Liberty Media ($FWONA) podcast mentions
Well, I've got a long list of folks to thank for all their time and conversations helping us prepare for this episode. First, to Nancy Lee, to Bob Iger, to Josh D'Amaro, to Pete Docter, Jim Morris, and all the incredible folks who hosted us for the day at Pixar, including Danielle Feinberg, Katherine Sarafian, and the incredible people who run the Pixar Archives. That was an experience like none other. To Kristen Bell, the voice of Anna in Frozen, who helped us think about Disney animation and Pixar. To our friends Ravi Nandan at A24, Chase Carey at Liberty Media and Fox, and to Mitch Lasky at Benchmark, to Robbie Whelan at the Wall Street Journal who has a book on Disney coming out later this year, also to Ben Fritz and Emily Nelson at the Wall Street Journal. And I know you have a list too.
David Rosenthal · Acquired · Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · 2026-08-10Well, you know what's funny is my company, the Hustle, it was a daily newsletter, which at the time was. People kind of laughed at it, but I was like, I think this can get to a couple hundred million in revenue if we do it right. And we sold before we got there. But my competitors and, like, where the company that I sold now is, like two. Hundreds of millions in revenue was possible. That was right. But I was inspired by Ted Turner. I read his biographies. He's my hero. And I knew all. So I studied cable. So I read about cable. Cowboys and liberty Media. Media. Like I. I studied like crazy. I've studied you like crazy. And at the time, in 2014, right around when I was starting the company, Buzzfeed was popular and Vice was popular, but what was going on was their business models were going down because Facebook was pulling back reach so they would get less clicks. And I was like, well, where's, like, the last bit of real estate that I could fully own and not rent? And it was newsletter, newsletters. And you know who I got that idea from? Bob Pittman.
Sam Parr · My First Million · The insane true story behind MTV · 2026-05-29Yes. Thank you, Liberty Media and their stewardship of Formula One. Like, overnight in the last 10 years, Formula One went from just a marketing spend for Ferrari to the best marketing activity they do and a real meaningful profit center.
David Rosenthal · Acquired · Ferrari · 2026-04-13And we are your hosts. Today, we dive into a sport that started in the 1930s that began for the pure love of auto racing. Extremely dangerous auto racing. Then after World War II, the British Air Force veterans and mechanical engineers joined the sport to push the limits of technology and physics. It eventually became the sport of rich guys who wanna own teams to gallivant around Europe, losing colossal sums of money along the way. And in fact, David, since the sport began, over 100 separate teams have entered and exited the competition, mostly because they went bankrupt. And today the sport has been dragged kicking and screaming into being professionally managed and is now owned by the publicly traded US company that has owned the Atlanta Braves, SiriusXM, and Live Nation. That is Liberty Media. And against all odds, Liberty has managed to turn the sport, the teams, and the drivers into real viable businesses. Today's episode, listeners, is on Formula 1, the world's premier motorsport series.
Ben Gilbert · Acquired · Formula 1 · 2026-03-02So in September of 2016, it finally gets announced that the American media company Liberty Media is acquiring F1 for $4.4 billion of equity value and assuming all of the outstanding debt that the company has for a combined total enterprise value of $8 billion. Now, the way they do it is interesting. Liberty and John Malone and Greg Maffei, we've talked about Liberty many times over the years on Acquired. They are masters of deals and financial engineering, the way they do it, they initially acquire a like 18, 19% stake in F1 from CVC. So enough to make them the largest shareholder. And then they actually changed the whole name of Liberty Media, the company, the publicly traded company, into the Formula One Group, create a new tracking stock to track the value of F1 Group.
David Rosenthal · Acquired · Formula 1 · 2026-03-02The completely fascinating thing about Liberty Media today is it sort of doesn't exist anymore. They bought F1, then they did enough other spinoffs through the Atlanta Braves spinoff, through Liberty Live, the Live Nation spinoff. At this point, like 90% of Liberty itself is Formula One and the stock is actually Formula One. It's like they spun out everything else that was left. And so the holding company is actually basically Formula One now.
Ben Gilbert · Acquired · Formula 1 · 2026-03-02So now let's ask like a more literal question, uh, which is just the, the Seven Powers framework applied to the Liberty Media Formula One entity. Today. And the framework for power is what is it that enables your business to have persistent differential returns, or basically to be more profitable than your closest competitor on a sustainable, durable basis.
Ben Gilbert · Acquired · Formula 1 · 2026-03-02And I've got a great list here. Big thank you to Zak Brown, the CEO at McLaren Racing. Thanks so much for your time in prepping. To Greg Maffei, the former CEO of Liberty Media when they, of course, bought Formula One from CBC. Thanks, Greg, for helping me understand the whole company. To Brandon Rieg, who oversees nonfiction and sports at Netflix. Very helpful for understanding Netflix's strategy with Drive to Survive and and the impacts it had, to James Gay-Reece, the co-founder of Box to Box Films, the production company behind Drive to Survive, to Eddie Cue at Apple, longtime Formula One fan, and of course, who recently bought the US broadcast rights, to Pavan Gami, Alex Knight, and Jimmy Fairbanks, who are equity investors and analysts who really helped me understand the investor perspective on Formula One Group and Liberty Media, to Sid Trivedi, partner at Foundation Capital and lifelong F1 fan. To Jom Najafi, the former vice chairman of McLaren Racing, and from Ford, Will Ford and Mark Rushbrook, who obviously did the big engine partnership with Red Bull Racing. Thanks for your time, guys. Yep. To Nathan Baschez, my good friend and longtime F1 fan. To our friends at Shopify, Toby Lutke and Mikhail Parakhin, both total motorsports nuts. And Toby actually races in another racing series. So kind of fun to get his, his perspective as a driver. To Andrew Craig, former chairman of IndyCar and sports marketing consultant. To Mike Miller, former Wall Street Journal editor who helped us think through a lot of the big beats on the story on this one. To our friend Dustin Sedgwick, who has done partnerships and sponsorships with teams and races all over the course of his career. To Colin Fleming and the whole ServiceNow team for bringing us to the Paddock Club for the last Vegas Grand Prix for some first-party research, to Bobby Epstein, CEO of the Austin track, Circuit of the Americas, and promoter of the US Grand Prix. And lastly, to our friends at Dallupa for providing us with some amazing financial models and spreadsheets of all the historical data on Formula One, just like they did for us on Coca-Cola and Google.
Ben Gilbert · Acquired · Formula 1 · 2026-03-02