. This can come back and bite you. That always stuck out to me that and the fact that how people were so willing to lose their money.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something I wanted to do as an adult because I thought there were no second chances here. But I do remember one good story. Someone came into the grocery shop, never saw the person before any better, very large amount of money on a broken down nag of a horse and suff it downs that had huge odds against winning. And I took the bet. and I said, there's something wrong here. This is not the person who comes in with a dollar or two dollars. I mean, this person is putting a large amount on crazy at crazy odds. So, you know, you have your option in that business. You can call upstairs and you can give it away to the person above you. So I said, I don't want to have anything to do with this bet. So I made a phone call. I said, I'm taking this bet. Do you want it, to this unknown person?”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, the whole process behind gambling is it would start in Las Vegas with, I believe it was Nick the Greek, if I remember correctly, who was the most famous of odd maidens who would have the starting odds for a game. And then based upon the flow of money, who was betting on what, those odds would change. And there were all sorts of arbitrage. The odds would be different. Austin and it wouldn't be in New York if Boston was playing New York and so on. And my only job was to try and balance the book, try and get it equally weighted so that no matter who won or lost, I made something. And I always had a 50% partner above me who sort of unknown partner that was always a telephone voice away. And I was a miner. So I knew that this was not.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was horse racing, dog tracks, football cards. The so-called number lottery system was based upon, I believe them paramutual system at a horse race track. And that's what would determine this what's called supposedly a random process. It was a tough town with some tough places, but not the, I think a few crooked racetracks and so on. So it was always interesting. But yeah, people were betting all sorts. That was the daily race form was the publication most people read as opposed to the Herald or The Boston Globe.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know where you dug that one out, but pretty good. It was a fabulous experience. I learned more during those couple of months. I remember five in the morning, I turned into an adult. And five in the afternoon, I became a kid again. I remember it was an all-cash business. To this day, I remember having the 20s in one pocket, the 10s in another fives. The ones went into a cigar box. It was a great business. I ended up making about $2,000 a week. It took about, I think, 10 years after that for me to make that kind of money. But it was amazing how the love for people to gamble and how it destroyed so many people. I always thought in a psychology was quite perverse, where you have someone who would easily lose money, gamble. But would be outraged, paid 25 cents for a cup of coffee.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Observation. Yes. My best decisions, a lot of the very good decisions I made were based upon figuring out the distributable cash a company had, how much cash they would generating after spending what they had to to maintain the steady state of the operation, sticking to those numbers were quite important, especially in analyzing the banks and financial services companies and all else. Because at the end of the day, all you can't spend is cash. And the cash is what is going to determine your liquidity and your balance sheet. And there are so many accounting tricks. Gap doesn't at all times portray the reality of a business, especially when it comes to depreciation, amortization. All the non cash, non recurring charges, non cash, and non recurring charges.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the cash register, that's all the counted with the cash. Cash goes in, cash goes out. Cash goes out to pay for your inventory, to pay your employees, to pay the taxes, your rent, cash comes in on the products you're selling. And really, at the end of the day, The day was judged by what was left in the cash register, what the difference was from the beginning of the day to the end of the day. And I've always used that analogy to look at businesses to follow the cash, count the cash. The cash did not lie. I mean, no matter what you may have put into a ledger, what was the cash register counted”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very interesting, the characters and people who are working hard to make a living and enjoyed that store a lot growing up from getting up at 4.35 in the morning, picking up the donuts that were still hot. I used to always remember a couple of fresh donuts right out of the vat with a cup of coffee. I enjoyed it. And people... You learned a lot about people.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Store is your typical corner grocery store where I guess you would call it a bodega. People would working class people, blue collar people would come in in the morning, buy some cigarettes, a coffee newspaper. And this was before the day of the lottery tickets. So they would play a number or they would gamble a small amount of money. And then they'd go on to the bus or the train and get to work and they would work their jobs and they'd dream all day about maybe winning a few hundred dollars and they'd reverse the process coming back. They'd see you in the afternoon. They'd find out whether or not they won, get another pack of cigarettes, maybe diet coke, whatever. And in those days, the afternoon newspaper, then off to home and repeat the process.”
2024-02-18 · We Study Billionaires · RWH041: Ignore the Crowd w/ Super-investor Bruce Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT