Bernie Ecclestone, every mention

Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired Mar 5, 2026 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 1:35:01 David Rosenthal Bernie's various companies, and there are even many more than we have talked about on this episode, just for simplicity.
• ▶ 1:35:35 David Rosenthal Nonetheless, times are so crazy that Bernie hatches a plan with his bankers at Salomon Brothers to consolidate all the various F-I companies that he owns into a single holding company called SLEC Holdings.
• ▶ 1:36:19 David Rosenthal Uh, we should also note here too, we being a little glib in this episode, in 2023, Bernie ultimately pleaded guilty to tax fraud as a result of all the machinations we're about to talk about, and had to pay a six hundred and fifty three…
• ▶ 1:38:02 Ben Gilbert To Bernie.
• ▶ 1:38:03 Ben Gilbert I mean, so of course we've talked about the media rights, but what a race promoter does is if F one is thinking about going to a racetrack, the person who owns the racetrack or a company affiliated with the racetrack or a government…
• ▶ 1:38:36 David Rosenthal In this new agreement, Bernie swaps in a new entity called Formula One Constructors Association Administration Limited, a new company owned by Bernie, FOCA-A for the original FOCA, so that he can now legally have all the rights to…
• ▶ 1:39:25 David Rosenthal News of the plans, as well as Bernie's recent sort of consolidation of legal power, gets leaked to the press, and this causes the European Union antitrust investigators to start poking around.
• ▶ 1:39:39 David Rosenthal Bernie is doing so much self-dealing here that there's no way he's going to survive an investigation.
• ▶ 1:39:45 David Rosenthal So Bernie shelves the IPO idea and also resigns from his official role as a vice president of the FIA, and the combination of those two things is enough to at least
• ▶ 1:41:07 David Rosenthal Bernie gets his dividend.
• ▶ 1:41:11 David Rosenthal On the following Monday, Bernie calls up his bankers and says, oh, there was something else that I didn't tell you.
• ▶ 1:41:34 David Rosenthal Three days later, Bernie is having triple bypass heart surgery.
• ▶ 1:41:38 Ben Gilbert The entire future success of this thing is heavily dependent on Bernie being in the seat.
• ▶ 1:42:07 David Rosenthal Well, Bernie survives.
• ▶ 1:42:10 David Rosenthal Later that year, we're in 1989 now, his wife Slavica, i.e. really Bernie, starts selling off equity stakes in SLEC holdings to various private equity firms.
• ▶ 1:42:40 David Rosenthal H and F then goes and buys out some of the other minority owners that Slavica slash Bernie had been selling stakes to, and Hellman and Friedman collectively gets a 50% ownership stake in F one.
• ▶ 1:42:55 David Rosenthal And then they go negotiate with Slavica and Bernie
• ▶ 1:45:32 David Rosenthal And Bernie and Slavica hold the last 25%.
• ▶ 1:45:48 David Rosenthal Bernie, meanwhile, is just getting tons of money into his bank accounts.
• ▶ 1:46:32 David Rosenthal With Bernie in Slavica still owning the 25% minority share.
• ▶ 1:46:39 David Rosenthal Okay, so it all comes to a head in 2004 when the banks are super frustrated because Bernie's still running the thing as he always did, paying himself everything.
• ▶ 1:46:50 David Rosenthal The banks keep trying to tell Bernie what to do.
• ▶ 1:46:53 David Rosenthal They're like issuing him directions as if he's their employee and Bernie just keeps ignoring them.
• ▶ 1:46:59 David Rosenthal The bank consortium sues Bernie for control of the sport.
• ▶ 1:47:08 David Rosenthal However, Bernie addresses the media after the court proceedings and says that the verdict would mean quote, nothing at all.
• ▶ 1:47:34 David Rosenthal They also buy out Bernie and Slavica's 25%.
• ▶ 1:47:38 David Rosenthal So more money going to Bernie now here.
• ▶ 1:47:41 David Rosenthal But Bernie will remain CEO.
• ▶ 1:47:45 Ben Gilbert He's hired by CVC to continue being Bernie.
• ▶ 1:47:57 David Rosenthal All told CVC and Bernie for his portion spend about two billion dollars acquiring 100% ownership.
• ▶ 1:48:19 David Rosenthal I believe over three billion that Bernie and his trust had pulled out of the company through all the debt and equity machinations that we discussed earlier.
• ▶ 1:48:32 Ben Gilbert This is important to know the CVC slash Bernie buy-in to this new F-one entity is about nine hundred million of equity.
• ▶ 1:48:45 David Rosenthal Bernie
• ▶ 1:50:32 David Rosenthal So Bernie goes out and he courts Abu Dhabi, Singapore,
• ▶ 1:51:08 David Rosenthal So Bernie's on a roll with these new races.
• ▶ 1:51:10 David Rosenthal So then in the early 20 tens, Bernie lands the big one, Russia.
• ▶ 1:51:35 David Rosenthal Bernie and F-one
• ▶ 1:52:19 David Rosenthal It is an amazing Bernie and Putin story.
• ▶ 1:52:24 David Rosenthal As they're in final negotiations for the deal, the Russian contingent asks Bernie to fly over to Sochi and sit down with Putin to finalize the deal.
• ▶ 1:52:36 David Rosenthal To which Bernie responds, do I look stupid?
• ▶ 1:52:52 David Rosenthal And then Bernie goes to Sochi and sits down with Putin and do a press conference and announce the whole thing.
• ▶ 1:53:11 David Rosenthal Bernie would get asked on a British morning TV show after the Ukraine invasion what he thinks about all this, and he famously says that Putin is a, quote, first class person, and that he, Bernie, would take a bullet for him.
• ▶ 1:53:27 Ben Gilbert I did hear from some folks that I talked to, and I'd always ask the question, what's it like working with Bernie?
• ▶ 1:53:54 David Rosenthal Re-invigorated Bernie and CVC.
• ▶ 1:54:14 David Rosenthal There's also the fact, too, that now it's not just Bernie getting rich, it's the private equity firm that's also getting rich on the backs of the teams and all the investments that they're making into the
• ▶ 1:56:07 David Rosenthal So as they get into 2008, Bernie CVC and the FIA all team up and they float a solution, a lifeline to the teams.
• ▶ 1:57:38 David Rosenthal There's also all of this pent up badwill against Bernie, all these deals that have happened, CBC, the FIA, et cetera.
• ▶ 1:58:38 Ben Gilbert There's a lot of value in what Bernie and the series are actually doing.
• ▶ 1:59:18 Ben Gilbert One, Bernie and Max could offer different things to different teams to get them to individually cave.
• ▶ 1:59:32 Ben Gilbert Bernie had been withholding their payments from the previous year when they had raced as Honda, because Bernie's opinion was, well, you're not the same team, so you don't deserve your payout.
• ▶ 2:02:09 David Rosenthal So ironically, miraculously, and certainly despite all of Bernie's best efforts to the contrary, pretty much this whole situation gets fixed by two new teams that enter formula one who nobody saw coming.
• ▶ 2:08:12 David Rosenthal And importantly, just like F-One and Bernie itself, none of these sponsors, except maybe the cigarette companies,
• ▶ 2:08:22 David Rosenthal Bernie has a great quote about this when he's asked about the challenges F-One faces of its aging demographic.
• ▶ 2:08:36 David Rosenthal That is the key thing, Bernie.
• ▶ 2:11:05 David Rosenthal So when Red Bull rolls up to the paddock the next year in 2005, which remember is the first year of CBC's ownership and the new Bernie regime.
• ▶ 2:13:05 David Rosenthal The other team owners and principals and Bernie hates this.
• ▶ 2:26:17 David Rosenthal Bernie, of course, gets wind of what's going on.
• ▶ 2:26:20 Ben Gilbert Oh, Bernie does not like Ross.
• ▶ 2:26:21 David Rosenthal He does.
• ▶ 2:26:22 David Rosenthal He doesn't like Braun anyway.
• ▶ 2:26:24 David Rosenthal He definitely doesn't like somebody else buying a team for one pound.
• ▶ 2:26:29 David Rosenthal He tries to swoop in and convince the Honda board that they should sell it to him instead.
• ▶ 2:26:35 David Rosenthal Nevermind that he's like head of F-one.
• ▶ 2:26:39 David Rosenthal Well, he's still willing to buy the team.
• ▶ 2:26:41 Ben Gilbert He just generally doesn't like the idea that there's a transaction that doesn't go through him.
• ▶ 2:26:46 David Rosenthal Or, or that there's a good deal to be had and he's not getting in on it.
• ▶ 2:27:03 David Rosenthal Amazingly, Honda doesn't go with Bernie.
• ▶ 2:38:43 David Rosenthal Except Enzo Ferrari and Bernie.
• ▶ 2:38:46 David Rosenthal And Bernie, of course, had greater aspirations.
• ▶ 2:39:27 David Rosenthal That is, what, twice as much as all the cash that Bernie pulled out of F-One in its entirety during his heyday?
• ▶ 2:39:38 David Rosenthal And speaking of valuations and Bernie and cashing out, in 2016, as all this is taking place, F-One finally lands in the right set of hands to shepherd the sport going forward.
• ▶ 2:39:58 David Rosenthal So, starting a few years after CVC and Bernie
• ▶ 2:40:59 David Rosenthal Remember, they and Bernie only put in nine hundred million to start.
• ▶ 2:41:22 Ben Gilbert Because it was the weird Bernie entities, and then it was the holding company in his wife's name.
• ▶ 2:41:50 Ben Gilbert Bernie had secured the 100 year commercial rights to Formula One from the FIA.
• ▶ 2:43:44 David Rosenthal And then they issue flunk shares to the remaining equity holders, including CBC and Bernie, et cetera, such that.
• ▶ 2:44:33 David Rosenthal Is that former Fox and News Corp executive Chase Carey, who had been president and COO of News Corp, would become chairman of F-One, but that Bernie would remain as CEO.
• ▶ 2:45:52 Ben Gilbert And that Bernie had sort of systematically under invested, which, which created opportunity.
• ▶ 2:46:40 David Rosenthal So pretty quickly when Chase and Liberty come in, um, it becomes clear that there's not enough room for two bosses in F-One of Chase being chairman and Bernie remaining as CEO.
• ▶ 2:46:52 David Rosenthal I mean, really, there's, as long as Bernie's there, there's not room for anyone else to run anything.
• ▶ 2:47:03 David Rosenthal After they had announced the acquisition the previous fall, Liberty announces that Bernie is stepping down as CEO.
• ▶ 2:47:20 David Rosenthal So in other words, Liberty fires him.
• ▶ 2:47:39 Ben Gilbert All that stuff that Bernie did, no doubt built the sport and created the sport and the way in which it needed to go from here, Bernie could do almost none of those things and was probably holding it back at this point.
• ▶ 2:49:00 David Rosenthal Arguably even more so as they were growing in power under Bernie.
• ▶ 2:49:09 David Rosenthal And like we said, really, it was the indication of how broken things were before that Bernie and the FIA couldn't get it done.
• ▶ 2:53:47 David Rosenthal I mean, that's like the level that Bernie was making for the whole league a couple decades ago.
• ▶ 2:56:09 David Rosenthal Talk about a stakeholder that Bernie had just been, uh, extracting from.
• ▶ 3:00:33 David Rosenthal Bernie and F-One had been doing everything they could to keep the sport in sort of the heyday state for them of the mid nineties, where
• ▶ 3:00:46 David Rosenthal It all flowed through Bernie.
• ▶ 3:01:49 David Rosenthal That Bernie kept sending him to take down posts on his Instagram because he was quote, illegally distributing F one's intellectual property.
• ▶ 3:14:31 David Rosenthal Thrives, and Bernie World never could have realized or seen this.
• ▶ 3:15:07 David Rosenthal Feels like it should have an audience here in a way that it never had under Bernie.
• ▶ 3:21:05 David Rosenthal Bernie had some things, right?
• ▶ 3:26:56 David Rosenthal Right after Liberty takes over in 2017, they do a deal with ESPN, much like Bernie's original European Broadcasting Union deal.
• ▶ 3:49:09 Ben Gilbert I mean, these, these teams used to be basically worthless in the Bernie era and now
• ▶ 3:54:57 David Rosenthal I suspect if we were to have access to all the books during the Bernie era,
• ▶ 3:56:12 David Rosenthal Did F-One require Bernie?
• ▶ 3:56:47 David Rosenthal I think though you did need a Bernie to get F one to where it is today for two reasons.
• ▶ 3:56:57 David Rosenthal One, doing this episode and telling the Bernie story has made me appreciate much more how unique what Pete Rozelle did at the NFL.
• ▶ 3:57:49 David Rosenthal And for formula one, that was Bernie in the seventies.