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if you think about capitalism you know 100 years ago it was very different right you had carnegie and jp morgan you had uh you know players who'd buy big stakes and businesses they were control shareholders there was an owner on the board of directors so so capitalism over time has democratized uh which i think is great for accessibility to uh you know the average man in terms of investing in the market but you get rid of owners uh controlling companies so we look for very high quality businesses uh what we describe as simple predictable free cash flow generative dominant businesses a business that warren buffett would describe as having a mode around it right if you if you believe that the value of anything financial is the present value the cash you can take out of it over its life we need to know what how much cash is going to generate over its life so the business quality to us is the single most important uh criterion for determining what's interesting because if we can't predict the cash flows we don't know it's worth we don't know what's worth we can't invest so we figure out what it's worth figure out how good the business is how predictable will this cash flows be from a railroad or a spirits company or a real estate company shopping mall business and then we say okay well where's the trading and if there's a wide gap between price and value you can buy for 50 cents it's worth a dollar twenty and then we're going to take a hard look and try to understand why it trades at a deep discount and once we understand the reasons we decide well these things that we can solve you know can we in light of the situation uh the circumstances can we be influential in changing these these levers that can cause this valuation discrepancy to narrow and is this a business that while we're causing the valuation discrepancy to narrow we can also perhaps contribute to the valuation growing and those things are true we found something that looks quite interesting for us one of the best investments we've ever made uh took us four hours to do the work it was during the financial crisis which was that uh wachovia corporation so um i was on my blackberry uh eating breakfast uh the brooklyn diner uh in front of my building and the story went across the uh i was just you know wall street journal headline reuters headline excuse me went across saying that citigroup to acquire the wachovia banking subsidiaries for two dollars in citigroup stock stock was halted this was kind of an interesting transaction because they're buying the subsidiaries for citigroup stock i figured it's interesting what happens to the holding company so i went back to you know kind of went upstairs to the office and you know cracked open the 10k and another member of the team mick maguire he and i worked on it and what was interesting is the thousand page 10k of wachovia corporation i think 900 pages were on the banking subsidiary there's fewer than 100 pages on the holding company most of the people that we have on the investment team are people with more conventional backgrounds uh half the team worked at uh blackstone in either private equity or investment banking uh a few guys from goldman sachs um but i'm a big believer you know i had internships in my uh life and uh you know if i meet a great human being uh you know i want to give some you know people who didn't go to harvard business school and didn't work at goldman sachs for four years you know some exposure so i met the beginning of persian i met a guy named oliver white who i believe is one of the you know he's become recognized one of the top fly fishing guides in the world very smart interesting guy taught me fly fishing and i said look if you're interested in business uh and you want to uh intern at uh learn something about it you know come work for me and oliver came and spent 18 months with us you're taking a very outdoorsy guy and you're putting him in manhattan which is kind of an interesting uh thing he didn't like that part of it but uh he learned a ton about business and then he left he actually worked a lot on uh one of our proxy contest situations in the ceridian we had a proxy contest one of the issues was the uh the ceo was using the corporate jet to do a lot of fly fishing junkets so we were able to track that stuff through his network of fly fishermen so it was useful in the proxy contest anyway um and uh oliver left uh you know dude and uh i backed him to buy a fly fishing lodge which the abaco lodge in abaco in the bahamas and it's like you know 20 unlevered return on capital and he's done an unbelievable job managing and and uh we hired a guy named mary sadamski who i met on the tennis court uh super talented guy went to wake forest uh you know top tennis player and uh he um you know i offered him a job and he's worked for us for the last couple of years and he did a lot of the research on herbalife uh he did a phenomenal job um so i just you know he's gonna go to business school uh because he's gonna he needs more training to come back into the business but i think it's a you know taking a short position and going public with it is a pretty serious business um we uh and i debated long and hard as to whether i wanted to do that again you know we i took a lot of heat for taking a big short position in mbia and uh and sharing my thinking publicly about why i thought that 150 to one levered triple a rated institution guaranteeing subprime cdos was not good for america and not good for your pocketbook and could cause a financial crisis by the way and it took us a couple of years to get the regulators interested in taking a look at the accounting issues reserving issues and so on for the company but i learned a lot about dealing with the regulatory community uh and also now a lot of headaches associated with it uh in the case of verbal life um i couldn't really believe i came to the conclusion that how can this company really exist how is it possible that a four billion revenue business with a seven billion dollar market cap is a pyramid scheme um and uh but you know how could bernie madoff had 50 billion dollars under management in a pyramid scheme um and i debated do i want to go public with this and uh you know the first part of that analysis is one we've got to get to a level of certainty here that is higher than any other investment we've ever had because again to come out and say a company is effectively violating the law is a pretty serious uh accusation uh we didn't want to do it on our own you know we hired one of the top law firms in the country who did six months worth of work and came to the same conclusion and agreed to meet with regulators with us which i think was important part of our the work we did but still do i want to go public and take the heat the problem with short selling is it's still not accepted as a uh particularly well accepted as an american way of investing there seems like something inherently shadowy or evil about short sellers you look at some of the uh you know david iron horns call on lehman jim chanel says if uh lehman had done a recapitalization in response to david einhorn saying they had inadequate capital yeah lehman would still exist and i don't know exactly what if the uh the course of the financial crisis we sort of had a financial crisis probably not as severe um at mbia in effect recapitalized when we pointed out the adequacy of their capital you know uh municipal bondholders would have a better would have a better insurer in the case of verbal life uh we concluded the risk reward was very attractive we thought um by virtue of sharing our thinking publicly and pyramid schemes rely on deception uh there are they got to recruit almost a couple two million people a year to keep the scheme going and a growing number to keep this game growing it's harder to do that when there's tremendous visibility about the business model the company's been forced to update its disclosures that it's now sending to its distributors that in fact 88 of the distributors make nothing they get no royalties from from real life that's not a fact that they were willing to disclose publicly before they've been forced to shut down some of this uh lead generation recruitment that happens on the internet which is a completely the way it's done by their distributors is we believe totally in violation of law so just by virtue of going public we mitigate the risk of being short because it affects their ability to deceive people it affects the fundamentals of the company and that reduces the downside of being short the stock price rising and then we have the benefit of a potential record but you would never guess that but so all that's the kind of thesis now did i think that a group of hedge fund managers would take the other side of the trade and and uh try to you know orchestrate a short squeeze no i didn't think that in fact what i think is disappointing about that again it doesn't bother me at all if someone takes the other side every investment we have there's probably someone short uh things that were long or obviously long things that were short that's how the markets work uh what what's sort of nice about the hedge fund industry is it was an industry where it was more a cooperative industry i didn't view my people in the industry as competitors because we would find value together you know ultimately you know you see partnerships and various investments this was the first case where a lot of sniping going on between managers which i think is just a negative for the industry slick is not an easy thing to be a regulator it's you know it's a job where you don't get a lot of awards for being a regulator unfortunately you get in trouble for missing things uh you have limited resources even though it's the government they have limited budgets uh companies have you know uh you know lobbying organizations they have uh influence uh and they you know they push on the margin to minimize uh regulation oversight of their business so their forces fighting against regulators it took us 18 months to do the work we could spend an unlimited amount of money hiring the best lawyers in the country we can put an unlimited amount of resources to figure things out we could focus just on this one company and we have no obligation to regulate the rest of the direct so-called multi-level marketing industry we found one outlier we spent all of our time and energy on it we studied it and it took us a very long time to get to a level of conviction and certainty that we feel comfortable going public a regulator can't do that they just don't have the resources to do that and that's you know look i think the answer is first of all i'm philanthropic generally uh there is a taint associated with short selling my experience with mbia is every time we talked about or made a presentation about mbia people would say oh he only believes that because he's going to make a profit if the stock price goes down and what's interesting is all day people go on cnbc and talk about stocks they like and no one discredits them by virtue of the fact they're going to make a profit if it rises but on the short selling side there's something at least some people perceive inherently wrong with it in the mbia case the stock basically went up for years this the credit spreads got tighter and tighter and the aaa rate rating remained until one day i gave a presentation at uh forgot which conference and i said the end of my presentation i hereby commit to give away 100 of the profits that i personally make from this investment that was the high for the stock it went straight down the credit spreads went from 13 to 2 000.
we made you know a lot of money yeah uh i see the persian square foundation with 140 million dollars from that uh situation fantastic and we've spent the money already so we need to refill the foundation so yeah in fact we've spent 200 million on on uh charitable things and we're running out of resources you
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