Ferrari, every mention

Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio) · Acquired Apr 14, 2026 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 2:10:56 Ben Gilbert And part of what you are buying, if you are interested in buying a Ferrari, especially, let's say you came into this, you didn't want a Ferrari, you leave this episode, you're like, actually, I do kind of want a Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:11:18 David Rosenthal There is a team of artisans and experts aided by technology that is making my Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:11:28 David Rosenthal We've talked about Luca's embracing of the luxury strategy for Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:11:54 Ben Gilbert New markets are perfectly allowed, as long as it doesn't change the perception in the current markets that, oh no, there's suddenly lots of Ferraris zooming around the streets.
• ▶ 2:12:25 Ben Gilbert Anytime a new geography sort of came up in global wealth or disposable income or was okay with becoming flashier, then suddenly there's a whole new area where you can sell your Ferraris without
• ▶ 2:12:46 David Rosenthal They make so few cars and sell so few cars to a given geography that it really is a special experience every time you even see one on the road.
• ▶ 2:13:04 David Rosenthal Owning a Ferrari is a truly rare and special experience, but even just seeing one, even just being next to one,
• ▶ 2:13:17 Ben Gilbert The funniest thing is, since a large number of Ferraris are owned by people with 10, 20, 30 Ferraris, they actually can soak up a lot of the units into garages that you never see anyway.
• ▶ 2:13:30 Ben Gilbert Yeah, so if you're Ferrari and you're trying to manage scarcity, you sort of have an incentive to continue selling to the same person over and over and over because it is a way to generate a sale without
• ▶ 2:13:41 Ben Gilbert Having the problem of a Ferrari out on the streets feeling commonplace.
• ▶ 2:13:46 David Rosenthal Now, there is one other related thing that Ferrari takes on during this time, which is a lot of Ferrari clients, particularly American clients, really
• ▶ 2:14:04 David Rosenthal They've got more use cases in their life for automobiles than Ferraris give them opportunity to use it for.
• ▶ 2:14:32 Ben Gilbert A brand, kind of like Ferrari, but gosh, that's actually just not the reality of his life these days.
• ▶ 2:14:47 David Rosenthal Really, you would like a four-door Ferrari for that.
• ▶ 2:14:52 David Rosenthal Well, it is disgusting, and that is why during this era, Ferrari takes on the Maserati brand under its wing.
• ▶ 2:15:14 David Rosenthal It ends up in the hands of Fiat, and in the late nineties, Fiat says, why don't we give Maserati management over to Ferrari?
• ▶ 2:15:27 David Rosenthal And then we can, you know, have this connection between the Ferraris and the Maseratis, and we can have models that are Maseratis that are not Ferraris.
• ▶ 2:15:36 David Rosenthal These are not Ferraris.
• ▶ 2:16:19 Ben Gilbert So Ferrari gets this sort of market intelligence of, uh,
• ▶ 2:16:51 Ben Gilbert I think remarkably Ferrari has had the soul of a standalone company, even though it was for a very long period of time, 90% owned by Fiat.
• ▶ 2:17:03 David Rosenthal Him having the 10% ownership stake in place on the board keeps that continuity to Enzo and the Ferrari family, even in a 10% minority ownership way in the company.
• ▶ 2:17:15 David Rosenthal Well, speaking of Ferrari also being part of the Fiat and Agnelli empire, something pretty big is about to change here as we enter the early 2000, which is Gianni Agnelli passes away and all of a sudden the Fiat empire is now in crisis.
• ▶ 2:17:41 David Rosenthal But before we tell the story of what happens next there, and how it incredibly ends up with the IPO of Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:17:59 Ben Gilbert So listeners, as we've been talking about all episode, Ferrari builds cars designed for speed and precision.
• ▶ 2:19:16 Ben Gilbert Statsig lets you keep moving Ferrari level fast, while, uh, making sure that what you're doing actually does make the product better.
• ▶ 2:20:23 David Rosenthal She calls Luca after Umberto dies and asks him to take over as Fiat chairman and replace Gianni and Umberto in addition to Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:20:34 David Rosenthal So Luca will stay at Ferrari, but he will now come and serve the Agnellis as sort of a stored and a bridge to the next generation while they get the house in order and hopefully try to save Fiat along the way.
• ▶ 2:20:49 David Rosenthal He's now chairman of Fiat and Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:21:20 David Rosenthal He's like Luca back in the day when Enzo tapped him to take over Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:23:23 Ben Gilbert I gotta say, it's so funny that we feel the need here on the Ferrari episode to extol the virtues of the Fiat 500, but it ends up becoming actually very important and path dependent to Ferrari's trajectory from here and why a few things…
• ▶ 2:23:40 David Rosenthal And it was designed by a man named Frank Stevenson, who had been Luca's in-house design guy at Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:23:49 David Rosenthal When Luca was just at Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:23:51 David Rosenthal So there's a Ferrari connection and lineage there.
• ▶ 2:26:23 David Rosenthal So as everything is stabilizing at Fiat and returning to success, in 2010, Luca steps down from the Fiat chairmanship and returns solely full-time to Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:27:59 David Rosenthal He's gonna IPO Ferrari and use the proceeds to help pay down the Fiat Chrysler debt.
• ▶ 2:28:33 David Rosenthal He's a great businessman and he's a great executor of the luxury strategy for Ferrari, but in his mind and his heart, the cars always have to come first.
• ▶ 2:28:58 David Rosenthal And actually the great tragedy to this active Ferrari is it could have been a beautiful partnership.
• ▶ 2:29:18 David Rosenthal And for a while, Luca going back to just Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:29:25 David Rosenthal His passion was Ferrari, his history was there, he could go back to running it and be very happy, and Sergio could leave it alone and continue running the Fiat Empire.
• ▶ 2:29:38 David Rosenthal To pay down the Chrysler did and turns to Ferrari, they're on a collision course.
• ▶ 2:29:43 David Rosenthal Because IPO-ing Ferrari is, like, completely anathema to Luca's way of being.
• ▶ 2:30:36 David Rosenthal I mean, hell, one of Luca's very first actions when he came back to Ferrari after Enzo's death was to cut production by half.
• ▶ 2:31:21 David Rosenthal I mean, taking Ferrari public is part of the plan of how this whole thing is going to work.
• ▶ 2:31:31 David Rosenthal I think Luca probably had zero interest in taking Ferrari public, and I think he had even less than zero interest in using proceeds from the Ferrari IPO and the other financial engineering that we're about to talk about to save Chrysler…
• ▶ 2:31:53 Ben Gilbert Sergio is kind of exactly the guy you would want to manage the street, to look for all the ways that the Ferrari business is quote-unquote unoptimized, to realize the full value of the asset.
• ▶ 2:32:09 David Rosenthal In September, 2014, Sergio unceremoniously fires Luca as chairman of Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:32:38 David Rosenthal Part of the reason that the Ferrari Formula One team wasn't performing well at this point in time was that Formula One had switched to hybrid powertrains, and Fiat never developed hybrid technology, so Ferrari didn't have anywhere to turn…
• ▶ 2:33:05 David Rosenthal Like, this is not how Luca's time at Ferrari should have ended.
• ▶ 2:33:32 David Rosenthal He has become Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:33:35 David Rosenthal You see Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:34:15 David Rosenthal So, with Luca gone, the path is cleared to IPO Ferrari, and in 2015, Fiat and Sergio float, as you said Ben, 10% of their 90% ownership stake in Ferrari on the New York Stock Exchange for an initial total market cap of Ferrari of 9.8…
• ▶ 2:34:46 Ben Gilbert So, twenty-fifteen, Ferrari publicly traded worth ten billion dollars.
• ▶ 2:35:05 David Rosenthal That is turning Ferrari into a real business there.
• ▶ 2:35:34 David Rosenthal As part of the spinoff of Ferrari and the whole transaction, they effectively transfer another 3.2 billion dollars in Fiat Chrysler debt to Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:35:59 Ben Gilbert The interesting thing is, it was perfectly fine to do this because Ferrari turns into a great, great business that is perfectly capable of paying down all that debt that was just transferred to them.
• ▶ 2:36:31 Ben Gilbert And Ferrari is a great little engine to pay down debt.
• ▶ 2:36:35 David Rosenthal And not just a little engine, like, the value unlock that happens at Ferrari here, to use investor speak, is unprecedented.
• ▶ 2:36:43 David Rosenthal The company IPOs at a 9.8 billion dollar market cap in 2015.
• ▶ 2:37:21 Ben Gilbert Ferrari was not appreciated by investors when it was nestled inside of fiat for the real gem that it was.
• ▶ 2:37:51 David Rosenthal Value is unlocked at Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:38:13 Ben Gilbert Those closest to Enzo himself, Ferrari, the company.
• ▶ 2:38:37 David Rosenthal But still, within Ferrari, there ends up being kind of a parade of CEOs over the next couple of years.
• ▶ 2:38:47 David Rosenthal Culminating in 2021, when the current CEO of Ferrari, Benedetto Viña, is hired, and he's a new choice for the company.
• ▶ 2:39:26 David Rosenthal Which actually makes a lot of sense for the direction that Ferrari and technology is heading.
• ▶ 2:39:33 David Rosenthal So the question is, what happens at the company after the IPO?
• ▶ 2:39:44 David Rosenthal Ferrari does increase production.
• ▶ 2:40:32 David Rosenthal This is essentially Ferrari runway fashion.
• ▶ 2:40:37 Ben Gilbert But yeah, it's this acknowledgement of, hey, there's a lot of people that want to participate in the Ferrari brand who are very affluent, and they don't want to go buy any of these things from our partners.
• ▶ 2:41:08 Ben Gilbert They're really opening up the aperture of Ferrari represents something, and can we give people more tokens to sort of adorn themselves in Ferrari and not just cars?
• ▶ 2:41:29 David Rosenthal That come about as a result of Ferrari now being a public company and needing to show predictable growth and new avenues of growth to Wall Street.
• ▶ 2:42:23 David Rosenthal In fact, Ferrari becomes
• ▶ 2:42:28 David Rosenthal You know, if you take as a axiom that the most important part of the soul of Ferrari is a Ferrari being a Ferrari and not being a rebadged Fiat 500 or Volkswagen Touareg,
• ▶ 2:42:45 David Rosenthal Ferrari today is even farther away from Fiat than it was before the IPO.
• ▶ 2:42:51 David Rosenthal It really kind of reestablished Ferrari as its own separate entity.
• ▶ 2:43:49 David Rosenthal Is how the Ferrari model range has evolved.
• ▶ 2:43:59 Ben Gilbert So, Ferrari effectively makes four types of cars that consumers can buy.
• ▶ 2:44:18 David Rosenthal So this is the collection of sports cars and GT grand touring cars that have always been the core of Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:44:37 Ben Gilbert This is your Amalfi, your Roma, your Tesarosa, your twelve-cylindri, these sorts of models.
• ▶ 2:44:37 Ben Gilbert This is your Amalfi, your Roma, your Tesarosa, your twelve-cylindri, these sorts of models.
• ▶ 2:44:43 Ben Gilbert So that's 85%, and actually sometimes it flexes up even higher if they are not shipping a supercar at the moment, because the supercar that we had talked about, the F-Forty, the F-Fifty, the Enzo, the LaFerrari, and now the F-Eighty, these…
• ▶ 2:44:43 Ben Gilbert So that's 85%, and actually sometimes it flexes up even higher if they are not shipping a supercar at the moment, because the supercar that we had talked about, the F-Forty, the F-Fifty, the Enzo, the LaFerrari, and now the F-Eighty, these…
• ▶ 2:45:40 Ben Gilbert Oh, Ferrari people would.
• ▶ 2:45:43 David Rosenthal Part of me is dying by making this analogy for Ferrari, but it's telling, right, that this was added.
• ▶ 2:45:49 David Rosenthal This never existed before, and now there's, you know, essentially the M series or the AMG series of the Ferrari range.
• ▶ 2:46:17 Ben Gilbert Yes, and the way I just described that, someone at Ferrari is very mad.
• ▶ 2:46:31 Ben Gilbert That'll run you about 2.3 million dollars for the current one, this V-twelve Daytona SP-III.
• ▶ 2:47:15 Ben Gilbert The stated reason is that they pay homage to Ferraris from history.
• ▶ 2:47:34 Ben Gilbert These people own at least 10 new Ferraris, maybe 20 plus Ferraris in a garage.
• ▶ 2:47:41 Ben Gilbert These people are tens of millions of dollars deep into buying Ferraris.
• ▶ 2:48:35 Ben Gilbert That is, it is the Ferrari utility vehicle.
• ▶ 2:48:54 Ben Gilbert And when you go up market from Porsche, even to Lamborghini, which looks a lot like Ferrari from a production volume standpoint, they only make 11,000 cars a year also.
• ▶ 2:49:47 Ben Gilbert So people really want one from Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:49:49 Ben Gilbert So what does Ferrari do?
• ▶ 2:49:50 Ben Gilbert They don't call it an SUV.
• ▶ 2:49:51 Ben Gilbert They call it an FEV.
• ▶ 2:49:52 Ben Gilbert They debut a low top.
• ▶ 2:49:54 Ben Gilbert Four-door, almost SUV, called the Puro Sangue, and as you mentioned, it translates to pure blood or thoroughbred, and it's almost as if they're saying, yes, this is still a Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:50:05 Ben Gilbert In fact, we're, we're almost even overcompensating with the name and saying, we really insist it is as thoroughbred of a Ferrari as you could possibly own by naming it that.
• ▶ 2:50:19 Ben Gilbert Yeah, I mean, it is, it's a, it's a real Ferrari under the hood.
• ▶ 2:50:22 Ben Gilbert The really disciplined thing that they did, though, they capped total production at 20%.