Forbes

"Henry Singleton, in a rare 1979 interview with Forbes magazine: “After we acquired a number of businesses, we reflected on business. Our conclusion was that the key was cash flow. . . . Our attitude toward cash generation and asset management came out of our own thinking.” He added (as though he needed to), “It is not copied.”"

"As Murphy put it succinctly in an interview with Forbes, “We just kept opportunistically buying assets, intelligently leveraging the company, improving operations and then we’d . . . take a bite of something else.”"

"“Can it really be true that nobody has made a billion dollars purely by playing the stock market?” After all, Forbes lists “Investments” as the primary source of wealth of seven of the wealthiest Americans in the billion-dollars-and-up category. A look at the profiles that Forbes also provides, however, makes it clear that these indi¬ viduals did not make their fortunes primarily by spotting attractive stocks to put into their personal portfolios. Among the other activities that the “investment” specialists have engaged in over the years are: • Starting a charter airline and selling it for a $ 104 million profit. • Building the world’s biggest hotel. • Assembling a broadcasting empire and selling it for a S3.3 billion gain. • Booting out management of Columbia/HCA following an investi¬ gation of alleged Medicare fraud. • Expanding a single drugstore into a chain and selling it for $50 million. • Engaging in hostile takeovers. • Restoring a foundering bank to health and merging it to form Na¬ tionsBank. In short, Forbes's definition of an investment, for purposes of compil¬ ing its wealthiest-Americans list, is not buying a stock and waiting for it to go up. Rather, the term means taking a substantial stake in a company and actively influencing its direction. Active influence may even include owning the business outright and running it. Indeed, John Kluge, one member of the billionaires’ club whom Forbes characterizes as having made his fortune primarily in investments, told the magazine: “I’m an op¬ erator, not an investor.”15"

"Buffett built a vast industrial and financial empire on the founda¬ tion of a struggling textile company. On May 10, 1965, the day he gained control, Berkshire Hathaway’s closing share price was $ 18. The stock ended 1998 at $70,000 a share. (One of many conventional ideas that Buffett rejects is stock splits. “I’ve never really felt,” he explains, “that if I went into a restaurant and said, ‘I want two hatchecks instead of one for my hat’ I’d really be a lot better off.”)52 Massive wealth has rained down on Buffett’s early investors, as well as entrepreneurs who sold him their companies for stock. Forbes has estimated that there are scores of families that own $100 million or more of Berkshire Hathaway shares.53"

"A generally favorable Forbes 1997 article contended that Kerkorian had never preyed on companies, in the customary sense of “pressing every advantage, picking every bone clean.”26 The author further argued that he had not taken advantage of minority shareholders. According to an unnamed executive, who was otherwise critical of Kerkorian’s man¬ agement of MGM, “If you invested with Kirk, you had every advantage he did.”27"

"As soon as a year after the stock listing of Securitas, Melker Schörling bought the Edeby manor by Lake Båven outside Norrköping in 1992 for 32 million kronor. The area was close to 3,200 hectares at the time of acquisition, mostly forest. Schörling has gradually bought more land since then and is described by Forbes as one of Sweden’s largest landowners."

"Alvarsson had grown that business from SEK 100m ($10m) in sales to SEK 2bn in sales ($200m)—an impressive 20× growth over the course of a decade. This was also notably profitable growth: returns on capital consistently surpassed 20%. His success didn’t go unnoticed. In 1999, Forbes ranked Zeteco the 37th best small-cap company in the world out of 12,000 companies—an extraordinary achievement, especially in an era dominated by IT firms.9"

"Everyone expects computers to do more in the future—so much more that some wonder: 30 years from now, will there be anything left for people to do? “Software is eating the world,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has announced with a tone of inevitability. VC Andy Kessler sounds almost gleeful when he explains that the best way to create productivity is “to get rid of people.” Forbes captured a more anxious attitude when it asked readers: Will a machine replace you?"

"In 2000, Ren Zhengfei ranked third on the Forbes list of China’s richest and had an estimated personal wealth of 500 million USD. In 2004, Forbes launched a list of the world’s top 100 largest private companies outside the United States, where his company became the only Chinese firm to make the list, ranking 79th with a revenue of 2.7 billion USD."

"In general, Amancio eats little but is a good host. "My favorite food—he has told me more than once—are fried eggs with French fries and sausage." This down-to-earth man, incapable of giving himself importance no matter how many times he appears cited in international economic magazines as one of the richest in Spain, and on the lists of the world's richest compiled by Forbes, in a more prominent position as the years go by, told me in great detail the starting point of his business story; a story so unusual and endearing, so deeply human, that it is key as a testimony of his life."

"Forbes when the latter wrote that the purpose of the journal in 1917 was to ‘promulgate humaneness in business, then woefully lacking’, because too many individual and corporate employers were ‘merely mercenarily-minded, obsessed only with determination to roll up profits regardless of the suicidal consequences of their short-sighted conduct. They were without consciousness of their civic, social, patriotic responsibilities.’ The writer warned that if employers did not change their tactics, politicians would do it for them, and the employers would not like it."

"Let’s do the math, as Americans say. In 2005, Forbes calculated I was worth $1.4 billion, making me Iceland’s first billionaire. By the peak of the boom, midway through 2007, this had increased to $4 billion, with roughly one-third of my wealth in Actavis, another third in Landsbanki, Iceland’s second-biggest bank which was privatised in 2002, and the remainder in other ventures. But by the end of 2009, following the government’s seizure of Landsbanki and the fall in Actavis’s valuation, this had fallen to about $40 million. So if people asked how I was doing, I replied that I still had 1 per cent of my net worth."

"May 2010 In the business magazine Forbes, Berggruen announces his rescue plan: "From California to Greece". For California, he announces a rescue package of 20 million dollars, an investment that is intended to help improve government work. For Greece, which has been heavily affected by the financial crisis, Berggruen sees a silver lining on the horizon. The newly elected Prime Minister Giorgos Andrea Papandreou is on the right track with his austerity course to avoid a state bankruptcy. Papandreou will be a welcome guest at Nicolas Berggruen's political town hall meetings in Paris and Berlin."

"Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Economist, Barron’s, Fortune, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Forbes, along with more abstruse publications like American Banker and the International Railway Journal."

"The McCaw strategy involved sending several different messages: to convince LIN shareholders that the better deal was with McCaw; to persuade others in the cellular industry that McCaw was the better steward of LIN's critical licenses; and to build pressure on BellSouth through political means and by convincing them they were in a fight with a ruthless opponent. Normally eager to avoid reporters, McCaw started sending signals through the news media that he wanted LIN at practically any price. McCaw compared his company to anti-imperial Scottish warriors, the Islamic Jihad, and the anti-Soviet Afghan rebels. "We want them to think we're maniacs," he told Forbes magazine. He sent John Stanton, Rufus Lumry, and other McCaw executives on a worldwide trip to raise money from bankers who were privately assured that McCaw would make no crazy offers. The group raised $5.5 billion—proof that Craig McCaw was not dependent on Michael Milken, who was about to have serious trouble with the law. Meanwhile, on Wall Street, the McCaw team tried to raise doubts about BellSouth's offer by pointing out the Material Adverse Change (MAC) clause in the Baby Bell's offer. Routinely used by many compa- nies in buyout offers, the MAC clause allowed the cautious BellSouth an out if problems erupted. The McCaw company had similar outs in its offer, but the team stressed how long Bells usually took to close deals compared to McCaw's history of rapid closures. A slow-as-molasses Baby Bell deal, they implied, stood a good chance of triggering the MAC clause and killing the whole arrangement. Other McCaw aides tried to make political trouble for BellSouth, telling state regulators that the LIN deal would drive up local charges or violate agreements. Two U.S. senators from Washington State agreed to introduce a bill to block BellSouth. Then came McCaw's flanking maneuver, what Perry calls "the beginning of the end" for BellSouth."

"The second option was to fight, pay my creditors and redeem myself, so I took the option of voluntarily opening up the trusts, giving the banks part of the proceeds from them in exchange for a value-split formula that could return me between nothing and up to €600 million if performance were good over three to five years. I could have been left with absolutely nothing, but I would always be able face myself in the mirror – something I couldn’t have done if I had taken the ‘easy’ way out. The actual financial outcome turned out to be that I became a billionaire in the 2014 *Forbes* and *Sunday Times* ‘rich lists’ and I have stayed on them ever since."

"I had more money than I could have spent in a thousand years. *Forbes* estimated my wealth at $3.4 billion and put me on its cover. Steady increases in asset value kept adding to my fortune. It might just as well have been on autopilot. Doubts crept up on the periphery, but everything was moving too fast for me to process it clearly and objectively."

"Let’s do the math, as Americans say. In 2005, *Forbes* calculated I was worth $1.4 billion, making me Iceland’s first billionaire. By the peak of the boom, midway through 2007, this had increased to $4 billion, with roughly one third of my wealth in Actavis, another third in Landsbanki, Iceland’s second-biggest bank which was privatised in 2002, and the remainder in other ventures. But by the end of 2009, following the government’s seizure of Landsbanki and the fall in Actavis’s valuation, this had fallen to about $40 million. So if people asked how I was doing, I replied that I still had 1 per cent of my net worth."

"When I was on the cover of *Forbes* magazine in 2005 Bulgaria’s media lapped it up. ‘Our Thor is On The List,’ ran the headlines. Their Thor? They had nobody of their own on the list, so they adopted me. I was an honorary Bulgarian. I was an outsider, but when it was positive news I was theirs. It felt good to be cherished. I felt that my time had come. However, high on the success of my pharma investments, I decided to copy the model in telecoms and try to repeat the Pharmaco story. I had bought a huge cash cow in the form of Bulgaria’s state telecom company, although it needed massive modernisation which we committed to by introducing fibre and mobile phone service. Now all I needed to do was reverse that company into a Scandinavian listed company with access to listed capital markets and use them to buy more telecom companies in the region (the East-to-West arbitrage). I wanted to do a copy-and-paste of what I had already done in Iceland, and I got the chance to try it in Finland. I managed to acquire the biggest single shareholding of the listed Finnish telecom Elisa, a conservative company more than 100 years old and the only Scandinavian telecom operator with no international assets. This was a no-brainer to me, and I thought the investors would welcome someone with a new vision of modernising their company and fully using its potential for scale with merger ideas and ready-made connections in eastern Europe. But that’s when I hit a wall."

"As the money flooded in and I made that *Forbes* front cover, doors kept opening for me and I gained access to a new stratum of people and power. The World Economic Forum in Davos is one example. People talk about it being a networking magnet for the kings of capitalism, but that’s only half the story. I always came back pumped up, energised and with a notebook full of ideas and potential deals. The annual Davos meeting inspires people to make a change; it challenges you on a personal level to have a higher purpose, and gives you a deeper recognition of the challenges of the world. In one way it is like being back at school, and the closeting effect of so much wealth and power being concentrated in one small Swiss village is electrifying."