Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them.
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Ferrari
Apr 12, 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, Hermès sells that many…
Formula 1
Mar 02, 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…
The NFL
Jan 26, 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…
Rolex
Jan 02, 2026
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 stronger than ever in…
Costco
Jan 01, 2026
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 characteristics can combine to create…
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)
Dec 14, 2025
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 guests or video. Hardly the…
Coca-Cola
Nov 23, 2025
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 transmogrified a beverage…
Trader Joe’s
Oct 26, 2025
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 versus 50,000+ at normal…
Google Part III: The AI Company
Oct 05, 2025
Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini)…
Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)
Sep 30, 2025
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 Ross Sorkin, New York Times…
Google Part II: Alphabet
Aug 26, 2025
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 next six years from 2005 to…
The Jamie Dimon Interview
Jul 16, 2025
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 expected to become CEO) to…
Google Part I: Origins of Search
Jun 29, 2025
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 door to the internet. Today it’s…
The Steve Ballmer Interview
Jun 01, 2025
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 listened to our Microsoft episodes…
Epic Systems (MyChart)
Apr 20, 2025
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 auditorium, as well as…
Indian Premier League Cricket
Mar 23, 2025
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 surprising episode.” Well, if…
TSMC Founder Morris Chang
Jan 26, 2025
We flew to Taiwan to interview TSMC Founder Morris Chang in a rare English interview. In fact, the last long-form video interview we could find was 17 years ago at the Computer History Museum……
Mars Inc. (the chocolate story)
Dec 15, 2024
M&M’s, Snickers, Milky Way, Double Mint, Ben’s Rice, Pedigree, Whiskas, VCA, Banfield… all the brands you know, owned by the company you know nothing about: Mars, Incorporated. And Mars itself is…
IKEA
Nov 17, 2024
IKEA may be the most singular company we’ve ever studied on Acquired. They’re a globally scaled, $50B annual revenue company with no direct competitors — yet have only ~5% market share. They’re one…
Meta
Oct 27, 2024
Meta is a company everyone knows (literally, everyone). But, somehow, it’s also a company that few people feel they actually understand. Their products are used by more humans than any other’s in…
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Sep 30, 2024
Here it is: the complete video of the most unbelievable night of Acquired’s nine-year life… our sold out live show at the Chase Center in San Francisco. We joked during the months (months!) of…
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Sep 18, 2024
Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time. At Chase Center on September 10, 2024, he did an unprecedented thing: a live conversation in front of 6,000 people on Meta’s company strategy, sharing…
Chase Center + Summer Update
Aug 08, 2024
Summer greetings from Acquired! Two items for this “mini-episode”: Tickets are now available for our live show at Chase Center in San Francisco, with special guests including Mark Zuckerberg (!). The…
Microsoft Volume II
Jul 21, 2024
In 1999, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world. And in 2019, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world, again . But… what happened in the twenty years in between? The…
Starbucks (with Howard Schultz)
Jun 04, 2024
Starbucks. You’d be hard pressed to name any brand that’s more ubiquitous in the world today. With nearly half a billion global customer purchases per week across its stores and 3rd party retail…
Microsoft Volume I
Apr 21, 2024
Microsoft. After nearly a decade of Acquired episodes, we are finally ready to tackle the most valuable company ever created. The company that put a computer on every desk and in every home. The…
Renaissance Technologies
Mar 17, 2024
Renaissance Technologies is the best performing investment firm of all time. And yet no one at RenTec would consider themselves an “investor”, at least in any traditional sense of the word. It’d…
Hermès
Feb 19, 2024
In luxury, there’s Hermès… and there’s everyone else. Stewarded by one French family over six generations, Hermès sells the absolute pinnacle of the French luxury dream. Loyal clients will wait years…
Novo Nordisk (Ozempic)
Jan 21, 2024
Last year Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, overtook LVMH to become Europe’s most valuable company. And the pull for Acquired to finally tackle healthcare…
Holiday Special 2023
Dec 17, 2023
Ben has some big news. Actually, double big news! On what has become a holiday tradition here at Acquired, we cozy up to the fire to do our annual review of the show “in public”. We reflect on what…