YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Sonnenfeldt

lines on the record: 69
first: 2023-02-17
most recent: 2023-02-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Tiger 21 is www tiger two one dot com and there's a wealth of resources for that and if anybody is interested it's very clear from the website how to get more involved and if you're qualified and interested the website will take you exactly where you need to be if you just google me i'm i think i was on cnbc or cnbc and other tv the 57th time last week so you can probably google me”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After the sale. And this is a real sticker shock. You know, if you were making $3 million, you might have been living on a million and giving away $200,000 a year. And now you can't even give away $200,000 a year and be left with anything.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we have, that's amazing. You have a business that you're making, I'll just making an example $3 million a year, and you say, what is that business worth? Well, typically private businesses go at seven, eight times earnings, something like that. You might sell it for $20 million. And you sell it for $20 million, and then you pay taxes and you're left with $16. Well, if all you can get is 2% on that $16 million, that's $320,000. Your income has just gone down 90%. That's a phenomenon we call sticker shock. And in almost every case, except high tech or very high margin businesses, the passive earnings you can earn on the proceeds of a sale are less than you were earning when you owned the business because you sell it at a multiple that's much lower than the rate of return that you're getting on your investments.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're down 20% last year, most investors were down 10-11%, depending on which category. You're not going to not eat. So in a year like last year, if you were living on 2%, now you went down 13% because you had losses and so forth. So if you look out over the long term, 2% is simply a number that if my kids had to learn one fact about prudent spending, you can't go wrong spending 2% because even if you made no money, it would take you 50 years to get through it. But the point is that when you look at historic inflation and you look at what it costs to live and taxes, 2% is a number that is prudent. Obviously there are only a few people in the world who can actually have enough assets that 2% is enough to live on because even a $10 million, you know, one of the phenomena”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm kind of curious about So, look, if somebody retires and after tax they have 10 million or 100 million or a billion, the first thing they're going to say is what can I afford to live on? What's a prudent amount? And the fact is if you, you know, we believe that the average for our members is 2%. And so as a first order approximation, if somebody does their portfolio defense and they're living on 5%, that's going to set off an alarm bell that's different. And you do have people who are going to live on 10% because they haven't thought through the number and they might have a pension. They might have a unique situation. Obviously, if I've locked in some amazing financial asset that's generating 15% a year for the next 30 years, I don't have to worry about 2%. I can live on 10%. But when you're subject to general market conditions, a perfect example is, you know, most the market.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the Arctic region. These are, you know, all of that is keyed off of temperature and the temperature is very clearly a reflection of a very simple scientific fact. So happy to debate with you any parameter, any leverage, any intensity, but not whether the simple fact that more fossil fuels raise the parts per million in the atmosphere and get the Earth to be hotter.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can either take the best science that we have, knowing that it's always an approximation, but we can say that if you burn so many gallons of fuel, it will produce so much pollutant that will raise the parts per million of carbon. And we know that the more carbon in the atmosphere, the hotter the earth will be. And it's just that simple. So whether it'll be 17 years till we get to two degrees or 34 years, you and I can debate it, but we can't debate whether burning fossil fuels is good. And we can't debate about whether having less fossil fuels and other pollutants and whether reducing the carbon in the atmosphere will reduce the temperatures that are rising seas, burning down, if you will, forests, creating these storms and melting Antarctica.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fundamental relationship that you have to look at is how many parts per million in our atmosphere is the carbon dioxide. And you can see that it's been going up from 350 parts into the mid-400s as the Earth has been getting hotter. So we could debate whether one thing or another produces more or less carbon. But if anybody believes they can get in a car and drive down the freeway and the gas tank will fill up instead of empty, that's a kind of science I don't believe in. So we could debate how fast the gas comes out of the car when you're driving down the freeway, or we can debate how far you can go. Those are legitimate scientific debates. But that's not the same as a debate about whether you can drive down the freeway and have the gas go up in your tank instead of down. And so when you look at the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere,”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's too expensive right now. And although it'll undoubtedly be used, we know the science, we know what needs to be done. We just need the political will to do it.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's lots of words for carbon tax. It's carbon fee, carbon dividend. But anytime you put a price on carbon, every time I turn on a light switch, I think, you know, if this costs I say, you know, if the price of gas was another dollar or two, maybe somebody would drive a little slower, drive a little smaller car, completely the same quality of life, doesn't reduce your freedom, but it'll save our children. There's so much that would unleash the entrepreneurial genius both of America and the world. If we put a carbon price, because it would unleash innovation. Unfortunately, carbon price alone probably is only about 30, 40 percent of the problem, meaning it's a solution would solve only 30 or 40 percent of the problem because we need to shut the coal plants down and we need to stop cutting down the forests in Brazil, which are the lungs of the planet. But we know how to do it. We don't need any new technology. The more new technology there is, the easier it'll be. Someday we'll be able to do what's called carbon capture and literally turn on a gadget in a field and it'll suck the carbon out of the air.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The science is virtually settled, that climate is man-made and it is going to threaten our way of life if we don't cut back on the production of fossil fuel CO2. And obviously CO2 is not the only carbon dioxide is not the only pollutant. You have methane and a whole bunch of others as well. But one thing that's very optimistic is we know how to solve the problem. And by the way, There are many routes to solving the problem. The flip side is will we have the political will to solve the problem. But the point that I make is it's not only is the science settled and not only do we know how to solve the problem, we don't need a single new technology invented to solve the problem. We need policies. If there was any one policy, it would be a carbon tax.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm the vice chairman of or co chairman of something called the Climate Pathways Project at MIT that is where we house something called the En-ROADS Climate Simulator. It's what I believe is one of the most advanced visual simulators of climate over a hundred-year period. And you put in these 18 policy levers, you can move any lever any way. gas prices, oil prices, taxes, regulations, electronic cars, afforestation, deforestation, and we could go through it. But you look at all the major policy areas. And the fact is we know the science. This isn't anymore debate. Yes, there's some wacko kooks, and I'll just call it that, who are in denial. And it's not just the majority virtually.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resource that's going to do well. So there's just endless categories of potential. And we're both in an age of kind of unlimited entrepreneurial potential bounded by the realities that polarization and these other challenges are creating.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Russia's fossil fuel assets. They've made fortunes of money. And I suspect the war has cost less than the increase in value in their oil and gas assets. But we have the potential of Taiwan. I wouldn't minimize that inflation, climate, and political instability and all of these things are creating a witch's brew of black swans to mix a metaphor that we've never had before. What tiger members, I think, are saying is despite all of that, people need to wear clothes, they need to eat, they need to turn on their lights when they get in the car. They need to be able to move from point A to point B. There's a lot of basic things that are amazing bets in good time and bad. And frankly, if you cure cancer, whether it's good time or bad, you'll do well. And if you create a new energy source, that's fossil fuel free and is cheaper than any other energy.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Labor prices still tight. But if you look at so many other areas, you couldn't buy a used car year ago. Now you can't sell one a year ago. You couldn't ship something because the ships were all filled and the shipping rates had gone up 10x. They've all fallen back. So a lot of those supply chain issues that were a result of the pandemic have resolved themselves. And I think some of the inflation was a result of what was called the bullwhip effect after the pandemic where inventories were low and then people started stacking up again. But these are really complicated times. And let's not forget the war in Ukraine has turned the world upside down, not just because it turned energy prices. It was the greatest gift that energy owners had. And if you think about Russia, Russia might have invaded Ukraine just for its financial impact on.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To get the carbon out of the atmosphere, or none of our children or grandchildren will inherit the life that we would like. So climate investing, I'm particularly interested in VC climate investing, where I focuses on late seed and early A because there's too much big money in the later stages, but I think we can make a difference. So I run a team called The Muse Climate Partners. We have about 30 VC investments under our belt that are just doing amazing across the entire spectrum. But in terms of interest rates coming out of the conference that I mentioned, I think interest rates likely are not going to accelerate. I think it's obviously been a bad route in the last year, but maybe, I don't know if we've topped out, but I think the growth will slow and maybe top out. One of the ways I look at it is late.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the place where I'm most involved is in climate investing because I believe it's the single biggest investment theme in the history of humanity. We're going to rewire the entire utility network so that it can become electric and replace fossil fuels. We don't have any choice but to do that. And the totality of the electric conversion and elimination of fossil fuels will be about two to three trillion a year for the next decade. So by any stretch, it's the largest investment theme. The markets, even with how great oil and gas did in the last year, the markets have spelled the end of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels in 1980 or 90 were 28 or 29 percent of the market cap. And I think today they're close to 5%. And if you believe in stranded assets, it'll be even worse.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of the top people in every industry, and one of our speakers you know his name, and I say he's probably one of the five largest real estate owners in the world, said that the question was if I had $10 million, what would you invest it in? He said, well, I wouldn't invest it in real estate. I think the prices are too high. They have to come down. We're still pretending that interest rates are as low as they've been for the last decade, but they haven't been. And so real estate looks like it's coming down just a bit. But as anybody who's been in real estate can tell you, a deal of a lifetime comes across your desk every week and it doesn't matter whether it's good times or bad if you do a great deal and they're always out there, you can do well.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in the last year, it's fallen to 23%, and public equity is obviously the other one of the big three in the last year fell from 28 to 23, which just reflects the downturn in the public markets over that period. But we've had what would be called rotational or sector.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're in a moment that's remarkable, truly remarkable. Something happened this month. We're obviously in February of 2023. Something happened in this month that literally has never happened in the 15 years we've been recording this data. Over the last few months, a majority of our members think that we're going into recession and a majority of those members think it'll be a significant recession. And yet as of the fourth quarter, our members were more highly invested in their portfolios than ever before and even more remarkably, private equity zoomed from 23 to 31% of our portfolios. Private equity had been 10% only 15 years ago. So it's the biggest shift out there. And real estate had been king for 15 years, hovered between 28 and 32 percent.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether it's a for profit or a non profit, very small fraction of them care about making much more money. They're much more interested in legacy and impact. And sometimes the impact is on their family. Sometimes their impact is philanthropic. But we don't hear a lot of discussions about just raw ambition to make more.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They could make a difference. Many entrepreneurs in the nonprofit world exhibit much the same characteristics of saying, I can do this. I grew up. Maybe people had a low expectation. And I want to prove to them that I can make a difference or I can do X or I can do Y. You have these amazing outliers. I have no particular insight into the Elon Musk or the Steve Jobs of the world. But I know if they've gone through a transformation thinking about a word called retirement, that word doesn't exist anymore largely. There's a better word called rewirement. I didn't create it, but I like the word, the nature of our frictionless economy, internet, and so forth allows wealth to be created much earlier in life. People are creating wealth younger, and obviously when they're creating wealth younger, they have more energy to create something else.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, there's lots of studies that show that once you achieve $75,000 a year of income, which for most people would cover kind of basics, very basics, virtually everybody else thinks if they could only have 20% more, they'd be satisfied. Doesn't matter whether they have a million, 10 million, 100 million, or a billion. Obviously, you have outliers, but when you ask the question, I was thinking like, what would happen if you put a thoroughbred who just won the preness in a pen that's 20 feet long? You know, he'd be itching to run wild. Many of our members, it's not the money. In my case, I'm fine on the money. I love being part of an act of creativity if I end one thing I want to start another. Some of our members want to change the world. Some of them started a business because they just thought.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Together. And it's an amazingly transformative experience. And much like the one you're describing, lots of anxiety before and lots of pleasure after.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Peer to peer learning, the essence of what we do stems with the belief that the learning comes from your peers who collectively see things that you can't see on your own. They see your blind spots. And the portfolio defense is nerve-wracking for many people. Literally, we've had people leave before their first portfolio defense. Most people think that once they get through that gauntlet, that's what it feels like. It's been the most incredible experience that they've had. And they look forward to it year after year because it's the one time in a year where you can get an unvarnished feedback from people you respect. And for many of our members, they've never shared this information with a spouse, with a friend. They can't talk about it if their country club. They haven't even shared it with their lawyers or their accountants. Each of those people know a piece of the puzzle, but we try and put the whole picture together.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Practical, yeah. Probably the most unique aspect of tiger is something called the portfolio defense. Their financial statements and a 20-page analysis of the purpose of wealth, what is legacy, if there was a downturn in the market, what are your goals? How do you define family? What is the purpose of this wealth? What are your philanthropic goals? And very often it takes about a month to prepare the first portfolio defense. And the reason I called it a defense was like when you get a PhD at a university and you defend your thesis, this is an opportunity among 12 economic peers to defend, do I have enough cash? Am I overconcentrated? Is my estate in order? Do I have enough insurance? Have I thought about how this will impact my kids and endless other questions? And we exist within a world.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the best way to understand Tiger 21 is those are the great colleges, the Oxfords and Cambridges and where the great graduate school when you sell your business, you graduate from YPO to Tiger 21. It's kind of remarkable. I only have the highest phrase for both of those organizations. We don't see ourselves as competitive. We see ourselves as compatible and they're both fantastic.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, the two great CEO groups globally are Vistage and YPO. And it's kind of remarkable. Both of them have as their members CEOs, but YPO tries to get you before you're 40. And there's a higher percentage of under 40 CEOs who are running inherited businesses. And I have absolutely no problem with that. But obviously the journey somebody goes on to inherit a business is very different than somebody who takes a nickel and rubs it with a dime and creates a large business. But both members of YPO and Vistage have the responsibility to run a business. Those organizations focus on running businesses. And amazingly enough, they're both 80 years old and they both have something like 30,000 members. It's remarkable because one is a nonprofit YPO and one is a for-profit vistage and they're both great organizations.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who are successful, they're like the fish swimming in water and not realizing exactly why they've been successful. And then when they lose the platform and now have to go head to head with the world's best investors, they don't have a chance. They're like Cannon Fodder. So the real moniker for Tiger 21 should be we take some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs and turn them into mediocre investors. If we didn't, they'd be some of the world's worst investors just by their natural inclination. So of course that's not what we aspire to, but the point is that so many investors have a dramatic comeuppance about the world after being an entrepreneur. And if we're helping them become a new entrepreneur or a better investor or to clean up their legacy or their personal relations or their family relation, this is a space where they can explore all.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are action junkies. Every day they come in and they say, what can I do to make my business better? And for them, investing is watching the paint dry. So they almost always move too quickly to do something instead of letting investments like a wine savor over time. There's just a lot of other differences between an investor and an entrepreneur. The most important thing is overconcentration. and a lack of understanding of risk. What happens when you're an entrepreneur is very often your success comes in an area that you have some kind of innate or natural sweet spot. It just works for your personality. And you don't really know it. It's like the classic example of the fish who doesn't know what water is. He's been swimming it its whole life, but he doesn't realize he's actually in water. And for many entrepreneurs,”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them and they lose the automatic earning capacity or the built in earning capacity that that business had. And now they're at the mercy of markets. When they were the owner of a business, they were the king of a little pond. They were the master of some small corner of the universe. But once you convert that into money and you become an investor, you have no natural advantage. Maybe you have some advantage in investing in asset types like the asset that you worked on. So if you were a real estate developer, maybe that gives you an edge as a real estate investor. But by and large, entrepreneurs make their money concentrating on a single opportunity and investors have to diversify. In that sense, Warren Buffett was never an entrepreneur. He was always an investor. Maybe the best investor in history, but he was really an investor from day one.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know this is there's so many different ways to look at this, but I'm not sure that Warren Buffett is an investor when he's negotiating specialized deals. He's a kind of financial entrepreneur. It's a distinction maybe without a difference. But what I know is the following. None of our members are Warren Buffett, and most of our members made their money building a single business and milking it for all it was worth for 10 or 20 or 30 years. And while they had had their nose to the grindstone in that single business, most of their capital was tied up in the business as well. So that when they sell the business, they get a huge pile of capital, doesn't matter how many zeros are attached to it, could be 10 million, could be 100 million, could be a billion. But when they sell their business, they lose the platform that the business provided.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was such a fantastic fund that he literally mortgaged his apartment, one of the top apartment buildings in New York because the cost of the mortgage was a lot less than he was earning on that made off investment. And when Madoff blew up, they lost everything. And that person had been in Tiger and done what is called his portfolio defense. And most of the people had never heard of Madoff said, we don't know who Madoff is. But after you make your money when you're investing it, you have to have some kind of prudent diversification. And while we would say 10% is the most you should put.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five million you have to come up with. And I said, really, you would put debt on a house? I'm pretty sure that I'm anecdotally accurate that a majority of tiger members have no debt. The greatest luxury of the wealth they have is never to have to worry about the corrosive effect of debt. We could have a long debate whether because there's a certain level of tax deductibility and you can get debt, particularly in the last couple years, you could get such cheap debt that the arbitrage, if you had any kind of income-producing assets, was clear. So it's not a financial argument. I understand financially if you borrow money at 4% and your average return is 11%, you do all the math, it makes a lot of sense. But we once had a member whose father not only had 100% of his assets in one fund, but”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So yesterday we had a young member in one of the groups describing his net worth and asking the group what they thought he could afford to pay for a house. That's a common question. You create a fair amount of wealth and you're not quite sure. We've been tracking these statistics. So I can tell you what the asset allocation is of the 135 billion dollars that aggregates all of Tiger. And I can also give you a sense of some issues about living expenses, but he was new to the game and he just had no reference point whether he could pay X or 10X and be prudent about buying a house, particularly in California where the numbers are so crazy. And one of the other members said, well, if you pay, I'm just making a number up, $10 million and you leverage with $5 million, all you have to do is worry about.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to 28 war zones. We were shot at, held up, whatever. And we were in the killing fields of Cambodia and one of our members almost lost their hand when they were given a grenade that was supposed to have been deactivated, but there was still gunpowder in the cap, and he was a pianist. And I thought all hell was going to break loose. But my point is that life has these twists and turns. And so that was an interesting period”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about ways to marry philanthropy and business I owned a solar lighting business at the time. And we started installing lights, the earthquake in Haiti happened a little while later. And we installed lights at our own expense, sent our own team down, and lit up the emergency feeding stations and the emergency medical stations. And we were the first people on the ground, and I never realized that light could be so life-saving. But the interesting thing is, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intention. I told our team, you can only go into Haiti if you bring somebody who's from the military, who's killed somebody in action. And they thought that was crazy. And they said, why would you do that? I said, well, in the 90s, I led peacekeeping inspection teams to 28 war zones around the world as part of my international activities maybe following in my father's footsteps.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In those five years, or at the end of the five years was the best thing that ever happened to me. And frankly, a few years later, in 2007, I was diagnosed with cancer, a form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. And oddly enough, it was a great experience. It sounds crazy to say that. Obviously, if you die from it, it's not a good experience. But for me, it was another kind of wake-up call to take a step back and in my case, it gave me six months to step off the merry-go-round while I was in treatment and think about what I had been doing. And I kind of decided that I wanted to marry philanthropy and business in a different way. Particular to me, I wasn't making a judgment about anybody else. And that's when I sort of coined the phrase all climate all the time, which is what my passion is and tried to.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say, Oh, well, that coach doesn't know what he's doing, and I'm going to take care of him. I'm going to call the principal. I'm going to do something to make it right for you, baby. And that's not the right way to do it. You want kids to be on their own. You want them to fail. They want to understand that not always, but sometimes their failure is a reflection of their own shortcomings. And if they want to win, they need to correct or work harder or be smarter or not be so lazy or do something. And if you don't make that connection for them, they expect the world to come to them. And that's just no way to live. But I feel that, you know, this notion that everything is the best, the way the world works out is a wonderful way because we all try and make the best of whatever hand we're dealt. And of course, I feel like I was dealt a very lucky hand. Many of us are, but that failure.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I was just at a meeting of the Tiger 21 family office group where some of our members who have higher amounts of wealth and have created family offices come together to talk about mostly issues of legacy and children. And one of the members was saying that his daughter didn't make it onto the soccer team. I was kind of shocked because she's grown up in some privilege and she assumed she would get that in the father hates the fact that any of his kids would think that they were so privileged. And she said, Dad, I didn't get on the team. And he said, well, honey, I guess you weren't qualified. And it was a real shocker. He said, if you want to get on that team, you just got to work a little harder. They'll let you on when you're ready to get on, but not before. It was really a beautiful kind of statement because I can't tell you how many other parents.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partner to buy 50% of the business? Why doesn't he just buy my interest? I think at that point I owned more than 50%. And I'll go quietly into the night. I think I was about 43 at that point. And what was interesting was if I hadn't sold harborside when I was 31 and it changed my life for the better, I might not have had the courage to do that second sale. The business had a lot of room to grow and the problems weren't enough, but it just seemed like I had a second opportunity in my life to start all over again. And I'm somebody who likes to be part of the act of creation. So I took that opportunity and sold. And that's when I started Tiger 21.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's called M S E M E S was a play on my initials MS. And it also means truth in Hebrew. MS means truth in Hebrew. I was very sorry to see that name go. Most entrepreneurs get very attached to the names of their businesses and it breaks their heart when they have to let them go. But after seven years, I built that business up to, as I mentioned, about a billion dollars and an opportunity came where my junior partners wanted an institutional partner to buy half of the business. And I realized that really what was going on is one of my partners thought that if we brought in an institutional partner, he would be closer to that institutional partner than I would be. And so his minority interest plus the institutional partner's interest would control the business. And I didn't have any interest in being a minority partner in the business. But I said, look, if you want to bring in a”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some more natural expertise or instinct for, notwithstanding, I also got a huge benefit from the fact that my wife's family was in real estate and I'd been at the real estate department at Goldman Sachs and so forth. And I started then a company to acquire distress portfolios. And over the next seven years built back up to about a billion dollars in assets. partners generated about a 38% IRR, which even today is a good number. And we acquired about 200 properties distressed, some through the debt, some through ownership. And I put together a team that could rehab, remarket, reposition, resell, anything with the word RE in front of it to transform a property from what we took control of to turn it into something vastly more valuable. And that company, which”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After I sold Harbor Side, I was involved in a business where I'd made an acquisition that turned out I don't know that there was fraud, but I certainly miscalculated what the potential of that acquired business was and had a real legal hassle with the guy who I bought the business from who I thought had misrepresented the business. And I realized I woke up one night and said, boy, if these 10 different things happen in the things I'm involved with, I could lose most of what I made. And it scared the bejesus out of me. I just couldn't believe how that could be. The chance of all 10 things happening was very small, but the fact that I could even construct a series of improbable events that would set me back told me I was doing something wrong. And I decided to crawl back, if you will, to the real estate space, which I guess I have.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't imperil all that I had made, but set me back enough to realize that I wasn't as infallible as I thought the day that I sold Harbor Side. Actually, as a rule for hiring people, unless they've had a bit of failure, I tend to be less interested in them because obviously you want success in somebody's background. But without the failure, they don't begin to test their own limits and they don't begin to learn what their strengths and their weaknesses are. And they never master how to make up for their weaknesses either by associating with other people or staying away from the things that they're least good at and focusing on the things that they're best at. So I had a tough couple years after this incredible success where it felt like I was going backwards. And one day about five years.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea was to find a way to track real estate prices across different property types, which had lots of uses, among which was if you were buying a property, was this a good or a bad price and potentially to trade commodity indexes against the prices of different real estate categories or to arbitrage what an industrial property in New York might be worth versus an industrial property in California just to use an example. But in my entrepreneurial zeal, you said, I think you were touching before what it was like to be 31 and have achieved that level of financial success. There's nothing more dangerous than a 31-year-old who thinks he can do no wrong. And when you've had that level of success, it's hard not to think you can do no wrong. And so fortunately, I did a couple of things that”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know so little about investing when I've been such a successful entrepreneur. And we create an environment where people learn about all of the things that that transition occurs. I mentioned this large development that I had done in my 20s. I sold it when I was 31. I was more successful pretty much than any peer of mine and maybe successful beyond any dream that I had had. But then I had a second go at starting new businesses and I didn't want to stay in real estate because I was being overshadowed by my father-in-law and I wanted my own identity. And so I went into the real estate information business. And for those of you listeners who might have gone to Zillow to look up the price of a house, I essentially created an industrial form of Zillow before the internet was created. So obviously very different functionality.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, Tiger is an acronym for the investment group for enhanced results in the 21st century. Tiger is an organization of today, 1224 entrepreneurs who meet in groups of 12 to 15 people every month for a full day to focus primarily on the experience that a successful entrepreneur goes through when they sell their business that they might have owned for 20 or 30 years and immediately go from a wealth creator at least temporarily to a wealth preserver. And the amazing thing is most entrepreneurs don't know so much about investing and they further are fooled by the fact that their successes, their success as an entrepreneur, they assume will assure their success as an investor. And as they say, it just ain't so. And all of a sudden there's often a rude wake-up call. How could I?”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a record groove on the old records where you had a needle in those grooves and your childhood sort of imprints. And sometimes when you can see your behavior today as a product of your childhood, it's another form of attenuating or taking control of behavior that up until then you weren't sure what was driving you.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Analysis is a different way to access what's going on. You can do it. You need to do it generally for three times a week with an analyst who's the psychiatrist who's gone on to train as an analyst. There's Freudian analysis and other forms as well. Freud was the father of it. But, you know, a simple example is I was listening a few years ago to my brain, if you will, and what popped into it was an experience I had when I was 11 or 12 years old where my parents had a fight. And I hadn't really remembered in 50 years that event. And I had to wonder, why had I hidden that event? Why was this sublimated? Why did it disappear? And what did it mean that it came to the fore now? And sometimes when you realize who you are, your childhood is like.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT