YouSaid · the spoken record

Kirk Kerkorian

lines on the record: 37
first: 2019-03-31
most recent: 2019-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Back. He wanted no part of what if speculations, no second guessing about past decisions, learn a lesson from mistakes and move on. That was Kirk's way. But Kirk's legal and financial advisors wanted to blame the SEC. They estimated that Kirk lost $100 million as a direct result of the stock offering denial. Kirk blamed Kirk. He had let himself become vulnerable. He hated that. He hated feeling helpless and at the mercy of forces beyond his control. It took much of the fun out of his life and out of his business. He vowed never to let anything like that happen again.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Geez, so we lost what 90% of his, almost 90% of his investment. I got a good kick in the ass, Kirk conceded to a close friend. And now we're going to see what he thought about this. And you'll definitely have an understanding of Kirk after this. He didn't care if they changed the name of the International Hotel to the Hilton. And he shrugged off questions about the staggering paper loss on the deal. But in a rare public display of temper, Kirk let his feelings show when asked about sharing management control with his friend Baron Hilton and his team. They can talk all they want. They can call at Hilton Hotels. I have no ego problems. But we own equal voting control. We have two directors, they have two. I hate even that. I like to call my own shots. It's my place more than Barons and Conrad Hilton's, so I'm not going to dance to their tune, and they can go whistle. Like any sane gambler, Kirk never looked.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's about to do his second offering for the International Leisure Hotel. And everybody pulls out. So remember, he's got $50 million at, I think it was like 15 or 18%, like really high interest rates. This is the late 1960s. And now he's basically forced to find a way out. So he's got to take on partners, even though remember in the past he didn't like when he took outside investment. But before I get to that point, there's just some personality, some highlights on his personality I thought was interesting. He talks a little bit about the way he was extremely disciplined. So he says, Kirk had always been health conscious and disciplined about regular exercise. He jogged daily and played tennis religiously. He ate small portions, drank in moderation, and despite bouts of insomnia, tried to keep an early to bed and early to rise schedule. So it says basically he'd work like from 9 to 4, so he'd work at 9 in the morning to four in the night.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“flamingo he buys the flamingo as well it was time to take advantage of all the good press and potential investor enthusiasm by preparing for another public offering of international leisure stock so he wanted to do it twice beyond raising enough cash to pay off the 50 million dollars he had in high interest rate loans Kirk expected this public offering to raise his next fortune”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can wipe him out. And he came close at one time, he came close to, like he had almost defaulted on a loan. And if he had another loan that had a clause in there that if he defaulted on any other loan, that that loan would come due immediately. So he's like a few weeks, even when he was over a billion at the time, he was a few weeks from insolvency. So he definitely pushed it to the limit. This is an example of highly leveraged plus high interest rates. And this actually goes against him. And this is about the International Hotel. The International Hotel's early financial returns were sensational. International leisure, that's the company he created. International leisure stock steadily climbed steadily. So he did a public offering to help raise funds for the hotel. Kirk's original 82% ownership had been worth a modest $16 million before the hotel opened. It jumped to $180 million on the strength of steady profits at both the international and the”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Victim, so he's like, all right, we'll just buy. I can't get evicted if I own the hotel. So he buys that hotel. Then he bought the sands, the frontier, and more. A buying spree was on. In the shadows behind those perpetually drawn curtains in his penthouse, Hughes was plotting a one-sided robbery to undermine Kirk's grand plans. To the hermit billionaire, Las Vegas wasn't big enough for two kings of gambling, and it's funny in some of his memos that he wrote he compares him and Kirk to two tigers. He's like, there can't be two tigers on a rock. There's only one tiger. It's just, I don't know. Howard uses such a peculiar person after reading two massive books on him. It's just bizarre. So, you know, I'm not trying to glorify the fact that this guy goes all in on everything and that he has a pensions for gambling because when it works out, it works out really well. But when it doesn't work out,”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so over the course of the career, Kirk invests billions and billions and billions of dollars into Las Vegas. But at this time, he's taking the money from all the money he made from TIA. He sells it off, makes hundreds-something million dollars, I think $150, $104, something like that. And he just starts buying up more land in Vegas. And this is an example of Howard Hughes not enjoying sharing the spotlight.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he does this basically by hand, which is just fascinating to me, and it actually winds up working. So months and months and months, he goes around saying, hey, any possible... So I wind up working. It says, in a matter of months, Kirk had paid off the $2 million bank loan from which he had bought TIA back from Studebaker. Kirk was now sitting on stock worth more than $66 million, a vast fortune by any measure, and no one was more surprised than he was. And now there's another quote from Kirk. I thought after the war, God, if only I could get up to having fifty thousand dollars, that would be great. Then it was $100,000. It just keeps going, Kirk said. A lot of people ask me, did you have any idea that you would do this? The answer is absolutely zero.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kirk was ready to open TIA to Wall Street investors. His nearly two decade-old charter business would be the first supplemental airline ever taken public. And this is fascinating story. Basically, it's Armenian investors are the ones that save his ass here. It was at best a modest beginning. TIA stock opened at $10.30 per share, dropped to $10, and didn't move for weeks. But what finally started moving the stock where Kirk's Armenian connections. So there's this young, hungry guy that cold calls Kirk one day and wants to take all his stock business. His name's George Mason. So George Mason goes around and he starts selling, like pitching the stock to fellow Armenians he knew through the newspaper because it was like an Armenian mafia almost. They weren't gangsters. I mean, like they had like a connection, cultural connection.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The new president, so the guy that made the deal, Egbert, he's gone. Now he's replaced by this other guy. The new president had just started selling off everything from idle factory machinery to corporate subsidiaries in a desperate campaign to slash Studebaker debt. Kirk left meeting with him with $150,000 option to buy back TIA for $2.5 million in cash. Remember, his other deal is worth $10 million. He's buying it back for a quarter of that. He does something similar with a, but the numbers were different. Like a billion dollars he sells something for and then buys it back for $250 million. So by September 1964, after less than two years under Studebaker's control, trans international airlines was back under the direct ownership of Kirk.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“However, Kirk didn't send that letter to Kirk. I just thought it was funny that he said this is a terrible deal. Kirk saw something different. He's like, yeah, I'll do it. Kirk agreed to a final conditions. A relatively modest monthly lease of $15,000. So he's foregowing some monthly profit. In return, Kirk would receive 15% of casino profits. So now this is the story of how Kirk buys TIA back. then takes it public. And he's done this a few times where he sells something to somebody at like peak price. And then something will happen and he's able to buy it back at like one fourth the cost. It's really fascinating. He did it to MGM Studios a couple times or maybe twice. Okay. So this is Studebaker. The car maker was in free fall. It was on track to lose $16 million in 1963. And that was despite the fact that TIA and several other non-automotive one of these days I'll be able to pronounce that word. Subsidiary were all profitable.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kirk had come to listen. Sarno had come to make a deal. He proposed a lease agreement that would make Kirk a partner in the casino profits. Sarno launched into his pitch. This is going to be the greatest hotel casino in the world. Everything is going to be top notch. We'll have the finest restaurant, the best entertainers, the most luxurious rooms. People want people won't want to stay anywhere else. It can't lose. It was a very big play, and Kirk wanted to hear more. So when he goes into this meeting, he would only really at the beginning he only wanted to accept like regular lease payments. Like, no, I'll just lease you the land. You just pay me the set amount every month. And Kirk being the gambler was like, oh, well, actually, it wouldn't be bad owning this. So it says it looked like a shaky deal to Cohen. Oh, I'm skipping over something. So he convinces Kirk Kirk, like, yeah, you know what? I'll give this a shot. Sarno still needs to raise more.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shripp from the flamingo. So you make a million dollars, doesn't hold on to it, puts it basically all on a bunch of dirt in Las Vegas. That winds up working out really well for him because he's unbeknownst to him. There's a guy named Jay Shirano who actually builds hotels and motels all over the country. And he wants to build something in Las Vegas. And he's like, I want this land. Looks up who's the owner, winds up being Kirk, so he wants to meet with Kirk. And this is how Kirk winds up with being part owner of Caesar's palace, one of the most famous hotels in Las Vegas. Jay Charnot, the maestro behind Upscale Motel Developments from Georgia to California, already had financing lined up through personal friendships with Teamster Union President Jimmy Hoffa. Remember, this is the mob era of Las Vegas. Now he needed to win over Kirk Akorian. The strips' newest Landover. They met over dinner on a summer night in 1963, so it's about a year after he buys.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stu Baker, they buy a bunch of these subsidiaries. They're all making money, but they're corporate company winds up almost going bankrupt. So Kirk winds up buying back the control. All right, this is a little bit about his philosophy on risk and an example of that risk. Kirk still relished big risks. And he subscribed to the logic of his friend in casino owner, William Clark of the Desert Inn. The smaller your bet, the more you lose when you win. Besides, what's the point and where's the thrill winning a small wager? Betting the limit became Kirk's trademark. He took a similar approach in real estate investing after receiving nearly a million dollars in stock from Studebaker at the end of the year in 1962. Kirk turned around and invested most of that fresh income, $960,000 on 80 acres of sand and brush. The property was a potentially prime location near the dunes and across the shore.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So heavily, he's making money, but now he's highly in debt. So he's saying, hey, what if I take outside investment and I have somebody like I can make a little bit of cash and then have some offset my liability? It says big debt deprived Kirk and TIA of room to maneuver to take advantage of other investment opportunities to expand or more importantly to withstand unforeseen economic slowdowns. The plane and TIA were insured against a catastrophic accident, but Kirk was a sitting duck in the event of a business slump. Debt is what broke his father four decades earlier. Kirk pondered ways to minimize his personal exposure to financial ruin, and then Studebaker came knocking. Studebaker, you probably heard of that company. It's car manufacturing, and the guy running the company is this guy named Igbert. Egbert, I'm going to call him.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Glenn's mandate was to keep the meter running on the DC-8. That's the jet he just bought. Keep it so he could keep it making money. So basically your job is just to sell time on this plane that we just spent $5 million for. The big Jets' first steady work was flying high priority military loads from Travis Air Force Base in Northern California to Guam. More contracts followed. And just like Kirk envisioned, TIA was scooping up the cream of the new defense contracts. In its first partial year of operation, the jet single-handedly propelled TIA from earning a quarter million dollars in profit to one point one million dollars. The company's net value surged into multimillion dollars, into the multi-millions of dollars. So it gets four times the amount of profit in less than a year. Oh, so this is something surprising because when I was reading up, I knew that eventually he sells TIA for $104 million.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the importance of hiring somebody with just one mandate. He hires this guy named Glenn. Glenn was a sales executive of Lockheed and a leading figure in the post-war charter business. Kirk lured him over to TIA, making him president of the company.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our lease, I need to be able to like you buy the plane back for me. So his downside was capped. Kirk's basically doing the same thing here, but like 50 years earlier. So it's a government contracts were slow or failed to materialize. Kirk released the plane back to a commercial carrier. The Douglas exec agreed with Kirk. It was a good bet and he wanted a piece of it. McGowan crafted a special deal. So he's going to finance some of it. He says, Kirk came up with some cash. Bank of America came through with the loan for about $2 million, and Douglas Aircraft Company financed the balance. An unprecedented move at the time of about $3 million. On his signature alone, Kirk had assumed a personal debt load of nearly $5 million. Default would wipe out everything he had built. Failure would bring him a taste of his father's desperation back in those final days at Weed Patch. That's the place in the San Joquim Valley. But Kirp was the gambling aviation executive was going all in. The jet deal closed in June and Kirk moved quickly. He turned to, so...”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So even if he got that $2 million from Bank America, it wouldn't be enough to buy it for all the planes he wants to buy. So he goes to the company that he wants to buy the planes from and sees if they'll finance the deal. And they wind up doing it. So the company's called Douglas Aircraft Company. So this is Kirk He, meaning Kirk, arranged to pitch his idea to Douglas executive Jackson McGowan, a familiar face to Kirk. They knew each other casually having negotiated a couple of plane deals in the past when McGowan was a Douglas vice president of sales. He was now vice president and general manager of the entire aircraft division. This is what I meant about the importance of playing for the long game. Cook had a fabulous reputation, so if he did business with somebody in the past, they would likely to continue that relationship in the future. And usually in the future, they were in a more advanced station in life so they could actually provide him more benefit. In this case, this guy's running the whole thing. So McGowan was skeptical. A supplemental air service paying $5 million for a jet was he”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Airline with jets, he could sew up all the government business he could possibly handle and take a giant leap ahead of his competitors. This was a big risk for a big payout. But Kirk wasn't taking a wild guess or betting on chance. He knew the business. He saw the expansion of US military bases in and around the Pacific, and he was confident that future demand for troops and cargo would translate into strong returns on investment. So now he's going to go around. He's like, listen, I need jets. I don't have the money for jets. I need to go borrow money. So since his first stop was Walter Sharp at the Bank of America, they wind up having a lifelong financial relationship. This is actually important that he winds up paying back Walter on time and never defaulting on anything. So this is not the first time they did business. Walter was actually a fan. So it's a Kokorian fan since Kirk's Vale Field Flight School.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Kirk loved the allure of starting businesses and doing deals, but he was also obsessed with control, which is obviously very common for the people that you and I have talked about so far on the podcast. So remember that little charter service? He still owns it. He changes it to TIA. So this is Kirk's plan to grow what's now known as TIA. The importance of playing for the long term and hiring someone and giving them one mandate. Sometimes I leave notes for myself and I can't even read my own handwriting. Okay, the key to Kirk's grand plan was to go all in with TIA as a defense contractor. Since 1959 when the company landed its first government bid, which is faring U.S. soldiers and their families in North Africa, military business had become a steady and reliable source of revenue. Kirk also reasoned that if his company was the first supplemental”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To throw money at the owners, and they love doing it win or lose. Kirk consistently lost more than he won and yet called his visits to Vegas the best times of his life. And another quote I was just overwhelmed by the excitement of the town. And so this is when somebody approaches him about, remember, the Vegas at this time is extremely mobbed up. Like it was controlled by gangsters all over the United States and a lot of the people running the casinos for fronts, so he was approached and they were trying to raise money and he was authorized to buy. So he says Kirk was authorized to buy his first casino point, which means he'd have a 1% share ownership in a casino for $50,000. If timing is everything, the deal had nothing going for it. They were in such bad shape, Kirk later conceded. The good news for Kirk was that he lost only fifty thousand dollars. It was on the dunes and it wind up.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From penniless eighth grade dropout immigrant to billionaire. But I want you to keep in mind that everyone's life is messed up in some way. Like there is no such thing as a perfect life. You're going to have ups and you're going to have downs. He went through a couple.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Price, but he was surprised and put off by the nitpicking, especially over the design of in flight toilets, and though Hughes was always very polite, his stubborn pettiness make Kirk wonder if he might have somehow personally offended the multimillionaire. After three or four more meetings without agreement, Kirk gave up. Okay, so right around this time, Kirk actually gets depressed, and he's married, his first wife, their marriage is actually coming to an end. So he says they're nine and a half-year marriage officially ended in 1951. Kirk slipped into depression. He stopped working, stopped talking to his family, and hold up alone in a Hollywood apartment. During that same period, he tried to shake his dark mood with electric shock therapy. He later told friends that it worked, but the effects didn't last long. So I include that in there just because when I'm telling these stories to you, it's an amazing story.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Tim Rose and the Harry Bookkeeper. Kirk's new bookkeeper would introduce him to the tax benefits of lease deals and depreciation and capital gain profits. Both his used plane brokerage and his charter service were making money. He wasn't rich, but the entire Kukorkian clan was sharing in his growing financial security, so he'd hire his family members because remember they come from very humble beginnings. Now, I'm not going to bury this punchline. This small charter airliner that he purchases for $60,000 and it starts building up, he sells 21 years later for $104 million. I mean, he's got some transactions in the book. It's just insane. Just $200 million here, $100 million there. Okay. Okay, so this is an example. Something he internalizes at 35 years old. He's like, listen, to get wealthy, you have to own some kind of equity. You need businessmen get wealthy. Pilots don't.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For some weird reason. I guess it wouldn't be a weird reason, right? They just got done fighting in the Pacific. So you'd have to fly him from Hawaii to South America, Alaska, all over the place. So Kirk had a plan. He bought seven of the planes stranded in Hawaii, each worth at least double its purchase price. If he could get it to the US mainland and doubled again for any plane he ferried all the way down to Rio de Janeiro. He was figuring on profits that in 2018 dollars ranged from $90,000 to $250,000 per plane. Now, you have to ask yourself, like, why is such a huge profit just sitting there anybody could take? One, you had to obviously know how to fly, but two, they had limited range. So he would have to like take out all, like basically gut the plane in Hawaii, install extra fuel tanks.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so he takes the cash that he makes for selling off his flight school, right? And he's like, I need, he wants, like, he doesn't want to just fly Cessna, right? He wants to turn this into a full-fledged charter airline, which he winds up successfully doing, and he's going to sell it for a lot of money. But remember how you would sell, he'd buy old clunkers, use his skills to refurbish them and sell them for profit. He's going to basically do the same thing. So the chartered business had two, it was two separate businesses that made a lot of money that made him wealthy at the age of 50. He had the charter. So, you know, you can hire him and are his planes and other pilots eventually to fly you to specific places, so like private airfare. And then he had buying old military planes, refurbishing them and selling them. So this is an example of that. One way to build capital fast was in surplus military plane market. So I guess there's a lot of like DC3s, C47s, these huge planes that were used during the war. They were just kind of abandoned all over the world, anywhere from like a bunch of them parked in Hawaii.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is him starting and selling more businesses. The chartered business in those days was very good. Gamblers and couples in a hurry for Nevada's quickie wedding dominated customer traffic. In Las Vegas was poised for a boom. Kirk's operation was small, was too small. He sold off his flight school and planes, paid off his Bank of America loans, and pocketed a healthy profit that he intended to parley into something bigger. Kirk wanted his own airline, his own fleet of planes, his own company.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make some money from that turns it into a charter business. That charter business introduces it into Las Vegas. Later on, he winds up building the largest hotel in Las Vegas three separate times. Okay, so Williams was a regular hiring Kirk and his Cessna for weekly flights to the gaming center. Kirk was enthralled by the action. Now this is one of the few direct quotes we have from Kirk because he's extremely private. I was just overwhelmed by the excitement of the little town. The adrenaline rush was back in his life.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be his own boss. In a matter of days, he set up a pilot training school. So this is his second business that's going to lead to his third business. The booming aviation business needed large numbers of instrument-rated commercial pilots. So Kirk's flight school roster was quickly filled. Within weeks, the business was turning a reliable profit, but there was no excitement, no adrenaline rush. The teacher was bored with teaching. Kirk decided to get in on the charter business too, so this is extremely important because the charter business is how he makes his first fortune.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they'll pay you $1,000 a month, but you're literally just flying a plane over there. So you're basically like a plane truck driver, if you will. And you're going to make a lot of money, and they're going to pay for all your expenses so you can save a lot of money, but you have a good chance of dying. Basically, this is him. He goes, some days he could hardly believe his good fortune. He was part of an elite unit that was steadily changing the balance of power in the war. Why did they say that? Because they're using these planes to shoot the German rockets out of the sky. He was commanding some of the biggest, hottest, most powerful planes in the air. And he's on the leading edge of technology for aviation. And day after day, he was flying the unflyable North Atlantic. They said it was impossible to fly. Kirkorian was having the time of his life. It's also crazy because the book goes into detail about like, you know, he starts to make friends with some other coworkers who are doing the same thing. And, you know, a bunch of them, a bunch of them.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's like, oh crap, I got to get down there. This is how dedicated he is. He hitchhikes 85 miles to the Mojave and made Poncho a proposition. He was short on education and money for flight lessons, but he was willing to work hard. If that meant getting up at dawn to milk cows, slop hogs, and muck out the barn, Kirk was ready to start immediately.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so, but we're very far from that point of life. We're still in a sea of uncertainty. And it says, with regular work, still hard to come by. Throughout the middle 1930s, Kirk turned entrepreneurial. So this is his first business. He bought equipment for steam cleaning car engines and rented space at a gas station to use as his operations center. Used car dealers became Kirk's primary customers. He made enough money to start buying and trading old clunkers. So first he cleaned them, then he'd buy and trade old cars. He'd get them running with his auto shop skills, swap out bald tires for other used tires with a few more treads, and then wash, polish, and steam clean. Presto, he could clear of a fifteen dollar profit. So again, that's a good amount of money at the time because instead of moving heavy rocks around and making $260 a day, he can make what? What is that? More than five, six times that.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By age nine, Kirk was hawking the evening express, which is the newspaper in the area they lived in, on street corners, making about 50 cents a day and turning over pocketfuls of pennies to help support the family. So everybody worked, his brother and his sister as well. More first jobs, Kirk entered the Southern California job market as a middle school dropout at the worst possible time. The depths of the Great Depression. He had to settle for a series of odd jobs. He would caddy at the golf course, he would sell oranges on the side of the highway, anything to bring a few cents a day, anything to bring home a few cents a day, everyone in the family had to contribute.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Armenian businessman in the United States at the time where there's this giant earthquake in Armenia. And he was silently and anonymously donating millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. And he was doing this before anybody asked. And then he started to get a ton of press coverage or like, look how basically stingy this guy is. emigrated from Armenia to America. You've done nothing. So that's when he had to set up the foundation and kind of do it more publicly, even though he didn't want to because, you know, he was getting bad press undeservedly. Okay, so then he says, this is some quote from him. Life is a big craps game. I've got to tell you, it's all been fun. What follows is an account of the great craps game, the life of Kirk Corian.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even at his own hotels. He gave away millions to charity and to people need on the strict condition that his gifts were kept secret. When his donations grew into the tens of millions, he formed a charitable foundation, and it gave away more than a billion dollars. So he had a saying that he felt like anonymous donations made anonymously to an anonymous person was like the purest form of giving. And he's saying if you wanted something in return, like you wanted your name on a building or you wanted a plaque or an award or you wanted people to know to put your publicizing what you're doing. He's like, then it's not charity. Like it's a transaction. You're trying to get something out of it. So this actually wind up backfiring on him because he would pay for his employees like somebody in their family would have cancer. He'd pay for the treatment. He did all kinds of very generous things, but his family's from Armenia and he wind up, he was the most successful.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second in command. So he agrees to sell the company. The next day, another group offers, wants to buy the company, but offers $15 million more in cash. And so Kirk's second in command calls Kirk and says, hey, what should I do? I just got another offer and it's $15 million higher. And Kirk says, well, did you agree? Did you make an agreement yesterday? Did you shake and say you're going to sell the company? He's like, yes, I did. And Kirk's like, well, why are we even talking? And he hung up the phone. So he didn't take the $15 million. He said, no, your word is your bond. We made an agreement. We're going to honor that agreement. That was something extremely important to him. All right. He says, let's see. He never defaulted on a loan. Okay, Kirk traveled without an entourage. He carried his own bags and drove his own car, typically a Ford Tourist or a Jeep Cherokee. He refused comps, personally paying for meals and rooms.”
2019-03-31 · Founders · #65 Kirk Kerkorian: Penniless Dropout became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source