Portillo's ($PTLO) podcast mentions
Timestamped Portillo's ($PTLO) mentions across our podcast corpus.
Yes. I thoroughly enjoyed it. This is about the Portillos. It talks about all these people who, got rich starting businesses, then just figured it out.
Ben Carlson · Animal Spirits Podcast · Will Higher Rates Kill the Stock Market? (EP. 484) · 2026-09-30In 1963, former Marine Dick Portillo opened a hot dog stand in a 12-foot trailer with $1,000 in savings and a small investment from his brother, about $11,000 in today's dollars. By 2014, he'd grown Portillo's to 38 locations in 4 states, generating $300 million in annual revenue and carrying no debt. That year, Portillo sold his business to Berkshire Partners for nearly $1 billion. In 2017, 3 friends pooled $900 and started frying Nashville-style hot chicken at a pop-up located in an East Hollywood parking lot. 8 years later, Dave's Hot Chicken, with 390 locations worldwide, was acquired by a private equity firm for $1 billion.
George Hahn · The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · No Mercy / No Malice: The 1% Next Door · 2026-09-26Usually they, they have a pretty good idea. Often it's because it takes so long to get wealthy. They're, you know, they've gone through the life cycle. So one of my favorite characters that we talked to in the book is Dick Portillo. And he started— he grew up in the projects of Chicago, the Cabrini-Greens, and he didn't know how to make a hot dog and then started a hot dog company and was washing the dishes by hand because there wasn't running water. And he ended up over decades selling a lot of hot dogs to become a billionaire. And I think it's a really useful example because it shows, like, well, do you have to have market power to be a billionaire? No, you can actually sell hot dogs. It's a super competitive industry. And then, is he rich? Well, he has a really big penthouse, he's got a yacht called Top Dog, which is just a great name for the yacht.
Eric Zwick · Odd Lots · There's a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America · 2026-09-18Yeah, so like the Portillo, when he was growing the business, um, they didn't have offices for the managers because he wanted the people to be on the floor all the time. So there was a bit of a Marine ethic that he kind of brought to running this business. And, you know, he was there for opening. He was like very detail-oriented. He had no investors. He owned all the real estate. He tried to take no debt, reinvesting every dollar. You know, he had kids, but like it was pretty clear when he was moving into his 80s, this is not a family business. This is Dick's business. And there's kind of a relentlessness to that character that I think we see in many of the stories. The first-generation founders look like that.
Owen Zidar · Odd Lots · There's a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America · 2026-09-18Yeah, no, that's a great question because there's, there's the kind of the Dick Portillos, more tactile, blue-collar rich, and then there are the more white-collar ones. But if you own 8 dental practices, you can be really rich. I mean, I think you'll— if you're just a normal dentist, you have a pretty good life. But if you own, you know, a few offices, you can have a great life. Dentists have some amazing stats. I think they're like number 21 on our list of top pass-through 4-digit industries by profit. And if you add up all the revenue of dentists in America, it exceeds the revenue generated by the NFL, the NBA, MLB. Basically all professional sports and dentists are earning more. The joke we like to tell is that everybody's got teeth. And so if you own several of these, this is great. And then they also are in every congressional district. Yeah.
Eric Zwick · Odd Lots · There's a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America · 2026-09-18I agree that that was the biggest— that's one of the reasons I started writing in the first place, because I was so sick of the negativity coming out of the crisis. I couldn't take it anymore. Um, speaking of which, you This is interesting because, good lead here, the— there's a great story in the Wall Street Journal this past week that is very positive, and it's not, you know, it's not falling back on the victim stuff. The American dream is alive and it's minting millionaires. So they talk about Dick Portillo, which is kind of funny. Um, my kids— I can't remember what movie we were watching— my kids can't believe that people used to actually— your name is Richard, and no, now you're Dick. My kids are like, how was that a thing? I think there was a comedian who did a bit on this. How, how did that— how was that ever a thing in the past that people that like, obviously that's never happening again. No.
Ben Carlson · Animal Spirits Podcast · Everywhere Millionaires (EP. 481) · 2026-09-09No. Dickie Greenleaf and, uh, Tales of Mr. Ripley, right? Like, it's just, it's never happening again. Anyway, so it says, talk about how he opened a hot dog stand in the 1960s, didn't know how to cook a hot dog. A century later, he sold the company for $1 billion, which I still remember the very first time I tried Portillo's. My wife and I, I think we weren't even married yet. We go to visit my brother in Chicago at his condo. We go straight to the bar cuz we got there late. And we're like, oh, we didn't even have dinner. We got here so late. My brother ran over to Portillo's and got us the spicy Italian beef and brought it back. And my wife and I still remember that to this day. Like, oh my gosh, that's one of the best, so good sandwiches I've ever had in my life. Uh, and he talked about, I guess in his memoir, he, he grew up poor. He like didn't thought he didn't have anything to offer the world. He grew up, his, his family was immigrants. They lived in a housing project. And the whole point of this story was there's all these people that came from really, really bad backgrounds. And most of the people who are these big-time millionaires now, most of them didn't come from like elite, you know, Ivy League schools or the East. Like they, they're just regular people. And they, they interview all these people who started an HVAC company or start like, actually not technology, like the way you think everyone gets in, in, you know, rich these days. So they talk about, they, they call them these everywhere millionaires. They says there's 3 million of 'em collectively worth more than $65 trillion. Most come from poor or middle-class families simply because there are 99 times as many people in the bottom 99 as the top 1%. Um, among star founders, there are 2.5 times as many from poor backgrounds as from the top 1%. Only a quarter of business owners worth $5 million or more inherited their companies. And they go through all these different examples of this. And the whole point of the article is, listen, you can complain about how bad things are, or you can like bootstrap and try something.
Ben Carlson · Animal Spirits Podcast · Everywhere Millionaires (EP. 481) · 2026-09-09Lou, is this one of those things where people are just eating a little bit healthier? Maybe McDonald's not doing quite as well. I know I own shares of Portillo's. That's not doing particularly well because those beef sandwiches apparently are falling out of favor to a salad bowl at this point.
Travis Holyham · Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing · IPO Fever Heats Up For OpenAI and Anthropic · 2026-08-14Yeah. So Chipotle, Pizza Hut, ihop, Portillo. It's like whatever, all them Popeyes. And if you look at the. All the way in the right hand. And I mean, there's just a lot of stress here. But the point is this. Forget about even where we are today. Look how, look how rapidly this is changing. Is this a read on the consumer? I don't know. Chart off. Guess what? There's a lot of inputs that go into a restaurant. There's labor, there's inflation, there's inputs, there's a consumer. There's preferences, there's location, there's valuations. It's such a, it's such an idiosyncratic story that to look at the restaurants and conclude something about this consumer, I just think it's bad. It's just not a great idea. Same thing. Same thing with the dollar stores. It could, it can mean anything. So I think that sometimes it's just better to look at the data. So, for example, look at this chart from, from, from Goldman Sachs. We're looking at alternative measures of nominal consumer, consumer spending growth. It's right here. You've got retail control, you've got, you've got Costco. Like, you have just, just look at this. Spending data is a much more effective input. And finally, I would conclude that if you're looking at the restaurants or if you're looking at the dollar store. Shut off, please. Or if you're looking at Target or Walmart or Costco, at least today, like, I'm not saying in general, I'm saying right now you might be looking at the wrong thing because what I'M looking at to determine the health of the consumer. At least the health of the consumer that is powering the bull market is hotels. Why there's not 100 million hotels with. There's a few hotels. There's two that are in the S and P. It's Marriott and it's. Which one is bigger? It's Hilton.
Speaker B · The Compound and Friends · Why AI Momentum Stocks Got Killed, OpenAI's Confidential IPO Filing, Apple Launches Siri AI · 2026-06-09