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Mohnish Pabrai

lines on the record: 116
first: 2025-08-21
most recent: 2025-08-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, currently it's golf. Like, one of the things that really struggled with today was there wasn't going to be any golf. So I said it's either Steven or Golf. Should I go to Stephen or should I go for golf? I said, you know what? Give the arms a rest. Let's go meet Stephen.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you know, well, then they've lost their way somewhere. I mean, on a daily basis I specifically ask myself, how do I want to spend today? And I focus on spending it not with the focus on maximizing money. I focus it with maximizing what Monish loves. And that changes all the time, but that's the way it is.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in 2017 or 2018, they took Ferrari Public. So they actually then listed the company. And it looked like that they had captured all the value. And so I sold. I used to own approximately 1% of Ferrari as part of that purchase that I'd made. So 80% of Ferrari was in this $5 billion company. Ferrari now has a market cap of almost $100 billion. Would have about a billion more If I had not done that stupid thing. So I made a couple of hundred million on this whole thing, but it would have been a lot more. And all I needed to do was just not sell it.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so I think this was in about 13 years back, 2012. I invested in a company called Fear Chrysler Automobiles. Basically, it was coming out of bankruptcy after the financial crisis. They had gotten rid of all that debt and everything, and the stock was very cheap. It was about $5 or $6 billion that you could buy the whole business. One of the things I didn't pay too much attention to at the time was that 80% of Ferrari was inside Fiat Chrysler. And they owned Ferrari, 80% of it. But they had many other assets which I like. They had the ram trucks and jeep and maserati and so on. When I looked at the business, I thought the business was worth many times the five or six billion, even ignoring Ferrari. And I was right. So in the end, I made several times my money.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, yeah, I mean, so there's mistakes of commission, which is things going to zero, and there's mistakes of omission. The mistakes of omission are far, far worse. Okay, so the biggest mistakes I've made aren't the ones that have gone to zero. The biggest mistakes I've made are the ones that I sold and I shouldn't have, where I should have circled the wagons and I didn't. And those have been very costly.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So after we are only going to know a business after we own it, we're not going to know it before we own it. After we own it, we may understand the business will enough know that this is a great business. And when we figure out it's a great business, You don't want to sell that.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would circle the wagons, then defend that circle as best they could with their guns and so on. But the wagons being circled was the best possible way of trying to face off that attack. So, in effect, they circled the wagons around the crown jewel. So when I'm talking about circle the wagons, what I'm saying is that in a lifetime of investing, there are very few times when you're going to actually have a huge multi-bagger. A big winner, you know, something that goes up 10x, 50x, 100x. And what you want to do is you want to effectively circle the wagons around that idea so it doesn't get sold We are not going to know before we invest whether something is going to be a multi-bagger or not, but we may figure it out after we own it.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Warren Buffett said that 50 year period of running Berkshire Hathaway. He's made hundreds of investments. And only twelve. have moved the needle for Berkshire Hathaway. So it's the same 3 or 4% rule where if we say that Warren made three hundred investments. He probably made more than 300, but let's say he made 300 decisions. Only twelve have resulted in what we see as Berkshire Hathaway today. And the important thing was not that by decision on those twelve. The important thing was never selling them. Circle the wagons is a term that comes from 19th century when these pioneers were moving west, the wagon trails moving west, and the native Indians were attack or bandits would attack these wagon trails. So what they would do is they would put themselves in a circle.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I look at it this way. If you study the Forbes 400, the 400 richest people in the UN actually. I don't see any day traders in”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I would prefer that people do is focus on the other two variables, which is the amount you're saving and the length of the runway and focus on the index. So I think that it's kind of like saying, I want to be a great AI developer because it's the The nature of the situation.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a 96% odds. That's why the index is so important. When you buy the index, You bought that 4%. And if you go pick stocks, You are one in twenty five chance of getting one of those 4%”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one of the things that Warren Buffett says, he says that you get a punch card which you can punch 20 times in your lifetime. And each time you buy a stock, it's one punch that's gone. So what Warren is saying is If there was a rule which said that you cannot buy more than twenty stocks in your whole life. What would happen is you would be very thoughtful. what you bought. Okay, and chances are those decisions might be good decisions because you only have 19 left and then you only have 18 left, etc. In venture investing A very small sliver of companies that venture capitalists invest in do well. High burnout rate and if we look at the stock market Four percent of listed companies generate ninety percent of the return. So most companies that we may think about investing in are likely not to do well.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And such His second principle was No two Ikea stores can be the same. So what he said is that whenever we are opening a new IKEA store. There has to be some innovation that is going into that store that does not exist in our previous stores. Because he says that if I don't keep innovating. I'm done. And so, if we don't notice it because we think all the IKEAs are the same, but actually if you study them and look at when they were built, et cetera, you start seeing these These incremental changes that they're making.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He never ever took debt. Every single store they built, they built out a retained earnings and cash, he never took debt. And I've studied business failure quite a bit. The single biggest reason why businesses fail is leverage. They owe people money and they can't pay it back and they're gone. So Ikea has never taken debt. If you never take debt as a retailer, you're going to grow slower, right? You're going to keep... Can I bring in the cash? But it's a very solid foundation It's on a rock solid balance sheet.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One hundred percent of businesses Eventually, we'll go to zero. And so it very well could be that a business could last for fifty, hundred, two hundred years, one fifty years. Could last well past the founder's lifetime. Those are businesses which were built with a lot of principles and a lot of great core values. You know the founder of IKEA. Every decision he took was with the five hundred year view. Many businesses think with a 500 of IKEA, I was studying Ikea, some very remarkable things about it. First of all,”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would say that There are a lot of elements of luck. So, first of all, founders are all great at what I call offering gaps, right? They find something that the world doesn't have, that needs, et cetera, and they go after it. Sometimes what happens with the offering gaps is a moat gets built someone starts visa, it becomes a Moti company or American Express and so on and it perseveres and scales.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, because if the form factor, so currently humans walk around the brick in their pockets or in their hands. At some point that form factor is going to change. It may be integrated into something we wear or some other more ergonomic situation. That may or may not be apple, and in fact more likely not to be apple. It's probably some guy in a garage somewhere. And so if they are smart enough to find the guy in the garage early enough and buy them, they're okay. and bring them in as an extreme jobs, that's okay. But even there, the odds are low”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so Apple is a very unusual company in that everything emanated from one guy And that one guy has been gone for a long time, and if you look at Apple. Basically, nothing new has come out since he left. We don't have a Steve Jobs at Apple. And the same thing happened at Disney. You know, they had to buy Pixar because there was no Disney anymore. Mr. Disney was gone. And so Apple actually, I find somewhat risky.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so now the FTC doesn't believe it's illegal, but Bill Gates does. And I was just thinking, well, that's because you're competitive with Amazon”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, now that's the hack that Amazon did, right, with Prime. And Or three years ago, I was seated at dinner next to Bill Gates. My middle name is Forrest Kamp. These things happen once in a while. Bill is describing to me how the business model of Costco and the business model of Amazon is illegal. So I said, why is it illegal? He said, when you put a membership fee, What you're doing to the consumer is you're locking them in Which means the consumer is no longer going after the lowest price because they are the distortion in their behavior.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a castle. A knight in charge of the castle to keep the invaders away, and one of the ways to keep the invaders away is you put a motor water around the castle. So when you put a motor water around the castle, it makes it harder for anyone to take the castle. And a business with a moat around it is a business that competitors will have a difficult time taking business away from. So what can happen with our barber in Town C? Humans are creatures of habits. We don't like to change our barber every month. We like the same barber. So if he's competent and good, what's going to end up happening is that his client base will stay with him.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is full time. And he's making $45 an hour per haircut. But the nature of capitalism is more barbers are going to show up. So the second barber comes in, the third barber comes in, eventually the haircut there is going to be 30 bucks. It's going to neutralize. But in the meanwhile, he's doubled his business. What risk did he take? So going into Town C was addressing an opportunity gap when Howard Schultz started Starbucks, he saw an offering gap. He thought that what Italians love about cafes is Might be what Americans love too. Didn't exist, right? And he went and did it.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what he does is he rents a sublease is a small storefront, buys some used barber equipment, and then decides that one day a week he's going to go into that town and cut hair every Wednesday. He puts up a note board saying available Wednesdays. And what happens is people start coming in. They come in because they have no choice. If you don't go to this barber, you've got to spend half an hour driving to one of the other two towns. Now, he normally charges $30 for a haircut But here he doesn't need to charge 30 because there's an opportunity cost of the time you're saving. So he can charge 45. So He's charging 45 over here, and then when he's in his own town, he's charging 30. Now, what we've already noticed is Wednesdays are filled up. So he says Tuesday and Wednesday. And gradually what ends up happening is that that business”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of many barbers doing well, etc. There's another town about thirty miles away, Town B, which also has barbers, they're also doing fine. There's a new township coming up in the middle of these two towns called Town C. Doesn't have much of a population, but it's growing fast. So the barber in town A goes to see what all they hooplab or town C is all about. So it makes it takes a trip there, sees that there's some increase in population, people are moving in, and he notices there's no barbershops. Why would there be any barbershops? Because it's brand new, right? So he's thinking, how do I do this without taking risk?”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I mean by that is those are your laundromat, your Chinese restaurant, your eBay seller, whatever, Amazon seller, so on, the small businesses. None of those companies were formed because of venture capital. So the media focuses on all the venture capital led businesses. And so people think that, oh, if I have to do a startup, I got to do something in technology. Well, that's like one tenth of one percent or less. You can ignore it. You don't need to really worry about it. The important thing is to be an observer and to look at what my dad would call offering gaps. So let me explain an offering gap, right? So let's say there's a town, let's call it town A. Town A, there's a barbershop in Town A. Okay, in the barber's...”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the reality is, so entrepreneurship is not a real studying entrepreneurs. If we really study startups in the US or actually anywhere in the world, ninety nine point nine nine percent of startups are non-venture backed.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the most important one is heads I win, tails I don't lose much. Everything we discussed today, Stephen Is heads I win, tails I don't lose much. When I started my business, I When Bill Gates started, when Sam Walton started, when Richard Branson started, that was the formula. If they won they would win big, and if they lost they'd lose nothing So everything has to be in business about risk reduction. Everything has to be about free lunches. We love free lunches. So we always have to think about how do we get this done. Without capital, without risk, free lunches.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indians make up about little over one percent, maybe 1.2, 1.3%, just one tenth of that is the patels. And this 0.1% population is controlling 80% of the motels in the country. It's because of the Dando”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the patels are vegetarians, and they live a very simple life. So when a patel took over a motel in an area, what they were able to do is they were able to undercut the prices of all the other motels in the area because they have no labor. They have no payroll. They have no workers' comp, none of those things. And so they were, if everyone else is charging $25 a night, they're charging $19 a night. So the occupancy was higher than everyone else. And they saved their money. And then what they would do is buy the next motel, send the nephew to run it, and then buy the next motel. This started happening in the early 70s. And when you fast forward to today, eighty percent of all the motels in the US are on the hotel ownership eighty percent so the patels make up 0.1 percent of the US population”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That if they bought a motel, a small ten or twenty room motel. The family couldn't live in one or two of the rooms, and they could use the money they got out and get a bank loan. And run the motel. Now, motels are very labor intensive businesses. So what they did is when a patel took over a motel, they fired all the staff. and the family took over all the jobs, the cleaning and front desk and everything else, right?”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an ethnic group. In India. And so this ethnic group came to Uganda to build the railroad. But they are very savvy business people Over the course of the last hundred odd years when they were in Uganda. Through their Dundo methods of doing business they became very successful entrepreneurs, and they controlled large parts of the Uganda economy. And Idi Amin came to power in Uganda in the 1970s. And he said Africa is for Africans. So what he did is he threw all the patels out and he nationalized all their assets. So now the patels were stateless. The US took them in, the UK took them in, Canada took some of them in. And when they landed in the US, they basically really didn't have any skills that would allow them to get good jobs, white-collar jobs in the US. And What a few of them started to do was they realized that”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dando is actually a word from Gujarat, which is on the western coast of India where Gandhi came from. They are extremely astute business people. And though, if you translate it directly in Gujarati, It means business. But it doesn't really mean business. What it means is it's a way of doing business where the downside is non-existent. We already discussed how Mr Branson is a Dando investor. He had no downside. Mr Gates was a Dando investor. He had no downside. Mr Walton was a Dando investor had no downside. So all of these people embarked on businesses, built huge fortunes without taking risk. And so the Dando investor was written from the perspective of how can we minimize risk? While keeping the returns intact.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's say every seven years it would double. 72 divided by 10 is Fifty years is seven doubles, seven times seven is forty nine. And Okay, so we can throw away the 28, keep it simple. Going to have 100 times what you started with. So the 5,000 at eighteen is going to be 500,000. At 19 if you put money away, that's another 500,000 twenty you might have ten thousand you can put in. So you can start seeing that over a lifetime you're going to be having too much money.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The SP has plenty of periods where it does nothing. It's somewhat overheated right now. But I think if you have a long enough time horizon, your dollar cost averaging in, it's perfectly okay. What you could also do as an alternative is buy Berkshire Hathaway. So that's a stock BRKB. So you could again tell these people that just put it into Berkshire Hathaway. It's like an index. And again, it's like said it and forget it. You don't need to think about the investing side. You focus on yellow and keep putting this little money away on the side. And it's going to compound. And so at 18, if you put away $5,000. And you fast forward to when you're 68, 50 years later, right? Now, if you got 10% return on that money.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you could just. Ask them to buy you the SP five hundred index, for example. And they will get you invested in that.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically you could open an account at Fidelity or interactive brokers or Robin Hood, any of these places. You could open a brokerage account for very little money.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when people start working at 22 or 23, whenever they start working, they have to be saving then. Because that early money at 22 can compound for 50 years. And that's what we want. So, we don't need to do heroic things with finding the next NVIDIA or whatever else. We can just put it into an index. And the important thing is spend less than you earn and keep putting that five, seven, ten thousand every year into the savings. Don't go have a vacation in Hawaii with it. Let it keep compounding and just put it into a broad index and we don't really care.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A hundred years later there would be $20. If you gave them 2.3 cents, a hundred years later there would be $23 and now it would be the $23 trillion. So, what I'm trying to say is that If the runway is long enough, the starting capital doesn't matter. Even the rate of return doesn't matter. If the runway is long enough now so when people are thinking about investing, They have to keep a few things in mind. The first thing is spend less than you earn. So always try to save the first dollar rather than the last dollar. So if you are making $50,000 a year, put $5,000 to savings to start with and then do the rest of your expenses after that. Now, it's very important when we saw with this example, you start young.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they were not taken, they were given a fair deal, but they just didn't have a good trust officer who could actually make it happen for them. So the magic of compounding is that we started with $23 and we end up with $23 trillion without having a great trader return. It's just an okay. 7% is just okay. It's not great. It's not bad, but it's okay. Now, if you go back 100 years, so we started at 1623, go back 100 years to 1523. We had 2,300 cents in 1623.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not going up in a Hulky stick, Club, yeah. So in 1723, the Indians would have 23,000. It would have gone up 1,000. And then if they continue at the 7% in 1823, they would have 23 million And in nineteen twenty three they would have 23 billion. And in twenty three they'd have twenty three trillion. Now, the entire wealth of every man, woman, and child in the United States is 150 trillion. One sixth of that is not Undeveloped land in Manhattan. So if the Indians had invested at seven percent a year for the last four hundred years They would have more money than owning the land.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at seven percent for a hundred years you would have a thousand times what we started with. And this is why because compounding becomes non-linear, people have a hard time getting their hands around it.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will take seven years 70 to divide by 10 is 7. If I have a 15% return, it will take five years, 72 divided by 15 is 5, approximately. And if I have a 20% return, it'll take three and a half years. So this rule of 72 is a nice hack, and it's very important to know how long money takes to double because then we can start doing a lot of math in our heads. So when we look at these Indians with the $23, if they were getting a 7% return. It would become $46 in 10 years. And then it would become $92 in 20 years and $184 in 30 years and so on. Now, if you go a hundred years, right, it's 10 periods of 10. And ten periods of ten is two to the power of ten. and two to the power of ten is one thousand twenty four. So we throw away the 24 because we don't want to complicate the math.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the rule of 72 is a very important rule, and I wish they would teach it more in high schools and elementary school. It tells us how long it takes money to double. And it's kind of a mathematical hack. So, for example, If I'm going to get a 7% return and I do 72 divide by 7, that's approximately 10. And at the 7% return, it's going to take 10 years for the money to double, 7% compounded will take 10 years. If I have a 10% return,”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In New York, the Native American Indians in New York who owned the island of Manhattan, the Dutch settlers wanted to buy the island. And so they went to the Indians and said, we'd like to buy the island of Manhattan, great natural harbors. It can be a great place for us. And the Indians and the Dutch reached an agreement to sell the island of Manhattan for twenty three dollars. And when people hear that, they think, oh, the Indians got taken. I don't know, Manhattan for $23 is ridiculous. But let's say the Indians had a trust officer who they said invest this twenty-three dollars for the benefit of the tribe and try to do a decent job, right? Now, there's something known as the rule of 72.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are three things that matter. In terms of getting a great outcome with investing. Starting capital, how much the amount you start with. Length of the runway How long are you going to invest the money? and the rate of return. So before I answer your question, I want to tell you a story. So, and this is a true story. In 1623,”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's absolute honesty. It's pretty simple. It's black and white. You conduct yourself with the highest levels of ethical standards. So on all fronts when you're dealing with a customer or internally or externally, it's the moral standards need to be very high.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most important is integrity. You know, I mean We want three traits, right? We want intelligence. We want integrity and we want willingness to work hard. And none of these three are really negotiable.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is very important. Fire fast. I think FireFast is more important than higher slow. And you're doing the person a service because they may be exceptional in another role at another place. So you are helping them. To find that And you're helping your other team members”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So recruiting is really important. And I think the other thing is we're willing to hire people who may not do things as well as we do. But actually also what I've also found is I have so many people on my team who are better than me. They're better at many of these things because it's not my natural bent to do those jobs. So that's really when you get a huge bang for the buck, is you end up with team players that are way better than you.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are tools that you can use. We use, there's a company called Caliper. We use for pre-employment testing. And the thing is that between the genetics of a human and the first five years of the life experience, who they are, their traits are hard coded. That is not going to change from five to ninety five. So it's not like you're going to change a human. Human is the way they are. Now these pre-employment testing tests can get you data that you're not going to get an interview.”
2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT