Mason Morfit, co-CEO of ValueAct Capital, explains Microsoft's compressed valuation multiple before its cloud transition.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So the PC legacy of the company was not what was going to take it forward, and the stock was trading at about eight times earnings.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mason Morfit
Insight
Morfit: The three fundamental ways to win in equity investing
“There's only three ways to win equity investing. One is you have better information or faster information and computer programs and fiber optic cables that you tunnel through railway Lines and stuff, and we don't do that. The second way is you understand the w…”
Mason MorfitSep 29, 2025▶ 19:03Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462)
Insight
Morfit: Financial segment disclosures reflect internal bureaucracy, not true unit economics
“Financials are reported out as a function of the bureaucracy of the company, not necessarily as a function of the real economics of the business. So the segment disclosures you're getting are not necessarily the true economic picture, but if you're a good secu…”
Mason MorfitSep 29, 2025▶ 27:22Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462)
Opinion
Morfit: Dot-com era Wall Street research relied on executive hero worship
“I looked around and I saw a system that was built on hero worship. Number one, we used to bring folks like Jeff Skilling of Enron in and have these big town hall meetings, and everybody would ooh and ah about how brilliant he was, and next in would be Hank Gre…”
Mason MorfitSep 29, 2025▶ 9:44Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462)
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Morfit: Microsoft burned $4B to $6B annually chasing Apple and Google
“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 …”
Mason MorfitSep 29, 2025▶ 28:29Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462)
Insight
Morfit: Public boards lack investment theses, leading to adjective-driven CEO searches
“A public company is sort of an evergreen institution, and the board members generally don't have an investment thesis almost all the time. They're chosen from outside that company's industry, so they have great Life stories and super impressive people and a gr…”
Mason MorfitSep 29, 2025▶ 33:19Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462)
Disclosure
Morfit: ValueAct bought $60M of stock directly from Martha Stewart
“We got her to sell the only share she'd ever sold in our company, sixty million dollars to us, because we told her how scary it was to see all these scandals.”
Mason MorfitSep 29, 2025▶ 17:44Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462)
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 700 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.