YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Loeb

lines on the record: 66
first: 2026-05-28
most recent: 2026-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But anyway, I came down to my friend Carter, who when I was, let's just say, in between jobs before I started at Jeffrey's, I had about a nine-month period where I wasn't working. And he let me sleep on his couch. And then when I got my job at Jeffrey's, I suggested to him a bunch of different distressed debt situations. And he trusted me a few hundred thousand dollars of his money. And then it turned into a little over a million dollars. And then he then rolled that into my fund. It really enabled me to get my business started. So that was one of the kindest things. I want to say one other thing on the kindest topic. Gavin actually said this, and I think he was quoting Palmer Lucky. He said, the one thing money doesn't buy you is friends that believed in you when you had nothing.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have no idea how it will ever benefit. And sometimes it will. And sometimes it won't. Sometimes you just connect with someone who thinks you're a better person. Good for its own sake.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before I answer that, I do want to talk about the importance of kindness. And I know you know it's important because you ask this question every time you interview someone. It's important on many levels because I think if you elevate kindness as a characteristic that you want to elevate in your hierarchy of things that you want to be honest and truthful and smart, clever, innovative, kindness is very important. I think it goes with forming deep relationships with people. Kindness enables you to be empathetic. I think it's that empathy that enables you to connect with people, to learn from them, to be better as a human being. I hate to sound grass, but ultimately it will benefit your business. So I will say on the kindness front, be kind to the people, not just that will benefit from you, be kind to people.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morocco, Azerbaijan would be better allies to the US than NATO. Who would have thought that their growth rates would exceed them or they're embracing of technology? That's the stuff that keeps me going. Just being able to incorporate all these different things and also to form relationships with people that are doing interesting things. It's just incredibly fun to hang out with Jeremy O'Brien who founded Psy Quantum and talk about quantum computing or Elad Raz, who started Nexilicon or the CEOs of the companies that we invest in have get to know Mitch Rails from Danaherst.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that worries me the most is just not having the time to do the things that I care about, spending the time with my family or being able to go surfing and read books that I want to read. Not really worried about the business. And then the thing that excites me is just the things that have excited me that keep me going. I mean, what an awesome opportunity to be able to incorporate everything that you can possibly know about the world that's relevant to study industries, to study technology, to study consumer behavior, to look at the US economy, look at politics, to travel to the Middle East, which I think is probably the most vibrant, interesting part of the world. I mean, who would have thought 20 years ago or even three years ago that Bahrain, the Emirates, Saudi,”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With like a tech stock, it was because they were not a convenience store chain. They were a pizza chain masquerading as convenient stores. And I had an analyst who went to Texas and ate pizza. And that kind of an analyst today, I think, is what is different.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this thing got passed around and nobody could crack the code on this thing. And I was relatively new and I knew I had to differentiate myself. So I just spent like a whole weekend studying this thing. And ultimately, that was one of the best investments ever in the history of bankruptcies was the claims on Drexel because people didn't understand the complexity of the different value pools and liquidations and the claims were overstated. the assets were understated, but it was super complicated. And that was the kind of thing that differentiated the analysts of the 90s when I did that. I think now it's somebody who's like a Gavin Baker type, a junior Gavin Baker, somebody who understands a company or understands an industry and understands the nuances of a technology. Let's get away from technology for a minute. Casey's general stores, why was this one of the best performing stores?”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The great analyst 20 years ago was like someone that could build a model really fast and understand some really complicated restructuring. Like when I was, I'll use myself as the example of that ancient dinosaur of an analyst that used to be useful. When I was at Jeffrey's, Drexel went bankrupt. And there was a thick disclosure statement.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so different. I grew up in credit. I worked on a trading desk. You know, just electronically trade bonds. You have to have relationships with these firms. Part of the reason for expanding into the CLO business is that we had the high yield market trillion and a half dollar market pretty well wired. We were sort of dabbling in the broadly syndicated loan market, which is another trillion and a half dollars. But we also have eyes on a $6 trillion structured credit market. But these are not markets that lend themselves to tourism when the opportunities really come up were already there with the relationships and the understanding the companies.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're maybe less pessimistic that there's going to be some kind of apocalypse from AI. I'm still pretty optimistic that it will create opportunities and create jobs and create net jobs. Obviously, it will lose in some places, gain in other places. The differentiator for us is that we can always default into credit investing. We haven't been in a scenario where we had like a real credit cycle, but I'm very comfortable investing in incredibly stressed times. We really haven't had any since 2020. So going back to like COVID, the thing that we got really right, because we had a good year that year, but it wasn't because we piled into stocks, we piled into IG credit, answering the question a little bit differently, having that credit arsenal in our back pocket.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're all sharing best practices and some people are running agents overnight and using tons and tons of tokens. Other people are probably more like me, just using it more for queries and things, but we're all very involved with it.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we all have to just start using it. The only way to get good is this is just to use it. And we have people at different levels. We have some experts that we have brought on that are native computer scientists that are coming at this as expert AI people who are working on specific projects. They're coaching the team, but we're also encouraging everyone to use AI. We do hire system integrators. We have a system integrator working with us, but I'm obsessive about continual improvement both at individual level and organizationally. But Claude really enables you to be an individual self-improver. It makes you very autonomous. It'll give you back whatever you put into it. If you put a lot of time and energy and effort into it, I'm encouraging everyone to do that. And I think collectively.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cursor, anthropic Solano, everything he did. The guy had a great nose for value. So that was probably the toughest. The mistake that we made within the last two years, we obviously were looking for and we've taken some great shorts and things that are being disrupted by AI, but where we've made the mistake is thinking that companies that were controversial, but we thought we knew better that AI wasn't really going to affect this part of the info services business or these guys had proprietary information. That's where we've made some mistakes. There probably will be a shakeout there where there will be some phoenixes that rise from the ashes, but that's been the investment lesson of the last year or so.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would have to say our investment in FTX, it looked great. The company was growing fast. We could verify it all on the blockchain. We felt like we had some good company on the cap table with us we did. Turned out that it wasn't what we thought it was and it was painful because I think in general one of the amazing things about our capitalist system and that venture-backed companies have this incredible ability to go out and raise capital for interesting ideas. Most people are good actors with good intentions. We've rarely had any kind of mishap. It doesn't mean that you don't do very careful due diligence. I will say that now our due diligence process, we definitely like check bank balances and do like the most basic due diligence that probably would have turned stuff up on this. ended up being a crook or very sloppy”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private credit, structured credit, whole loan mortgages, some direct lending in real estate, some investment grade corporate debt and private investment grade. But we also put the equity of that business in things like the junior tranches of structured financings, but we'll also be using it for growth equity investments.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we had the wrong insurance vehicle. We were doing PMC insurance. We really should have just done plain vanilla annuities. From the annuity business, though, can't invest in the hedge fund. It can only do credit. So a few years ago, we started a reinsurance company. We've done two things since then. We merged our reinsurance company into a closed-end fund that we had in the UK, third point offshore investors. We reincorporated that business from Guernsey to Cayman and we repurposed it from a closed end investor in my hedge fund into an insurance company. Still has some of the investment in the hedge fund, but it now owns our reinsurance company. That company will then be in a position to do more reinsurance deals, issue primary annuities, and then third point manages the money in”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We actually started an insurance company de novo in 2010. We were backed by myself, Kelso, and Pinebrook, and we started a Bermuda-based reinsurance company. And the thesis there when we started was we have an executive that will do these reinsurance deals. We will invest the float all in third point and in treasury. So it was sort of a barbell. Then we can defer taxes, get leverage on our capital, Green Light Ri at the time was trading at 140% of book value. I thought this would be the future. We'll just keep raising money for this vehicle. The problem was that the reinsurance business took a sharp turn for the worse. And we had some good years at third point, but we were like scrambling to offset the losses from the insurance company. About three years ago, I said, well, we had the right idea.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cult is a little bit too strong of a word to describe it, but they had a very strong corporate identity and culture. It's one thing to say we are a Kaizen company and we're dedicated to continual improvement. But what they have is a whole system of implementing improvement across the organization. There are a lot of things that I learned that day, but one of the things I took away is that they would hold people very accountable and individually show when people were underperforming. But the interesting thing about it was that because these things were all addressable and fixable, when they found someone that was underperforming, it was celebrated because instead of shamed, because look, look what all these things you're doing wrong, we can fix those. And they did. They do that over and over and over again. And they do it both in terms of operations, working capital. And it was really cool to just walk around a place. It was really amazing how everybody's on.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their team, and even the fact that they have a system in place. And it's also been incredibly instructive watching the diaspora of executives.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better quality, higher margin businesses to shift from kind of general industrials into healthcare. I learned a ton and it then stopped working as an investment because of COVID. There were all kinds of irregularities, surges in orders and increases in inventory and then a correction for that, all the benefits that they got from the surge in demand that was a tailwind became a headwind. And they still haven't come out of it. It'll be interesting to see how they navigate AI in the next few years. We actually sold it recently the recent sell-off have gotten back in, but in a small way. But I learned a lot about how really thoughtful businesses think philosophically and deeply about their operating system, about optimizing and motivating and inspiring.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think investing in Danaher has been the most instructive because it really is truly one of the best run businesses. It was also one of the first experiences that I had investing in a super high quality business that internalized some of the best practices of creating a corporate operating system. My partner then Munib and I actually went to Danahert and got them to boil down their five-day DBS Danaher business system training into a one day thing for us. It was really instructive. It was a really, really good investment for about four years. What I learned by observing them, by watching them incrementally improve the business quality of the company, by shedding lower quality businesses, buying higher return on capital.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On invested capital as part of their three arrow strategy. And I came back to New York. I met with Larry Lindsay and Neil Ferguson. We wrote a three-person paper. They did most of the writing. But we wrote a paper for AEIs and picked up as an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. And they then adopted that. It was pretty cool. But the government actually really wants the companies to do this. It's really the management teams that are more entrenched because the shareholders and the government want that. And you've really seen progress since we first went over there. They're breaking up some of these cross shareholdings. They're penalizing companies that trade at discounts to book value. There's a bunch of other things. So I think they're definitely moving in the right direction.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Story went everywhere and ended up being a really good investment. They really pushed back on everything that we recommended, took them about five years. And I think one by one, they've done many of the things. They've broken out the semi-business. They partially spun out or they planned to spin out their financial services business. The one thing I learned is that activism in Japan is really hard. On one of our first trips, we met with the prime minister and we met with his right-hand man Sugo San. I told him I would write a paper explaining to him why activism was good for Japan as a country. And they had released something called the Three Arrows. It was about fiscal, monetary, and restructuring. And my suggestion was that they needed to include corporate governance and in particular focus on return.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transparency we shared our investment thesis with the New York Times. So Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote the story. They went into a panic when we told them about that. Andrew agreed to embargo the story until the Japanese market closed. The story came out and they had prearranged us to go on a tour of their innovation center. But before we went on the innovation center When we told them that there was going to be a story that came out, his name was Kaz Harai. He goes, you told the New York Times? I said, yeah, but just the New York Times, nobody else. He says, okay, just the New York Times. It was wild. We were walking around the innovation center and we're looking at our Blackberries at that time.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At one point, we owned 7% of Sony. There's a list of companies that at one point own significant stakes in that had I not sold would be worth in the mid to upper single digits billions of dollars. Sort of took two runs at Sony. The first time we invested in it, it was basically a conglomerate. It had obviously the main Sony studios. It had a semiconductor business. a life insurance business, obviously had all the consumer electronics. So we advised them to separate these businesses. Certainly at a minimum take out the insurance business, which had no place in it, we met with the management team. We had a big deck that we went through. At the end of the meeting, we told them, well, in the interest of trans”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Israel's an interesting market. It's kind of a niche year market. And we had one of our top investments there that despite the war has been one of the best performing stocks in our portfolio. But in terms of the big markets, there's a lot going on in Korea, Taiwan, Japan. I'm probably more bullish on them just in terms of a hunting ground to find great companies. The European markets are tough right now given the regulatory environment. They just have a different attitude about business and capitalism and we're invested in a couple businesses there Rolls Royce and SML. But the companies that are in Europe dependent on the local economy are challenged.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What that's going to do. We're barely scratching the surface. There are so many layers of corporations. They're just getting started. So I'm in the optimus camp in terms of seeing this as something that's going to play out”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you don't believe the CapEx numbers are going to yield a return, then you would have to believe that they're just fleshing money down the toilet and that they're not going to get a return because the gap earnings numbers are really strong and the multiples on that and they might say yes, but the cash flow after CapEx is, but these are companies also that are for the most part investing money off their balance sheets and are generating enormous amounts of cash. It's very different from the dot-com bubble, which we were short going into and had good numbers in those years. You don't have the valuation bubble now on those companies that you had on those companies back in those days. You see anthropics revenue growth and the adoption and the usefulness of its products and the anecdotes that you hear about the next generation mythos.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the setup's great. You can still buy NVIDIA maybe the multiples slightly higher right now, but there's such a catch-up trade in NVIDIA at 15 times 27, 12 times 28 for the most dominant, very fast-growing company at its size. I look through our whole semis cap equipment, hyperscaler portfolio. And I thought my instinct was going to be, okay, we've got to take profits here. I looked at the valuations. I looked at their growth rates. Unless you are really draconian or negative and you think that somehow the AI world is going to roll over in 31 or 32, I think it's most attractive sector right now is where the bulk of our capital is invested.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High yield business, they'll have their own PMs. I will come in if there's an interesting opportunity. We supersize both of those, both Twitter and XAI. When I got involved, but I'm not even on the investment committees of those businesses.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me just push back on that. Sure. I'm the portfolio manager of the hedge fund, but private credit, CLOs, structured credit.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we made that at that time our largest credit position. Then when XAI did a debt financing, very few credit people wanted to play in that one because there was no cash flow. $2 billion in revenues and a $20 billion enterprise value, but we were very comfortable that this was a real business. We looked at them as credit investors, but we also were able to bring in the resources of our private investing knowledge.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decisions. Let me give you two examples. We had a good enough knowledge of Twitter and XAI to understand the equity value of both of those businesses. And without making a decision whether or not we wanted to own equity in XAI, there were two financing transactions that came up. One for XAI and another one for Twitter. The Twitter debt was a resale of the financing debt that was offered when Elon bought the company. Morgan Stanley sat on it for a while. It was deep underwater. When it got close to par, they decided to sell it. Most credit investors were really scared and nervous to buy that, even though it was like $96, $97 on the dollar. It was yielding around a 12% yield. We were comfortable enough with the underlying value of the business and with the fundamental”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that's going to have the best risk reward. It's usually used in terms of companies that have debt and equity. Do you want to be in the equity? Do you want to be in this junior debt? Do you want to be in the senior debt? Let me give you an example. Like when credit suis was going through its troubles and being bought by UBS, you could invest in the preferred shares. You could invest in the hold code paper, or you could invest in the op-code paper, which was most senior within the capital structure. This fulcrum there was actually the hold code paper. They had the most upside, but the op-code paper also did well. The pref was wiped out. So that was the wrong place to be. But there are always different interesting places within the capital structure to play. And having a comprehensive view of these companies gives you a really great vantage point to make alpha generating investment.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've worked in venture capital. I've worked in risk arbitrage. I've worked in credit. I've worked in equities. Having a view of value and thinking about valuing enterprises, whether there are earlier stage, mid stage, or mature businesses, and looking to invest in whatever the fulcrum security is in that enterprise, obviously for an early stage company, the only fulcrum is the equity”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In it within Third Point itself, we have about 30%, which would make it about close to $3 billion in structured credit and corporate credit, but that's in the hedge fund. And then we have an insurance company that we manage about a billion dollars in credit. We have a couple billion dollars in asbestos liabilities that we manage in its own pool. And we just started a private credit business, which is small.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, third point is a whole collection of businesses. My main focus is on the hedge fund strategy, which started at $3 million. It's now about $9 billion today. That fund itself is about 30% credit in total. The rest of the portfolio, it moves all over the place. It is primarily equities. And I think our equity book is generically around 110 long by 30 or 40 short, but that can be all over the place going into the war. It was down, we really dialed back our risk. I think for the first time since 2009, we did have more credit exposure than equity, but we very quickly have taken that back up. But across the fund, we have a CLO business with about $7 billion.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's probably some of that in the sub $2 billion market cap space, and not necessarily even bad management, but B plus management, not optimizing. What we're finding is that it's almost like a negative selection process. We'd much rather invest in a great company with awesome management that's doing the right things and cheer them on than kind of find something that but for mismanagement the company would be worth a lot more. So what you find is that if the things that you've identified are badly run, then there's probably 10 times more things that are badly run.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was terrific from MSG, cleaned up the operations, improved the technology. They sold the company. Yeah, a good result.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Antitrust violation that spilled into criminal charges brought against the company and some of the individuals. The business itself was a good business, but just run unbelievably unprofitably. The company had been around since the 1700s, and some of the business practices had not really been updated since that time. We took a position, we bought 9.9% of the company. We went after the board, but really just wanted them to implement some basic business practices that we thought would be better. The CEO that was there, he didn't have a particularly deep knowledge of art, I think he came out of the rug division, didn't really have deep relationships with the collectors either. So we came in and gave him a shot for a year, and then I think the board came to realize he wasn't the right guy. We brought in a guy named Tad Smith.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll come back to the story about Sotheby's in a second. Board members often feel a sense of status for being on these boards. And I think that in itself needs to be dispelled because I think if you're on a board because you are either getting status or you're getting income and that's your primary reason for doing it, not for representing shareholders, then that's where we come in to try to disintermediate that and take away some of the status or increase the cost of doing that. Southerby's I thought was just an interesting company. It was a pretty small company and a small target for us. It's actually a very good example of what you're talking about because although it was a public company, it wasn't really run for the shareholders. It was run because I think people did feel like it was a high status business and had been mismanaged. It didn't really recover from”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great writing is really about clear thinking and organizing your thoughts, communicating them to people in a clear way to get a desired outcome. You can also use writing to influence, and in our case it's been very helpful in getting the attention of other shareholders, sometimes the board itself, shaking them up a little bit, getting media attention focused on a board. I think about activism, you've got a few different levers. You can have a financial lever so we can make a bid for the company. You have legal levers, proxy contests, litigation, information requests, et cetera. Social pressure is actually a very effective way. And I think the best way to put social pressure on a company is through writing and PR efforts around the company.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bad governance I've seen is when they let their loyalty or relationship to a CEO who's not up to the job overshadow their duty to shareholders. That's probably the main thing. It's very important to understand the boards don't run the companies in a well-functioning company. The board is strategic, not tactical. So they should be really focusing on those things. But if the company isn't allocating capital well or isn't holding the management team responsible or there's some very obvious things that should be done differently, that's when we can come in.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or intellectual or talent diversity on the board, or they are thinking excessively about things other than their duty to shareholders. Not to say that the board doesn't have other responsibilities, but I think ultimately they should feed into creating shareholder value. If you go back to both Milton Friedman, things that weren't Buffett have said, Of course, boards care about the communities that they serve, the products, the employees, proper conduct, et cetera. All those things are very important. They are not inconsistent with creating shareholder value. In fact, it's part of creating shareholder value. But I think especially a few years ago, the business roundtable said, we're no longer going to say that board's responsibility is primarily to drive shareholder value. Well, I think it was a distraction from what their real duty is.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we have an incredible system. Let's start with that. There's something beautiful about the American capitalist system in the aspect of it that creates boards of directors that ultimately have a role within both capitalism and a democratic system where the board is responsible and answerable to the shareholders and is responsible for accountability for the management, setting strategy, and key financial decisions. We have a great system in place where there's shortcomings within governance happen is when the board members lose sight of what their duties are as fiduciaries or the composition of the board is such that they aren't really equipped to carry out that duty because there is a lack of deep knowledge.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dad was incredibly funny, warm, irreverent, really smart. He was the only son of two immigrants from Europe. My grandmother, his mother came from Poland in 1914. His father came from Romania in 1898. Incidentally, his mother's youngest sister. She was the first of that family that was born in this country. Her younger sister founded Mattel Toys. It was a self-made person. He went to UCLA did well, went to Harvard Law School, and spent most of his career at one law firm.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dad, who was a securities lawyer, was an expert on corporate governance and wrote books about it. He's actually the first person I'd ever heard of who actually talked about corporate responsibility. He's on the board of Mattel and later Wim Sonoma. He would go visit these factories where they were sourcing their materials from and wanted to make sure that they were ethically sourced and that the workers were treated well at Mattel or William Sonoma. So he was really ahead of his time on that stuff.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but then you'll have corporate transactions that will create opportunities. It feels like there's always something, there's failures, there's credit cycles, there's bankruptcies, it's hard to imagine the computer sitting on a creditor's committee and working through the capital structure and being able to transact. If you think about a continuum of public securities and private equity, AI will not do private equity. You always need people to do deals. And then you have the stuff in between that requires a lot of negotiation and human interaction and high touch private credit or working through a restructuring. You'll probably always need human beings to do that part of the investment business.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buffett would say if a stock goes down, you celebrate it because it's a chance to buy more at a better price. They have risk metrics which have forced selling on the way down. So they do the opposite. It might be rational for their business model, but it's not rational for long-term investors. So you have a lot of these things that will continue to create opportunities, I think, for fundamental investors.”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Wiley Coyote. There's no one else to buy the stock. It tanked. So those things happen. And I think that's where the human element comes in to understand and to be able to make those tough trading decisions when fundamentals are going one way and stock prices are going the other way to be able to take the pain of losses in the short run. The advantage that someone like me being a fundamental investor who doesn't make trading decisions based on computers is that there are still a lot of market irregularities caused by some very good strategies, but collectively they create these anomalies. So you have quants and CTAs. You have pods. They have a great strategy for them and they're investors, but it causes some unusual behaviors because fundamental investors believe that when as warm”
2026-05-28 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source