The Compound and Friends - How Ron Baron Became the Greatest Fund Manager of All Time

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

On episode 252 of The Compound and Friends, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Downtown Josh Brown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and Michael Batnick are joined by Ron Baron and Michael Baron of Baron Capital to discuss: long-term investing, Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, artificial intelligence, and the power of owning exceptional businesses for decades. Ron explains how Baron Capital grew from $10 million in assets to approximately $70 billion, why the firm invested repeatedly in SpaceX, and why he believes it could eventually become the world’s most valuable company. Ron and Michael also discuss what they saw in Tesla before most of Wall Street, how they evaluate visionary founders, and what allows them to hold through extreme volatility. This episode is sponsored by Nuveen. Start your alternative investments journey with Nuveen by visiting http://nuveen.com/alternatives Sign up for The Compound Newsletter and never miss out: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thecompoundnews.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠twitter.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tiktok.com/@thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, Juan, I know we just met, but I have a slight bone to pick. Go ahead. I want to read your Q2 letter. I want to write it. It's July 22nd, 23rd. I know. I'm so late. You know, it's tough writing it, but once you get it written, you say, man, I really like

to how it sounds or you know, but I go over and over and over it. Baron AI. You have no excuse. I know. Michael, am I right? I'm behind as well in letter, so it's a sensitive topic at the moment. All right. Not the first person to say this.

But there's so much you have to do all the time to write letters or to be in a program and prepare for it. And your letter is, it's not one page. No, it's three. Yeah. No, it's more than that. Four. The Ron letter? Yeah.

It was substantial. It was substantial. I find that it's very hard to write about markets given the pace of change. You write something and something happens the next day. Whoops. And you either say, this changes. what I just wrote, or I wish I had incorporated this new piece of information. Find that things are speeding up, do you?

Really fast. I don't really write very much about the markets, right, really mostly about investing and about businesses and about people, principles. But what we do, you know, the mission that we follow, we have. That's my idea. Everyone else is writing about it. You watch television, the market's going to do this, the stock's going to do that. we don't worry about that at all.

Right. There's no value in that kind of commentary because it comes and goes. There's no reason to write it down. We're an investor in MSCI. A lot of what they do, the information they provide to hedge funds, investors, they enable a lot of it's to happen. So a lot of volatility comes about because it's going to systematic investing instead of investing in fundamentals the way we do.

You probably love the AI sell-off of MSCIA. and S&P and Moody's as if AI was going to replace all of these companies. Well, MSCI is going to be amazing. I was talking to Henry Fernandez, who's the founder and chairman of that company, and he owns a little bit over a billion dollars, and we own over a billion dollars, and we're having a contest. And he said, Ron, you know, if you lent me $100 million in 10, you know, if you lend me $100 million in 10 years, it's going to be worth $400, 500,000.

million dollars. I'd rather own it in my name. Is this the most exciting time? I know you've been doing this for a long time, but there's got to be up there in terms of business change. Fifty-six years. What do you think? Most exciting time for me, we've never had such a large position as if we have in SpaceX and Elon. You know, when you think about how we sort of our business, and we had, so I come to New York in 1969, the summer in 1966. in 1960s, I didn't get into medical school. And I taught for a year of biochemistry

at Georgetown Medical School. I taught there. I couldn't get into that school. I was hoping I would get in after a year on PhD Fellowship. Same. Where'd you grow up? Asbury Park, New Jersey, Boardwalk. And so after a year, I got a job in the Patent Office, working in the daytime as an examiner, and went to law school at night. a scholarship. And when I was working

in the patent office, my art was chemistry. That was draft-exempt job. Critical skill. And so I issued the patents on the nose cone, on the coatings for the nose cones that they used to come back to Earth and not burn up.

So I always advise my friends. If you ever have a chance to ride in a nose cone, don't do it. You had first-hand knowledge. That would be a good idea. No. And so, So that was in 1960s. I come to New York in 1969.

I'm in debt, $15,000. And my credit wasn't good enough to get a telephone. Couldn't get a telephone. And then I talked my way into a job after three months being unemployed as an analyst. In the 1970s, I did research and sold us to hedge funds, mutual funds, partnerships, families for commissions.

So my whole reason of, being was to buy and sell. Did you work with A.W. Jones? They were one of my clients. And he was like allegedly the first hedge fund. You were doing brokerage? I was doing brokerage. Okay.

In fact, one of my clients was A.W. Jones and it was not him, but it was a man named Walter Harrison. And he was a portfolio manager there. And I remember I tried advertising for barren funds. And I said, well, I'll run an ad. I ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal. and I made the ad up. And the ad was,

we deliver, and it was a picture of a man with a white apron on and a chef's hat and a tray. And I said, we deliver performance, not pizza. We're in a Wall Street Journal

was $8,000. And the first day, we got 50 phone calls in response. It worked. Did you take the phone calls? They got to me, but we got 50 phone calls

and we're three people with me. And so phone calls. 50, then I went to 10, then I went to 20, then I went to five, and then Friday there were none. And so I called up one of my friends, Walter Harrison, from E.W. Jones. I said, Walter, I need an order. How do you expect me to survive? I need an order. And he said, well, I'd like to have a hamburger rare with French fries. You like to add. Right. So I found a greasy spoon place on Wall Street, and I said, listen, I want the greasiest, you know,

leakiest hamburger you can have, but don't deliver until 5 o'clock and put it on the guy's desk and leave it there. And it comes down Monday morning and it's just all over his desk. Oh, my God. But I have W. Jones. Anyway, so in 1970s, I did research, sold it for commissions, and then one of my clients, and then 1980, I went from having a minus net worth to being worth a million dollars in 1980. And then 1982 started Baron Capital, we had $10 million in her management.

It all come from George Soros. And then 1976 or 77, he was one of my clients for ideas. He had had a bad year. And Juan said, why don't you have some other people manage money for you instead of just you? And he gave $5 million to six people, seven people. I was one of them, favorite guys outside of him. And then everyone else bought and sold and I bought and held. And my performance is better than the others.

So I started off Barron Capital with $10 million. under management M million. And then that was 1982. 1992, 100 million. And at the end of June, it was 69 billion. Michael, are you taking notes? You don't know this story?

I've heard it. And 69 billion is what we had. And then 70 billion is how much profits we've made. So we managed 69. I think that's good. I think that's got to be one of the biggest deliveries

of capital back to investors. record. It's a no-dice. I don't know. But I think that we're going to make hundreds of billions of dollars next 10, 15 years. Actually, Berkshire did okay, but

a little bit different. We have Barron Capital book value, our management company, our family management company, we had $100,000 book value in $192, $100,000. And that's now

$4.5 billion. No pressure, Michael. And then there's $1.5 billion more of deferred taxes that we owe if I were going to sell things, which we're not going to sell. So basically 100,000 in 1982,

turned into $6 billion. I mean, it's really unbelievable. Well, it's not one person. Our business is now 233 people, and 45 are analysts. We have very low turnover of our portfolio, very low turnover of the people who work there. And just long-term investors.

I was going to say the buy-and-hold part, The buy is the easy part. The hold is the hard part. And a lot of people talk about doing it, but not everybody does it. You know, people say one of the most well-known hedge funds, who was in difficult times five or ten years ago, whenever it was, he talked about being a long-term investor. He turned over his portfolio every day.

It's just crazy things. And our turnover is in very, in all the, virtual audience, this is less than 10%. And the portfolio is that Michael and I and my other son, David, manage, it's probably less than 5%. And we're just a long term. So we made, of our profits, we made about $40 billion before Elon and $30 billion more with Elon.

So that's our 70. And I think with a case of Elon, we're going to make, we can't even figure out how we're going to make $100,000, of billions from here with our investments in SpaceX and Tesla. We'll see about that. Well, we're definitely going to get it. We're definitely going to get into that.

Do we want to start the show? Oh, that wasn't the show? That wasn't it. I thought that was the show. I got to do that again. No, we got it all. We got it all. No worries.

Oh, boy. Whoa, whoa, stop the clock. Here's a word from our sponsor. Welcome to The Compound and Friends. All opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnik, and their castmates are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Riddholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions.

Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Compounded Friends, episode 252, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world's greatest investing podcast. It is. I don't know if I told you that. You did. Four and a five dent disagree. This is their favorite.

All right, you guys, we have a... You got a favorite dentist? We have an extremely special pair of guests today, literally a living legend with us. We are so excited. This is the show that we have wanted to do for quite some time. And without any further ado, let me introduce Ron Barron. Ron is the founder, CEO and portfolio manager for Barron Capital. The growth equity firm he started in 1982, now manages over $55 billion.

He's known as one of the great long-term Elon Musk investors. Barron bought most of its Tesla stake between 2014 and 2016 at a split-adjusted average, around $14 a share and turned a $1.75 billion dollar SpaceX investment that began in 2017 into a roughly $25 billion position. Unbelievable. Welcome to the show, Ron. We're so excited to talk to you about it. And with Ron is Michael Barron. Michael is a co-president and a portfolio manager at Barron Capital,

where he started as a research analyst in 2004. How'd you get in there? You got another right people. Michael has co-managed the concentrated, non-diversified Barron Partners Fund alongside his father since 2018. The fund returned about 25% in 2025 versus just 8.7% for the Russell mid-cap growth. with Tesla at roughly 27% of the portfolio.

He also runs Barron Wealth Builder and co-manages the Barron First Principles ETF, R-O-N-B, with Ron and his brother David. Michael, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. All right. Here's how I want to start. This is a quote,

since their respective Inceptions as mutual funds, 15 funds representing 96.2% of Barron Funds AUM have outperformed their benchmarks, and 13 funds, representing 95.4% of Barron Funds AUM, rank in the top 20% of their respective Morning Star categories. Six funds representing 54% of your AUM rank in the top 5% of their categories. And Barron Partners Fund is the number one performing mutual fund in the United States since its inception as a mutual fund in 2003. That is outrageous. You wake up every day and say, I'm the goat?

Or, I mean, how does it feel, I guess how does it feel, first of all, to be a one-of-one in a category of your own? Before we get into that, it's when I say, not $55 billion, as of June, it's $70 billion. All right. And that comes from $100 million in 1992, 1992. 100 million became $70 billion. And so that's one. And if you wrote your July 2nd, your Q2 letter, we would have known that, Ron.

I'll never underestimate you again, Ron. And then Tesla, we've been investing in Tesla between 2014 and 16, met him in 2010. It took four years. said, what took you so long? It took four years before we began to invest in between 14 and 16, invested 400 million. And we made about, actually I checked today, we made $7.7 billion in profit on that $4 billion. I think we're going to make five times that next 10, 15 years. But the big position we have now, that's now about $5 billion of our assets. However, the big investment we have now is SpaceX. And that represents, as of June.

about $25 billion, $25 billion out of 70 is space X. You can't find another fund. It's a bet. It's a real bet. We don't consider ourselves betting. We consider ourselves investing on the basis of knowledge, not bets. You've got bet kohannis. Yeah.

Either way, it's a conviction, it's a conviction position. You know, Mark Hoplamazian, who's the president, Chief Operating Officer for Hyatt, was telling me that he and Tom Pritz. who's my friend, who's the chairman and biggest owner of Hyatt, said that they marveled, and they're invested. A lot of executives of companies in which we've invested are investors in SpaceX through us. And he said that they marveled at how we were able to, in SpaceX instance, how did you ever hold on to that stock straight through?

Your point about how hard it is, not just to be able to find an investment that goes up a lot, but to find an investment goes up a lot and not sell it. It's much hard, especially when you get criticized. But is it easier in the private markets? With SpaceX, I guess you could have sold some, but you could not have sold all, even if you wanted to. And we started buying, we could have sold any day we wanted. Yeah. We started buying SpaceX in 2000.

So Tesla was 2014 to 16. And then they did an employee tender offers every year twice. They do a billion dollars. And they get oversubscribed very quickly. And then Elon started in a lot. private company, Elon started buying some of those employee tenders for himself. That's a great signal. So because we had a, and he owned 44% of company.

And so we had this good relationship with him. So we got included and we were treated the same as Saudi Arabia, as Abu Dhabi, as Fidelity. We're a tiny investor and that's how they treated us. It was incredible. And so we invested in the aggregate on 27 discrete transactions since 2017 purchased stock. And we were either the number one or number two or number three purchaser on each of those transactions in SpaceX 27 times. So we're talking about selling. We were purchasing.

So other than just these tenders, we told them that if they ever see any stock that is available, we want to buy it. And so we would get these calls and say, here's a guy who's been in the LeBester a long time. He's got $25 million for sale. Do you want it? Said, give me a day. I'll call you tomorrow. And they called me, calling back tomorrow. We want it.

We bought it. So we kept 27 transactions. And in the aggregate we invested, I think it's $2 billion so far. And it's now worth about June 25 billion. And then we bought a billion dollars more on the IPO. And the reason we bought the billion, they said, well, how come that we bought a billion more because we owned 1.25% of SpaceX and I didn't want to get diluted. Right. But I think we're going to make in that investment where I think from Tesla we'll make four or five times of money next 10 years, we think that in SpaceX we're going to make somewhere 20 times, 30 times from the IPO price, 20 to 30 times next 10 to 15 years.

Incredible business. You think this is going to be the biggest company in the world? Yes. By a wide margin. I think it's going to be, we think it's going to be 20 to 30 trillion dollar value, at least, $40 trillion. It started off a $2 trillion as the IPO. Ron, when people hear that number, it sounds like you're on drugs. I don't do drugs.

I don't drink. But you understand, like, when people say, well, we're first seeing now, the first ever $5 trillion. Well, the SEP market cap total is, what, $70 trillion, whatever it is? So, 70. People are saying that, people are saying that. I think it might be 80.

What your vision is for something that's never existed before on Earth. So I'm sure you have a great answer for it. You're right. This is a unique business. And one of the things we look for, so we have, so we have, our firm is different than most money managers.

So we have a mission. And the mission is to change, lives. That's our mission. And so when you have something like a mission, then all of a sudden you get better employees than you do because you're working for something, not just for themselves. And then we have principles that we follow. And the principles are, how do we do it? You know, we question everything we do. You talked about gambling before, about betting. We question everything. And I tell the people with whom we work that what I want them to do when they're making our analysts, when they make recommendations to us, I want them to think about

if their family fortune, if their family good well-being depended upon them being right, what would they have to know in order to make that investment? What would they have to know? And I said, when companies come to visit us, which they do every single day, they come to visit us, to court us to invest in their businesses, I said, I don't want to see them not typing, I don't want to see them stop asking questions. You ask them, and there are no dumb questions. You keep asking questions, and you ask questions as though your life depends. You don't have to write all the time.

I don't expect that, but I do expect you to find out what are the critical elements of a business that make us want to invest in it, that make it different than all the other businesses. There have to be, and we have to like the people. And so you're asking questions, and then you're betting on people. That's a bet. And the betting on people is you're trying to judge their character all the time. So Buffett says that before he invests in someone, integrity is the most important thing than intelligence than energy.

He says if you don't have integrity and you get someone high energy, that's a really bad deal. Don't do that. But basically, integrity is the most important part. Elon says it's the heart that makes him, you know. Is there nothing that Elon has done over the last 10 years that you've been in invested in Tesla and now SpaceX, where you've said to yourself, okay, I really like the guy. I really think he has the potential to change the world. But some of these character questions are now tougher for me to answer.

Or have you been able to look past the stuff that the media seems to be consumed with? He tweeted this. He said that. Like, what's your take on the public persona of Elon versus Elon, the business manager? I think he really does have a big heart. When you think about someone who works or sleeps four or five hours a day, works seven days a week, and if you're worth a trillion or $3 trillion or $5 or $10,

what difference to make? And so why are you doing that? And if you're doing that because he wants humanity to survive and he wants better lives for everyone, The things that he's doing, so normally, the stock market on our economy double about every 10 years. They make about 2 or 3% a year of real growth and about 4% or 5% is inflation. So 7% a year of growth means you double the economy and double the stock market about every 10 years. The value of money falls in half about every 15 years, 4% or 5% inflation.

So you have to make twice as much in 15 years just to stay even. So what he's doing is that he thinks that with all of the innovations that he's bringing to the bear, that he's changing everyone. So we think we're changing the lives of people with whom we do business. He's changing everyone's life. And I can't even imagine, you know, so growing up what I thought my life was going to be and what my children's lives were going to be. And for Michael and for his children and their children, I can't imagine what's going to happen. He thinks the growth of the world's economy, of the United States economy,

is going to, instead of doubling every 10 years, he thinks it's going to grow 10 times every 10 years because of what he does. He thinks there's going to be generational change is going to be guaranteed incomes that people will have. and he's going to try to find the truth in the truth in the universe. So what he does is that he has Asperger's, and he was on, on, on, what is it,

what's the Sorcan? Saturday Night Live. Oh, yeah. Saturday Night Live. And I gave him a couple jokes. And I don't know if he used them. I think he used one of them. And, and, but when he was there,

he said, I got Asperger's, and so he's a different kind of person. He's the most brilliant engineer on the planet, obviously, and his vision other people don't have. Nobody thinks about the things that he thinks about. And all these things he does, they all tie together. They all somehow fit together. He always said, gee, I wonder, did he ever think of that before he bought that? Did he ever think?

but he's always, you know, trying to make everyone's life better. And so all those people who are investors who work at SpaceX, they're all shareholders to SpaceX. Gaves everyone shares. So we want everyone to participate. Well, we said this earlier this week, Michael and I were talking, and I'm pretty sure, I can't prove this, but I'm pretty sure out of every CEO of a publicly traded company,

Elon has probably created more millionaire, households. Like, I'm trying to think if there's anyone else. Maybe Bezos. Maybe Bezos, but I'm not sure. Because I think the average Tesla employee is probably a higher compensation than the average Amazon employee, but that's not science. I'm just making it up. But I think between investors and employees, it's got to be Elon Musk. I'm sure it's the case. Do you think that it's just like the, a lot of the things that people either criticize about Elon Musk or more about style than substance, the way he speaks, the way he handles questions on conference calls, the way he uses social media, and maybe a lot of the things that people criticize are really just, he's a very

differently, differently. He behaves differently. Yeah. He's very political. He, yeah, I suppose. And if I were, you know, there's things. I think that the way he should have gone into the government, in my opinion, was that it would have been better if he said, in my opinion, that, you know, what we're going to do here is we're going to

make the government more efficient about the way we issue contracts. We're not going to have cost plus contracts where people are incented to take longer and cost more. We're going to do it for fixed bids. In fact, that's what they do now with. The Defense Department now, too. With SpaceX. Everything for us is fixed price.

And price is better than everyone else, and better quality and delivers on time and stuff works, as opposed to not. So he should have been holding himself out as I am a builder. I am the best builder on the planet probably. So when other people take two and three years to build a data center and cost them $40 or $50 billion, then we build it for a gig, then we build it in six months.

122 days, six months we build it, and it costs us a fraction of what it cost them. So we build, you know, Elon thought that there's going to be a short supply of compute, and you thought that was a limiting factor for all this AI to be effectively working. The LLMs will be working. So other people, Anthropic, goes from $9 billion of annualized revenues to 45, $5 billion in six months, and there's a three or four-year-old company, who Elon trained him and ChachyBT. Elon trained him.

And so... Dario and Sam both have that in their family tree. Right. Right. And so he left, you know, and Grock got started. Right. And Grock is so far behind, but within the next probably, five or six months, then we're not very far behind Anthropic right now. And I think that within the next

six months, we will catch them and be equal. A lot of tests were almost equal right now. But when you're buying stuff from GROC, it's 65% cheaper than Anthropic. 65% cheaper. So you know, so use of the model. Yeah. So if you use our model, you're going to have it significantly less fewer tokens than if you're using agroquin you don't you know anthropic so you don't really need to use as much as they are with uh with anthrop what did you what did you see in tesla in 2014 that the rest of wall street didn't because that predates all of the models it obviously predates profitability it's it's a fairly early stage i think the IPO is 2010 um very little coverage on wall street I know Adam Jonas was writing about it, and I don't think any asset manager had come in and made a big bet on it.

So you were probably the first. Why were you able to see more of the future than everybody else? Can I jump in for one second? Just to clarify, we weren't the first. And I don't think we're ever necessarily early on things. We met Elon on the IPO. We had a very small stake, due to private equity investment. Is it 2011?

11, 10. 10. Okay. And we spent a lot of time with him, a lot of time with the management team. Took us around four years of diligence on the company, diligence on him. What makes him take? What is he trying to achieve? And at the time, what were they doing? Around 30,000 vehicles a year? Yeah. Something in that ballpark.

One facility over in Fremont. Over in California. And we didn't spend time talking about, you know, what are you doing in this one facility or, you know, how many vehicles you can actually do in this one place. But what are they trying to achieve? And one of the things I noticed in the first, one of the first visits is there's a big mission. You know, my dad was just speaking about what our mission is in terms of changing lives. And Elon has a mission for all of his businesses, you know, and the mission over at Tesla

was to drive humanity to, I'm probably butchering it a little bit, but drive humanity to some kind of renewable resource from energy perspective. Nothing to do with vehicles, nothing to with transportation. It's doing good for society, changing us to a better way to consume energy. And when you understand that he is going to be a lot more dynamic than a single business, that's what kind of got us excited on. And all of our questioning was really about that. How do you become this much greater business?

And what Elon's famous for doing, both in Tesla and I was doing the kind of the same little playbook over at SpaceX, it's about vertical integration. So all the prior automobile companies was about outsourcing. You know, get your seatbels from someone, get your airbags, your wheels from someone else, and everyone takes a little bit of margin. If you really want to change the world, you need to do it yourself. You need to drive down costs as low as low as possible. And he's able to make vehicles now that others cannot possibly catch up to.

And I think that Tesla is on the cusp of really transforming itself from a hardware company, you know, selling a box on four wheels, earning a one-time profit to a software company, you know, basically selling the mile. So, but while you're invested in it, all of the car people are telling you, you're going to lose all your money. Yeah, it's a zero. So it must have been difficult to tune that out. Right, but it's four years.

Maybe you didn't tune it out. Maybe you looked at that and said, they don't get it. They think they're covering a car company. Yes, exactly. It took four years of constantly questioning. our conference last year, two years ago. Last year, three times. And we were talking about that kind of thing.

And he says, you know, what took you so long on me, you know, doing all that diligence? Where was the hold of him? I'm like, Elon, you know, look at you. You know, he's this crazy guy, you know, where I remember you always describe him in one of the first meetings coming in unshaven and, you know, a different kind of character. But really he needs to get comfortable on the person, you know, what's motivated and who they are, what they're trying to achieve and then trying to independently verify whether or not they can successfully do it. So, Ron, you've done this before. There's an anecdote about Steve Wynn

and being an investor in Winn resorts for decades or, you know, just like being able to see through short-term volatility. And this is another case where I'm guessing you're betting on the jockey. You're betting on the person as much as you're betting on the company. You talk a little bit about some of the similarities between the CEOs who have delivered the most value to you to the Elon Musk situation? So we have our portfolios are balanced out where we have maybe 25, 30% of our portfolio invested in companies like SpaceX or like Tesla or like Nvidia. and then we have the rest of our companies invested in companies that might be valued

relative to book value, relative to cash flow, relative to earnings per share, that are at least double-digit returns, but more consistent, you know, it's not in the sky. Like higher, it's now. It's now. Right. Right. And it can be hotel companies. It could be an animal hospital company.

could be a health care uniform company like Figgs, which I love. It could be a company that owns real estate like Vail Resort. Yeah. When people don't need to work anymore, they're going to need to do something. So. Okay. Ron, so most stocks are garbages. Most businesses suck.

Hendrick Bessimbender has his famous study where he compares what are the lifetime returns of businesses versus the stock market versus inflation versus cash. And here we go. Just 27% of stocks kept pace with the value with the stock market, just 27% of stocks, meaning 73% lose versus T-bills. Only 42% of stocks over their lifetime beat treasuries. Only 48% delivered a positive. lifetime return. So it's basically a coin flip of these companies are even going to make money

for their shareholders over the time of their listening to the time they die or acquired or whatever. And then the median stock lost 7% over its entire lifetime. So most companies are trash and are not worth investing and certainly not buying and holding. And yet, you guys have found a way to buy and hold stocks that have done the opposite, that have generated astounding returns, astounding returns. So I'm curious, when did you have this insight? How did you know that the money was made by waiting? Because that is extraordinarily difficult.

Josh mentioned you held win for 27 years. It's like unheard of. So how did that insight come to you so early? And how are you finding the stocks that actually are worth buying and holding? Well, we do research. But some of it, a lot of it comes from my background growing up. So my dad was an engineer for the Army. And I would always ask him, and when I was 1942, he was making $2,500 a year.

And then when I was bar mitzvah, $9,56, he was making $10,000. I would ask him all the time. Are we middle class yet? And that was when we got to be middle class in 1956. And I noticed, couldn't miss it when I was growing up that, So we lived in a small house, and my friends lived in larger houses. And they drove Cadillacs, and we had an old Ford and used cars all the time. And I was wondering, how did that happen?

And what happened was that they owned a business, or they owned a motel, or they owned rides on the boardwalk, or they owned a legal practice. They owned something. They owned it. And so it always made me think about, you know, owning things, he's going to make money. Then my friend in Asprey Park, his name was Mark Masser. His dad had a real estate business in Asbury Park. And I'm talking to him one day.

And I just had $1,000 from my boy at Mr. It's saved up. And he says, you need to invest in the stock market. I said, what's the stock? and he explained to me that it's the easiest thing. You buy something and it's 10 times earnings and they pay you a dividend and every year it becomes more valuable and you don't have to manage it.

So, well, that sounds pretty cool. So I go to my parents, my dad and say, I'd like to invest my thousand dollars in stock market and he said, well, I've never invested in stocks. I don't know how to do that. But if you can show me why you know enough to be able to do that,

an open account for you at Merrill Lynch. I said, okay. So I started going after school and reading these reports. And then my savings account was that Monmouth County National Bank in West Allenhurst. And it was Allenhurst. And red brick building, the state senator was the top floor pillar of building, looked substantial. And you go over your pastbook savings account every three months and they stamp in how much interest you made. And so I go there and I read a report about him and I said, I'd like to put my thousand dollars into Mammoth County National Bank. And this is why.

And he said, okay, you can do that. And so I want 100 shares at $10 a share. And with the account at Merrill Lynch. And then from that point, every day the Aspery Park Press, this did the local companies and their prices. every day. And so every day I would look up, Mammoth County, maybe 15 local companies. You remember the ticker? No.

I don't think there was a ticker. I don't know. But every day, the stock, I would look at the end of the day, and every day it would be 10, 10 in an eighth, 10 in a quarter, 10 in 3, 16. Just every day it went up for like six or seven months, and then it got acquired at $17 a share. And I said, oh, my God. You said how I could do this. Except my thousand became 1700. That was two-thirds of my first year's college. And I said, wow, nothing's this. I can do that. And so that's how I became interested in investing. But it was the idea about owning something. And then after I became an analyst in 1970s and did research and sold us to all these institutions and hedge funds and, you know, Soros was a client. Peter Lynch was a client. So I had all of these clients.

And every time, my stocks in the 1970s were McDonald's, Disney, Nike, and Ken Langone calls me up one day. And he says, I see you're buying a company, Dailen. And I said, yeah. And he says, do you know who I am? I said, everybody knows who Ken Langone is. Yeah. And he says, well, I'd like to have lunch with you. And so we go to lunch at the Bull and Bear at the Waldorf Astoria.

I remember. And I walk in, he's much bigger than I am, and he puts his arm around me. And he went to Bucknell, just like I went to Bucknell, and he puts his arm around me, and he says, guys like us, we got to stick together. And I look around and see if there's someone else he's talking to him. He's talking to me. And so we sit there and he says, look, I'm buying Dailen, and I think I'm probably, and they would just come out of bankruptcy, and they owned a company.

There was a home improvement company called Handy Dan in California. And it was Arthur Blank and the other guy were running it. And I was buying it because of them. And he says, I'm buying the same thing. I'm buying for clients. He's buying for him. And so my motor stock brand I is, I buy a stock, goes doubles or triples. I say, sell this and buy this.

So I get two commissions instead of this one. Right. So stock doubles or triples or quadruples. and so we share. He says, anything I see I'll show to you, and anything you see you show to me will spit 50-50. I said, why beat each other up? I said, great, let's do that.

And so we do it, and I buy a stock of $2 a share, and it goes to $4, $5, $6 a share. They say, okay, that's enough. It's called my clients and get them to sell it and buy something else, buy Federal Express. And so we do that. And then these guys at Handy Dan get fired by the head of the company, Dalyan, Sanford-Sigalov,

and then they go to Ken, and Ken raises the money to start Home Depot. So basically, I could have invested in Home Depot at the very beginning, but I had already sold, and so I was gone. Well, you got Tesla. But so I started in the business in the same way. The goal of the firm, the brokerage firm,

they told us, this is the first thing they said, told us, we're not in the storage business. We're in the moving business. So if you were right on a stock, almost by accident, the first instinct is, great, I'm going to get two and a half percent commission to get out of this. And it just so happens. I have another stock that the client should buy right now because they're liquid. And that was, I mean, that was the way.

So you had this insight that I want to be an owner. I want to own businesses. That's the key. And it dates back to what you saw when you first became aware of money. in your childhood? And the other thing I always thought about was inflation. And so my parents' first house,

so when I was born, we lived in rooms in a home in Red Bank, New Jersey. And then 19... And then we moved to Bradley Beach. And then in 1948, and we live in top of a garage. And then in 1948, my parents both their first home

and people were coming back from the world. war and it was $5,000, $5,000 for 2,000 square foot home. And then they sold it in 1955 for $10,000. That house is now worth $500,000. And then they bought another house who built, my dad built the house in 1955 for $20,000. That's no worth a million and a half dollars. Wow. So basically, that happens to be 4, 5, 6% a year. That's what that is. And Michael and I were just talking, we were coming over here, and we're talking about land on the ocean. So everything goes up 4 or 5% a year in price, except land on an ocean that goes up 7, 8% a year, or 9%.

And I was describing to him how some people did not very far away from us, three or four houses away, where the Islander lives actually, two houses away from me, us in the Hamptons. that house, a man comes to visit us in the Hamptons, and he's making vials for drugs, and he wants us to invest with him, you know, smaller vials. And he says, oh, Ron, I lived 12 acres, three houses away from you, and my parents had a dairy farm. And the dairy farm was, the reason we had it there was that it was

more than 100 miles from the center of New York City. And that was important because, and that was measured from Columbus Circle. And that was important because if you're more than 100 miles from the city, what happened is you can sell milk to the government for $1.10 a gallon instead of $1 a gallon. So that's how come they have, that's how come they had the land there.

There's 14 acres. There are 12 acres on the ocean. And so we're talking for it. He says, but you know, we sold our land a long time ago for $250,000. That land is now... I'll be $80 billion now. Between $1.15, $200 million. Yeah, I bet.

And so I was describing to Michael that what that means is that happens to be in 80 years, that happens to be 10 doubles. So 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 62, 64, $1.28, $250,000, $500,000. So, so basically, you know, whatever you have, had 80 years ago, 7% a year is a thousand times more today. Wow. So that's the math. And so the math is if you have something that's unique.

So we're investing in businesses that are unique with people whose character we admire and we trust. And if Elon does things, you know, who am I? You know, we're not active investors. I'm going to tell him how to run a business or what they're. what he should be doing or how he should be acting? Let me discuss this. Both of you can answer this. So one of the benefits of ownership is all of the upside, as you've laid it out, tremendous

upside to growth when you're doing 8% a year over 30 years of time. Holy shit, that's a lot of money. One of the downsides of ownership is you get all the downside. And so I'm curious how both of you can answer this, how you manage your emotions. So on a day like today, Tesla is getting the ship beat out of it. it's down 16%. The stock is where it was in August 2025. It's where it was in November 2021. And obviously, this is not the first time or second or a hundredth time that you guys have experienced something like this, whether it's with Tesla or any other monster winner.

This is the price, right? No pain, no gain. But on days like this, months and quarters and years like this, how do you stick with it? What gives you the confidence to say, we're not leaving? We believe in this vision. Sure, I'll take the first stab at that. On an individual basis, it's very hard to own a stock. It's very hard to own a company if you haven't done the first primaries research. And that's where we pride ourselves on really understanding the business behind it, not really what's happening on a day-by-day basis or a quarter-by-quarter basis.

Additionally, owning stocks as an individual is very volatile. You know, you're going to have multiple times like this, when all of a sudden something comes out or an earnings report comes, out, whether it's SpaceX last week, you know, all of a sudden had a flight not exactly work or they scrubbed it and try again next week. And the impact that has on the stock and what it does to individuals if they actually just own that one security. We want to own stocks in a portfolio when you have different companies that act differently in different market environments. And we really pride ourselves in exactly that, you know, not having a whole portfolio

of the Tesla's and the SpaceX is when all of a sudden there's this quote-unquote risk-off environment, they all move together. And that's what you come with seeing right now in the market, the S&P 500. It's no longer 500 companies. It's 7 or it's 8, 8, including the MAG 7. I like to call it the MAG8 at this point with SpaceX. Obviously not an index yet, but eventually it will be. The rest of 1,000, the same kind of thing.

Very concentrated and highly correlated investments. We're growth. We're only growth. You know, we want to do one thing shortening well that's fine, these growth-oriented businesses, but they need to work in different market environments. You know, we're talking, we're, as a firm, you know, people think of us as, okay, well, you're going to be completely overweight IT, technology kind of investments. We're not.

Discretionary. Yeah. We're actually underway. The whole market is overweight tech. Right. Even if you were 30% waiting, you'd be underway. So, Michael, your answer makes perfect sense from the portfolio, matron point of view. I'm just talking about as a person.

Like, are you good, you have, you guys have billions of dollars in. Tesla and the stock is down 16% today, you're a human being. I would imagine that, like, tonight's going to be a little bit rough. Like, you're going to lose sleep over this? Like, how do you manage your emotions through stuff like this? I mean, I used to. I used to. You know, like you said, it's not your first time having a down day.

First time I had a down day. Yeah, it was real tough. It was probably a tough day, tough week, tough month. A lot of managers, when they get into a position, they'll say to themselves, if X, Y, or Z happen, I'll be wrong and I'll exit the position. It doesn't seem like you guys go into a position already thinking about what could go wrong. It seems like you guys do all that due diligence, spend all that time with the CEO, and you just say to yourselves, there are going to be good years and bad years, but this is a company that's mission-oriented and we're going to stick it out

and there's probably very little that can change your mind. Not to very little. The reason we would sell a position isn't on timing. And I think that's where the market does. All of a sudden, they say, hey, is this happening now? And you're kind of seeing that with Tesla, how much you're going to be spending on CAPEX, how much, you know, they're getting on the robotaxy and when's that going to come to fruition? We don't care about timing. We care about, is this still driving towards what they think we can do longer term? And the biggest area that we would sell something is that competitive advantage deteriorates. You know, people think of us as, hey, your growth, you only care about growth,

growth's the easiest thing I think to kind of identify. The harder aspect is understanding the people who are running the business and understanding is a competitive advantage. Why can other people not do what they're doing? And we feel that in Tesla's case, Robotaxy, cyber cab will come. It might be pushed out a quarter or two

or even a year. That's okay for us. What's interesting about Tesla now to me, maybe I'm seeing this wrong, the competitive advantage they had in EVs. It's not as strong today as it was five years ago. The Chinese are very serious with EVs. But now if you're an owner of the stock, you're talking about optimist and you're talking

about robots. And Tesla probably has a bigger advantage there than anything they've ever done. Remember what I said earlier. Their mission was never about transportation alone. It was about being and getting into renewable energy, going into renewable resources. So they can make 10 million robots a year, though, out of, uh, I guess out of Texas, no one else can do anything near that. So like that, I almost would feel better.

He's not talking about $10 million. And then he's talking about $1 million. So is that how they tell? But so nobody's going to do that. No one's going to ever do anything like his robots. Yeah. So if you think about how you're able to withstand a share price going down, is that all the price does is tell you what you can buy and sell security for in a given day.

It doesn't tell you if a company's doing well or not. You guys aren't getting signal from the fact that the stock is up or down on a given day. They're just, you know, there are guys who trade in systemic investing. They trade and they make stocks go up and down. They follow the leader down. They follow the leader up. You know, that's not what we do. We try to find businesses in which we can invest.

You know, Henry Fernandez says, you know, Ron, what you guys do is you have an ability to see around corners. You know, you can look long term. Our time horizon is five or ten years. other guys are going to say, gee, I understand you're going to make all these billions of dollars of investments. Right. But you know what? If I don't perform today, I'm going to get fired.

I'm not going to be around for that in 10 years. But we can't get fired. We own the business. So basically the way, and we're the biggest investors in our funds and the money that we manage. We're the largest investors. And so, like, 11, 12 percent of the money we manage is ours. and so, which considering that was minus $15,000 in debt,

that's pretty cool. Yeah. So the idea that we have, though, is that you're, you know, it's a time, how we think about five and ten years horizon, and we think about what makes one business different than others. So think about SpaceX. So here he comes along, this is a cool story, that he comes along and he's the founder of PayPal and Elon.

And then when he has the idea, then his partners want to sell PayPal. Wasn't a good sale, but they sell it. He gets $100 or $110 million for his share. And she doesn't need to work anymore at that point. He's a very young man. And so he goes to his wife and he says, you know, honey, I think I would like to spend the rest of my life.

I want to have rockets that you can use over and over again, like airplanes. And she says, okay. And he says, and there's a good chance we'll not be successful. And I could lose, you know, everything. And she says, well, Elon, we have six children. What will we do? Where will we live? And he says, well, your dad has a basement.

We can live in the basement. So that's commitments. And then when you think about what he's done, so then he says, okay, and goes to visit President Putin, and he wants to buy rockets from Putin. And so he goes there and he spends a week there and meets with Putin every day. And Putin is obviously after a while

that Putin's given a run around. So he says, okay, Mr. President, thank you very much for your time. But I think I'll be able to do this by myself. And so Putin looks him and built rockets by himself. Bill rockets and make them return and land again. And Putin says, well, Elon, how are you going to get these to orbit with a slingshot? And so, and that was it.

That was the end of the conversation. So Elon goes. And now it's several years later. And we have the first rocket going up and coming back and landing. And it's a very emotional moment for him. And all the cameras are around. they come right up to him, and he says, and he looks into the camera, and he says,

some slingshot for you. Right. But I mean. It's an inside joke for him and Vladimir Putin. Right, right. It's always good to have the inside jokes way of him. So, but the idea is that the way we invest is that this is not a one-time thing and then done.

We're constantly talking to companies. Every single day I talk to companies every day. So is he. Every day you're talking to companies, every single day. And my wife says to me, Ronnie, I don't, why are you doing this? Why are you working this way? What is the matter with you? And what I do, my life is so interesting to meet these people and speak to them every day

and explain to me how their business operates and explain to me what's different about what they do compared to what everyone else is doing. Yeah. And I say, man, and it strikes the bell. and when you're talking to someone, you say, this, you know, why didn't this rocket work right? Why didn't it work? What happened?

How come the landing strip, you know, the platform blew up and was destroyed? It cost $500 million. How come that was destroyed? What was the matter? And why is a landing strip? It's just cement. Why is that so complicated to build $500 million? And why do you have to build them all around the world?

And why do you have to? So you just keep asking questions. and I was speaking to the CFO for the launch business of SpaceX I guess a couple weeks ago and she told me that a long time ago she told me he speaks to me more than anyone else I talk to every month a couple times, three times a month and she says I talk to you more than anyone else

I made me one of my husband and the way I talk to her she's in California And what I do is that my wife says, you know, you don't need to work at home. And so what I do is she goes to sleep. And then midnight I get up and I go to talk to Milet in California. But she says, I like talking to you more than other people because they're just interested in now. And what you're interested in is what you described to me, how things work. So you guys obviously believe deeply in your.

bones about what you do, your mission, right? It's apparent. You believe it. How long did it take you to train your shareholders to come alongside with you to endure the ups and downs of the businesses that you guys are investing in four years and decades in some cases? I don't think there's necessarily as much volatility in our portfolios as you would suspect based on the fact that we are growth equity investors. We're not just Elon Musk, just this space X of the world. As I was describing earlier, you know, we have these different buckets. in the portfolio. And our partners fund,

it's, you know, in good times, we do well. We keep up with the market and do a little bit better, but I think where we really earn our stripes is in the more difficult time periods

in the economy. When tech's out of favor, when growth's out of favor, we're showed that we're able to protect investors over the course of an entire cycle, not in any one given quarter, not any given a year, or even, you know,

these random one, three, five year periods. But over the course of a down market cycle, we've shown that we're protecting investors. I think one of the worst times, you know, obviously in our history, maybe the United States history of investing, was the dot-com burst through the great financial crisis, where had you invested in the market, you lost about a third of your money. Had you invested with us, we advanced 1.5, 2% annualized in Barron Partners Fund, I'm not sure the exact number, but something in that fall apart. So you grew 12, 15% while the market went down by a third over that, whatever was 9, 10-year period of time.

You can't come back having lost a third of your money. And you have to have these different kinds of buckets and companies that perform differently in different environments. And like I said, you know, you have Barron Partners Fund or Contraighted portfolios that have these investments with these big open-ended growth opportunities. But so many of our other portfolios give that balance and ballast to our clients and to our advisors that, like I was saying earlier,

if you just buy the S&P, if you just buy the Russell 1,000 growth, you're buying seven companies. You're not getting real diversity. and something like we have a barren generational growth fund, which has lagged over the past few years because it doesn't own that. It doesn't own this very small section of the market, these big growth ideas,

but it has nice, steady growth businesses. And the fundamentals of those businesses continue to do well and actually in our inflection point and improving, yet the sentiment is, we're only going to have seven companies in the future. It's only going to be AI companies doing everything. We're not in that mindset. And it's not showing up in the result of these businesses.

The companies are doing better and the valuations are incredibly cheap, you know, 50% off of their highs. You own some software stocks, right? Yeah. So you guys are optimistic that some of the AI fears are overblown? Way overblown. If you have something that is proprietary. Such as? AI should be an enabler to these businesses, not a detriment of them.

MSCI? They have proprietary data. they're spending a great deal on people to gather information to provide to head funds, for example, and there's also going after private. No one has done that before. You guys on FaxSat, too? Yeah. Fax set is a really interesting story.

Market hates it. We have been, so in the past year, we've bought $9 billion worth of stock, and about $5 billion, has been in, software companies. So $5 billion out of nine for software the past year. And in fact set, then we have been investor for a very long time and did well for a long period of time. And then in the past year, the stock has fallen from 500 to 200, it's now 250. And we've been buying it, as the company's been buying it. So the four or five companies that we've been investing in are software, the companies have been buying in like crazy, and we've been buying right along with the

companies, and the narrative is they're not going to exist any longer. And the person who is really interesting to me, who runs, the Paxet now, replaced the prior CEO who we hadn't had good success with for probably three or four or five years, and so it was vulnerable. This guy, So he grows up on a farm in India, dirt poor, figures out how to go to the best technical school in India and goes to the best business school in India and then gets recruited by McKinsey and company. And then the financial crisis hits in 2008. And McKinsey says, we'd like you to come to America and to be an advisor. he's 31 years old at the time. We'd like you to come to America

to be an advisor to Tim Geithner, right, off the farm in India. And so he comes to the United States. He works for Geithner for a year or two. Then, then Price solved. And then J.P. Morgan recruits him. And he works at J.P. Morgan and he becomes one of the top candidates

to succeed Jamie Diamond. He's now 52. It becomes one of the prime candidates, probably in the top 10. And say, well, look, you're the top 10, but you didn't make the top five. He says, like, I'm out of here. And where does he go? Fact set. So I tell Michael, say, this is a really cool company.

It hasn't been especially well managed for a few years now. And now it's like a junior Bloomberg. But we got the big company in the industry is Bloomberg, and they got some vulnerabilities. And we get some special things. And now we drop in this new. guy who is unbelievable. We weren't allowed to speak to him until he took his position. And so after that, we spent a bunch of time with him. And he even called me from India. He calls him from India when he goes to visit his family. I mean, he's really, really good guy.

And then of the 11 top executives now at fact set, eight come from him. And now he's describing to us how all of the services that he's providing are getting embedded in the, in the workflow of the clients that can't be replaced. So basically he's talking about the data that he has, the relationships he has. He says the people in the big companies, they didn't even know who he was. And they were just paying the bills or whatever. And he says, well, when we have something that's a commodity type of service, then we give it to them for really low prices.

But that gets us the entree to give them something that they really need for their business, they can't get somewhere else. So we find, so whether it's various who have, has all this insurance data or whether it's a fax set or whether it's Gartner who has, you know, thousands of analysts going out and then create this great library. So there's companies that have something special that get, well, there's no way they're going to exist. That's all going to get replaced by AI. You think the LLMs end up having to pay them for this data?

They're enablers of AI. Okay. I like that argument. A lot of people have given up on it because. because these stocks seem to have no, these stocks seem to have like no one who's willing to come out and say, no, you don't understand. There's nothing Claude can do if they're not working with this proprietary data set or that data set.

Well, a lot of the information that these companies have are arrangements that they have with Claude. Yeah. And all those LLMs, they're going to be commoditized. And they're all going to, you know, when they're describing before how GROC is, 65% is cheaper than Claude. And not as good so far, but it will be. But we got compute. And when we invested in compute, SpaceX did.

When we invest in compute, when other people are investing in the LLMs, we can catch them in LLMs. They can't catch us in compute. And when we've invested in Mississippi, as I mentioned before, that was for $25,30 billion. and we got we're getting 1.25 billion dollars a month from from anthropic and getting 900 million dollars a month from from Google and I think we're getting about 500 million a month from someone else or 250 for we're getting almost 25, 30 billion dollars a month for something a year rather for something that costs us 25 or 30 billion to build to show you how scarce it is we're getting three times what Corey Weave would get for the same amount of compute.

Three times. Why is that? Because we got it. No one else has it. And also our compute is different than other people's compute because it's coherent, because it's all together. And when it's all together, that means that it makes each other more powerful. The other things that really interesting my job, which I tell Judy, I say, you know what?

So here I am. I'm 83. and it feels like I'm in college. You know, you get to, and so it's still learning. As things change, you're keeping pace with it. Every day. Okay. Michael, you like having your dad around that work?

Most days. No, obviously he's been incredible to learn from at an extraordinary young age. You know, I joined the business in, what was it, late 2004. So over 20 years at this point. But I jokingly say, you know, my training started probably when I was five or six years old. half-jokingly saying this. We would talk about investing from an extraordinary young age, never about what's happened in the stock market,

never what's happening in the economy or from a macro perspective, but about companies. What makes one company different, unique, special? And, you know, he gave me that training. He made it fun. He made it interesting. People say, you know, were you forced to do this? I don't know.

Obviously, it was his grand plan to get both me and my brother into this, but it wasn't forced. But he didn't make it extraordinarily interesting. And something, you know, so you obviously train me, train my brother. But one thing that he doesn't get enough credit for, I think, it's obviously he gets credit for being a great investor and building this business, but the people that he's brought into it, you know, so we have, what, 45 investment professionals at Barron Capital, each and every one buys into it, buys into what is a Barron Capital-type investment,

what is a barren-capital type portfolio, what makes a company, you know, for us, what makes it special, makes the growth, what makes the people, all those kind of things, all this kind of questioning. So we're not a factory. We're not producing widgets. But it's the people that we have here who get to their right answer more often than not. I think that COVID was a tough time for us.

You know, it was a tough time. Obviously, I don't know how we would have survived COVID if it was 5, 10 years earlier if we didn't have the technology to enable work from home. But work from home sucks because you're not with people. You're not with us. We have companies come to the office nonstop and we go see them nonstop. It's never one person in a meeting. And the bad thing about Zoom and COVID was you press that red button and the meeting ends.

You know, we have that hour long, hour and a half, two hour long meeting. And we spend just so much time with the other analysts there to understand, do a deep dive on what just happened. And a lot of the good stuff happens outside of the official meeting. Yes. I agree with that. So it's, you know, it's my dad is the founder. He's the philosophy. He's all that.

But he's training everyone else here to kind of think about investing in the same way. And as you were giving our stats earlier in terms of what. what percent of our portfolios, you know, beat them index, which is obviously very hard to do, but not just beating by a little bit, top quartile, top 5%, top 1%, it's not just Ron Barron. But it's him, you know,

permeating all these type of portfolios in terms of how we think about investing. Sorry, let you guys go. We have two more things. Barron AI. I got one more thing. How many more do you have? And the conference.

The ProSec people are going to start losing their money. And the conference. I thought we have time. All the time in the world. Well, so let's do the conference because I'm fascinated by the fact, that I've never been invited to this. I got to get myself into that.

You guys throw, I would have to guess, the literal best event in asset management once a year. For the listeners, this is the Barron Investment Conference. You do it at the Met here in New York City. You've been doing it forever. These are some of the people that you've had there. Not Josh Brown.

Pink. Justin Timberlake. Adam Sandler, John Legend, John Malaney, Bruno Mars, Sebastian Manascalco, Fleetwood Mac, Steve Correll, Stephen Colbert, Seth Marr, it's just, it's... How about Paul McCartney? Paul McCartney. How about Barbara Streisand?

Celine Dion, Sting, Bon Jovi, Rod Stewart, Jerry Seinfeld. This is the most unbelievable... I'm going to add to that. And by the way, we pay for that. There's no expense for our clients. That's 100% paid for... And not only that, but we give away door prizes every year now of Teslas. We give away...

We were giving away... a year and you have to be in your seat when your number's cold. And then one year what happened is that a young woman came and if you're not there, you don't get it. And one year, about three or four or five years ago, a young woman came over to me and said, you know, I can't believe you called my number and I was in the restroom and I missed out. So I gave her a Tesla.

And since then we've been given three testes a year. instead of two a year. But in addition to that, one of the jobs I had in the summertime was this an ice cream man. And so someone came to me, and the way it worked when I was driving an ice cream truck, is that if you did a bill a day, $100 a day, you made $25. That was a big deal. And so I went to areas that other people didn't go to. They thought it was too risky, and I was able to do that $100.

And now someone came to us and told us about the ice cream trucks that he had. and he was an orphan and he explained and he said okay we want to invest in your business so so we own a couple of trucks and now every year at the end of our conference we go to we have our trucks they have six trucks the ice cream trucks okay at the end of the conference so when you leave the conference we give you ice cream it's the best ice cream best cones best ice cream I love it so so we give t-shirts we give swag we give ice cream every now and then we'll give a book or something like So your mutual fund shareholders from around the world come in for this. Around the world.

It's a really cool thing. So they get that entertainment, as you just mentioned, but I was just driving down a few of the people who have come. Obviously, Elon Musk has been there multiple times. One shot, Wilfman from SpaceX has been there. Charles Schwab, Steve Wynn, Ralph Lauren, Tom Pritzker, Henry Fernandez, Shopify. I can get you guys, Barry Ritholtz. I'm just saying it's really cool. And the next one's November.

The next one is November. November 6. Okay. All right. Executives who don't speak normally at these kind of investment conferences because it's a very different type of investment conference. You know, we tell these guys, don't give your canned speech. Don't talk about what's happening now and the quarter. But yeah, it's exactly. Who are you?

How did you get into this? These are founders of businesses. You know, why? Why do you want to found this business? What makes it interesting? What's the vision? Where's this thing going? And have this kind of open dialogue about who these executives are.

And I think that's really what people find very fascinating. and differentiate about the conference. So one thing I would add to that is that one year we had Michael followed Carlisle. That's David Rubinstein. And so I'm sitting on the stage with Michael, and then Michael goes to get David and bring him across. Do you know who he is? Yes, of course. And so to bring him across the stage and he's going to give a speech.

And then he's standing in front of the audience, 5,000 people. And then Michael walks back to me and says, Dad, do you know what David just asked me? I said, no. He said, what do you want me to talk? talk about. Yeah, he said, what do you want to talk? What is what's going on? Something tells me David Rubinstein can improvise.

You kind of wind him up and he goes. And then he says, okay, I got this. I can give this, you know, who I am. How did I find, found Carlisle Island and what we're trying to do? And he says, by the way, should I be funny? David, yeah, sure, be funny. Be David Rubinstein. He was hilarious.

Totally hilarious. By the way, I love his show over on Bloomberg, the way he interviews people. It's a very charismatic guy, I think. Guys, I want to thank you so much for your time. And it's just, it's been such an honor talking with you and congratulations on all of your milestones and success. It's an amazing thing that you've done. And it sounds like nobody is more excited than the two of you to keep doing it.

And that's, uh, that's as cool as it gets to me. So thank you so much. Thank you. Where do we send people who want to learn more about Baren funds? What's the right? What's the right URL or where can they follow and get more of Ron's commentary or anything that the firm puts out. Barroncapitalgroup.com.

Barroncapitalgroup.com. Once again, thank you so much. Michael and Ron Barron. We appreciate it. All right, cheers. Guys, it's it from us. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you for listening.

We appreciate you. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks again. You want to do it one more time or you think we got it.