Acquired

The Home Depot

The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After bei

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire

In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent wh

The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it’s the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectu

Vanguard

Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of

Ferrari

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,

Rolex

Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is

Costco

Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite character

Formula 1

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 m

The NFL

The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursd

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is… sugar water. And somehow it’s also America, Christmas, summertime, friendship and happiness. Today we tell the story of how The Coca-Cola Company amazingly

Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs vers

Google Part III: The AI Company

Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Clau

Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)

It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film” — the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew

Google Part II: Alphabet

In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its

The Jamie Dimon Interview

We sit down with Jamie Dimon for a live conversation at Radio City Music Hall, covering the incredible journey from his 1998 firing at Citgroup (where he was widely expec

Google Part I: Origins of Search

We tell the story of the single greatest business ever created: Google search. From its origins as a Stanford research project called BackRub, Google became the front doo

The Steve Ballmer Interview

We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listen

Epic Systems (MyChart)

What if we told you that the most important company in US healthcare was run from a farm in rural Wisconsin? And that farm contained the world’s largest subterranean audi

Indian Premier League Cricket

When you saw this episode pop up in your feed, you either jumped for joy and hit play immediately (in which case you’re not reading this), or you said “Huh. That’s a surp