Apple

“And I know this is not the greatest thing to say, but being in the hedge fund business for all these years, it's interesting how few hedge funds I give money to. And it's not because I don't want to. It's that the market's gotten more efficient. There's a lot …”

“Certainly banks are going to be under unbelievable pressure, but I'm talking 20 years from now by this. I'm holding up a cell phone, an Apple phone, because go to Kenya. You don't have banks. You have mobile payments. Go to China.”

“And sure enough, IBM was a complete dud. However, it allowed for them to begin the journey to technology, and sometime later, instead of a six billion dollar position in the dud, IBM, they have a forty billion dollar position in Apple, and they were willing to…”

“We were buying Dell instead of Apple, eBay instead of Amazon, Yahoo instead of Google. I mean, those three trades alone would have had, had they been done differently, would have had dramatically different results for that domestic product.”

“In the Vision Fund one, we had six limited partners. One was SoftBank itself, so SoftBank's a big operating company, spits off a lot of free cash flow. The second was the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Saudi Arabia called PIF. The third was the Sovereign Wealth Fund…”

“If you were to strip out the 40 most successful US stocks out of the S&P 500 and compare that to the, so the remaining S&P 460, I guess. The S&P 400 sixty's performance is actually bang in line with emerging markets. Bang in line with European markets. There's…”

“Because there has never been in American history a reaction to the death of a CEO the way the country, and indeed the whole world, reacted to the death of Steve Jobs. I mean, there were people, Ted, you may remember this if you were walking past an Apple store…”

“I think that the need for charisma is actually going to increase, not decrease, and here's why. The people who are going to create whatever it is that's coming down the pike are going to be knowledge workers, and they're going to have to be really smart. If yo…”

“And the first three months I was there, we took Genentech Public. We took Apple Public. I carried Steve Jobs bags on the Apple IPO Roadshow, and I was just exposed to the two of the most amazing entrepreneurs ever, and I fell in love.”

“I'm never going to beat Tiger Global or KOTU or anyone on Apple because they're going to have Yippit data and they're going to have robots and AI and credit cards and all of this stuff that's just going to make it functionally impossible for me to beat them.”

“If you wanted to make money in smartphones, 20 years ago, whenever it was, you invested in Apple, and you had a global industry leader. That's not going to happen anymore. You will have Apple US, Apple China”

“When I first started at Vulcan, we owned Apple, and at the time, I mean, it was just unbelievably cheap. It was like, and the iPhone that they'd released that year was not as popular as the Samsung Galaxy, which is hard to believe today, but everybody was kind…”

“The infrastructure of it is a little bit reminiscent of the Apple, IBM computer debate of the nineties, where it's like you were never incented to buy an Apple product if you were a corporate purchasing person, because you got no penalty for buying IBM and you…”

“They wanted to open up their first Apple store in our building, and we were very close to wrapping up a deal with someone else. We spoke to Steve Jobs, and he explained his vision for the business, which, to be honest, is exactly what turned out to be the case…”

“And at the firm wide level, we own five of the seven across our various different portfolios. But two of them, in this case, Apple and Tesla are companies that we have not embraced.”

“If you were to take something like Apple over the last five years, a big driver of Apple's growth has actually been valuation driven rather than earnings driven.”

“Their customers are, I think, high-value goods. So Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers, some cold storage, where they're Tracking and monitoring the environment of this high value cargo from beginning point to end point.”

“We got invested in Apple in January of oh four. It was our largest position for years. In October of oh eight, the stock fell 50% and stayed there for six months.”

“We made a bunch of money in BlackBerry, and then we lost a bunch of money in BlackBerry. We were early, one of my partners was like, this mobility thing is going to scale much faster than people think, and the winners are going to be Apple and Google and Black…”

“My biggest pet peeve in the industry is when a manager shows me a pitch book with an upside down triangle with an investment universe at the top and a portfolio at the bottom. I'm sure you've seen a thousand of them as well. And then they proudly claim that wh…”

“We could deduce that there was massive amounts of costs and losses being poured into these hardware initiatives. To the tune of four or five, six billion dollars a year that might be better spent driving Office three 65 in Azure instead of trying to chase the …”

“If you watch Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone launch, he uses steak, suspense, surprise, and humor. All four of them in the 1:06 minutes of the presentation. He does it masterfully and brilliantly. He's not really telling a story. He's bringing out a new product for a …”

“Jobs famously practiced for months on that performance. The crazy thing about it is he messes up on the second sentence. He actually speaks the fourth sentence second, cuts himself off, fixes it, and then goes back.”

“Apple had one that was just so big with the smartphone, The challenge for them was they did well with tablets and they did well with earbuds. They're doing well with the watch, but those weren't big enough to move the needle.”

“There's this company, Roku, no VCs would fund it, because every venture capitalist was worried about competition from Amazon, Google, and Apple. I was like, well, I'm really familiar with those companies. Competing with Roku, it is not on their top 50 list of …”