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Acquired

Acquired

By: Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
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 Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them.Copyright 2025 ACQ, LLC Economics Personal Finance
Episodes
  • Ferrari

    Ferrari
    Apr 13 2026
    Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermes sells that many Birkins and Kellys roughly every 2 years, and Rolex moves that many watches every 3 months. And yet this ultimate luxury product also lives under the same roof with a widely-beloved professional sports team… one with 400 million rabid fans from all walks of life who live and die by the Scuderia’s performance every F1 race weekend! How is it possible that these two seemingly contradictory customer bases can coexist within the same company? And far from destroying each other’s value, only reinforce it? The answer, it turns out, is a beautiful, bloody, tragic and romantic opera that spans two families and three generations — and just might be one of the best tales we’ve ever told on Acquired. Buckle up for the story of Ferrari. Sponsors:Many thanks to our fantastic Spring '26 Season partners:J.P. Morgan PaymentsVercelServiceNowStatsigLinks:Sign up for email updates, get out takeaways and research photos from each episode, and vote on future topics!Our Ferrari "episode preview" in WSJ!Enzo Ferrari by Luca Dal MonteSeeing Red on IMDbGo Like Hell by A.J. BaimeStephen Wilmot's great WSJ piece on FerrariFerrari factory tourWorldly Partners' Multi-Decade Ferrari StudyAll episode sourcesCarve Outs:Ford v FerrariMaison Wheat sweatersCraig Hill scissorsAmazon grocery serviceTravelpro Altitude backpackMore Acquired:Get email updates and vote on future episodes!Join the SlackCheck out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store!00:01:08 Intro00:06:11 Enzo Ferrari's Early Life & Tragedies (1898-1919)00:12:39 Scuderia Ferrari: Enzo's Racing Dream (1920-1933)00:25:08 The Prancing Horse & Ferrari's Branding00:35:41 First Ferrari Road Cars & Le Mans Victory (1947-1949)00:51:31 F1 & The Tragedies of Enzo's Life (1950s)01:14:03 Ford vs. Ferrari: The Le Mans Rivalry (1963-1966)01:21:24 Enzo Sells 50% to Fiat (1969)01:29:10 Luca di Montezemolo's Return to F1 Glory (1971-1976)01:52:40 Ferrari's "Pepsi Challenge" and how Luca rescued the company (1991)02:27:41 Post-IPO Ferrari: New Models & Growth (2015-Present)02:48:24 The FUV Purosangue & Model Range03:07:16 Ferrari Luce: The EV Future with Jony Ive03:12:37 Ferrari Today by the Numbers03:29:39 Analysis03:50:04 Carve-Outs + Thank Yous‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
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    3 hrs and 59 mins
  • Formula 1

    Formula 1
    Mar 2 2026
    Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality television. It's also the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million fans globally — a fact that would shock most Americans, who until a recent viral Netflix series had barely heard of it.Today we tell the story of how a chaotic, deadly, and gloriously dysfunctional European racing series became one of the greatest business stories in sports. For decades, brilliant engineers and daredevil drivers dedicated their lives (and too often lost them) to a league controlled for 45 years by a single man: a former London car dealer named Bernie Ecclestone, who centralized power and extracted billions, while also undeniably single-handedly making the sport successful. Then, in a move no one saw coming, the American company Liberty Media bought the whole thing in 2017, installed a team of Fox Sports and ESPN veterans, and did what Bernie never would — professionalized it. All of a sudden famously money-losing F1 teams turned into real businesses, with the average team valuation today clocking in at an astounding $3.6 billion. Buckle up for one of our most-requested episodes: the wild story of Formula 1.Sponsors:Many thanks to our fantastic Spring '26 Season partners:J.P. Morgan PaymentsServiceNowVercelStatsigLinks:Sign up for email updates and vote on future episodes!The Formula by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan CleggDrive to Survive on NetflixF1 The Movie on Apple TVAdrian Newey, How to Build a CarSenna documentaryWorldly Partners' Multi-Decade Formula One StudyAll episode sourcesCarve Outs:Cirque du Soleil EchoSuper Bowl LX Mic'd UpTonalPrincess Peach: Showtime! on Nintendo SwitchDaloopa for historical financial dataMore Acquired:Get email updates and vote on future episodes!Join the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store!00:00:00 Intro00:05:52 Origins of F1: Britain, Italy, and Monaco00:30:43 Bernie's Entrance00:37:42 Bernie Consolidates Power00:50:33 F1 as a Global TV Sport (Except America)01:08:08 F1's Incredible Engineering Achievements01:19:34 Senna's Crash and a New Era for Safety01:33:18 The Many Owners of F1, and Bernie's Liquidity Drama01:57:48 FOTA: The attempted breakaway series02:05:07 RedBull, Mercedes, and Reinventing the Sport02:42:33 Liberty Media buys F1 and Brings it to the Modern Era03:05:03 Drive to Survive03:26:45 Apple, TV Rights, and Success in America03:41:52 F1: The Business Today03:56:23 Analysis: Why Did F1 Work… and Was Bernie Necessary?04:05:40 7 Powers04:08:23 Bear vs. Bull Cases04:16:32 Quintessence04:20:08 Carve-Outs + Outro‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
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    4 hrs and 30 mins
  • The NFL (2026 Update)

    The NFL (2026 Update)
    Jan 27 2026

    The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays and holidays too) to watch the world’s most beautiful ballet of violence. It generates the most revenue of any sports league globally and sets new records for team valuations each year. But it wasn’t always this way.

    The history of the NFL mirrors America’s own development: scrappy small-town teams rode the successive growth waves of the automobile, TV, the Internet and social media to grow larger than the even the founders’ wildest dreams. Whether you watch football or not, the NFL is one incredible business story, and one that we’ve taken more lessons from over the years for Acquired itself than perhaps any other episode we’ve made.

    Note: This is a remastered release of our original January 2023 episode, updated to today's Acquired production standards. It also features a full hour+ followup section at the end covering the seismic shifts in the NFL’s business since the original episode’s release. Much has happened in those three years: Taylor Swift entered the league (via merger 🙂), streaming went mainstream (and took over Thanksgiving and Christmas), sports gambling exploded from 46 million to 76 million bettors, and — in perhaps the most surprising development — private equity finally stormed the gates of the NFL. Oh, and average franchise valuations grew by 60% from $4.5 billion to over $7 billion. Communist capitalism is alive and well!

    We're also releasing this episode in advance of Super Bowl LX here in San Francisco, where Acquired is hosting the NFL’s inaugural Super Bowl Innovation Summit!

    Sponsors:

    Many thanks to our partners:

    • Vanta
    • Sierra
    • Crusoe
    • Sentry (+ join the list for Sentry & Vercel’s Super Bowl Fan Zone party)

    Links:

    • Innovation Summit details and all Super Bowl LX Week events in San Francisco (note content from the Innovation Summit will be posted publicly the week after the Super Bowl — we’ll update this page with links when available)
    • America’s Game
    • Sports Illustrated’s oral history of the famous Joe Namath “pool photo”
    • All episode sources

    Carve Outs:

    • The Menu
    • Peyton’s Places

    More Acquired:

    • Get email updates and vote on future episodes!
    • Join the Slack
    • Subscribe to ACQ2
    • Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store!

    00:00:00 Intro
    00:00:37 Welcome to the Remastered NFL Episode
    00:06:05 Origins of Football & the Forward Pass (1869-1905)
    00:14:34 The Founding of the NFL (1920)
    00:41:52 Bert Bell's "Any Given Sunday" Philosophy (1946)
    01:03:28 Pete Rozelle Transforms the League (1960)
    01:56:34 The Creation of the Super Bowl (1966)
    02:09:47 Monday Night Football Invents Modern Sports TV (1970)
    02:37:19 The NFL's Business Model Explained
    02:39:28 CTE & the Kaepernick Controversy (2016)
    02:48:36 Analysis: Playbook & 7 Powers Analysis
    03:21:04 2026 UPDATE: Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Streaming, T-Swift, Gambling & New TV Deals
    03:57:11 Private Equity Enters the NFL (2024)
    04:14:08 Conclusion & Thank Yous

    ‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
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    4 hrs and 17 mins
All stars
Most relevant
wonderful podcast series, the format just works. topics are interesting and relevant, you can tell that the guys have fun researching and telling the stories. recommended

Excellent

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