Sam Zell

“Business is not a battle to be waged. It's a puzzle to be solved.”

“There were weeks when our billion dollar company was scrambling to scrape up enough money to make payroll. I didn't know it then, but this phrase in my career, or this phase, excuse me, this phase in my career was the genesis of a mantra that I would repeat re…”

“Redundancies are much more predictable and transparent than theoretical opportunities to add value. My focus is always on the downside. Overly optimistic assumptions lead to the graveyard of corporate acquisitions.”

“I often say I'm chairman of everything and the CEO of nothing. I stick to what I'm good at. Vision, direction, strategy. That is where I add the most value. I pick great people to run my businesses. I do not involve myself in the day-to-day management. But I s…”

“He was able to sneak about 10, the equivalent of, like, 10,000 dollars today out of the country in advance of him escaping, and if he didn't do that, there was a good chance that they wouldn't have never made it to America”

“Between 1974 and 1977, we bought roughly four billion dollars in assets with a dollar down and a hope certificate.”

“You cannot make a good deal with bad people.”

“I bought my first building during my second year of law school. I bought it for 19,500 dollars with 1500 dollars down.”

“In any negotiation, I believe in leaving a little bit on the table. And in any relationship, I believe in sharing the stakes. I've been doing deals with many of the same people for decades, because the goal is for us to all come out ahead.”

“If everyone is going left, look right. Conventional wisdom is nothing to me, but a reference point.”

“I had always believed that every day you choose to hold an asset, you're also choosing to buy it.”

“When there is scarcity, price is no object. This basic tenet of supply and demand would later become a governing principle of my investment philosophy.”

“The note of myself there is no one loves America like an exile from a hostile regime loves America.”

“Gravedancing is an art that has many potential benefits, but one must be careful while prancing around not to fall into the open pit and join the cadaver. There is often a thin line between the dancer And the danced upon.”

“I'm often asked, can entrepreneurship be taught or is it innate? My answer is that there is an inherent entrepreneurial gene, albeit it's stronger in some than others.”

“In fact, he gets to law school, and I think the last year of law school, if I'm not mistaken, he makes the equivalent of, like, two and a half million dollars, or maybe, like, 1.5 million dollars, like, his last year of law school.”

“Zeckendorf viewed assets as a sum of parts, so he could increase the value of the whole. Various parts were more valuable to different buyers, so Zeckendorf would maximize the value of his holdings overall, in effect making one plus one equal three. He calcula…”

“Frankly, there's no substitute for limited competition. You can be a genius, but if there's a lot of competition, it will not matter.”

“As I would later realize indifference to rejection is a fundamental part Of being an entrepreneur.”

“I essentially took on four billion dollars of non-recourse debt at an average interest rate of six percent in an environment with inflation of nine percent or higher. That means I was already making three percent returns the second the deal closed without doin…”

“The simple genius of public REITs is that they turn brick and mortar into transparent and predictable liquid assets.”

“It did not matter how smart you were if you didn't have staying power, if you were not able to hang on to your assets.”

“I just had to assume that there was a way through any obstacle, and then I would find it. This, and this is why I'm reading this to you, this sentence in particular, this is perhaps my most fundamental principle of entrepreneurship and to success in general.”

“The bottom line is if you're really good at what you do, you have the freedom to be who you really are.”

“He goes through 43 rejections, finally gets hired, lasts four days.”

“Once you find your life's work, extra strategy is death. It's not retirement.”

“So when I completed the thirty nine billion dollar sale of Equity Office, that's his company, in early 2007, I didn't yet know how the story would play out.”

“Our thinking was that if you dress funny and you're great at what you do, you're eccentric. But if you dress funny and you're just okay at what you do, you're a schmuck.”

“I'm probably best known for creating several of the largest companies in commercial real estate and for helping establish today's one trillion dollar public real estate industry.”

“And the one Sam Zell told me that I had to read one that Sam Zell talks about in his autobiography that he read when he was a young man. He's actually around 30 years old when he read this book. And that book is Zeckendorf, the autobiography of the man who pla…”

“For example, one Park Avenue in Manhattan, which the marketplace had valued at ten million dollars, was ultimately worth fifteen million in Zeckendorf's hands. He calculated everything separately. The building's title, the land, the leases, the individual mort…”

“He did say one thing. He's like, listen, don't get caught up in owning a bunch of shit. It's just like, you're just going to keep buying nicer versions of the same stuff. Like, it's just not worth it. That's not what life is about. And he goes, there's a true …”

“You don't build a company and sell it for forty billion dollars and then learn all this stuff. Like he was, had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and information that could be useful to his life and his career, his entire life. He knew this stuff as he was bu…”

“I found the same thing when I was meeting with Charlie Munger, is like, they are authentic to themselves, and I, that's something I'm obviously trying to strive to be, but like, I just love seeing that, because sometimes you see, like, the public persona is fa…”

“They leave on the last train of Poland, and then the Nazis wind up bombing that train.”

“He's like, if you get the freedom, you can control what you do every day and you'll love it. And if you love it, you'll be very good at it. And then the money will come with it. You have to love the day to day. It does not mean it will be easy. That does not m…”

“Sam sold his company, you know, for almost forty billion dollars.”

“He says, it's an obligation. I'm getting goosebumps. It's an obligation for me to share with other entrepreneurs what I learned.”

“Even when he was in law school, he was making the equivalent. It's like, you and I going to law school right now, we'd be in our early twenties and making millions of dollars a year while going to law school. Sam Zell did the equivalent when he was in law scho…”

“I got the chance to talk to both before they passed away. Two hours of Sam Zell and three hours of Charlie Munger.”

“You don't sell a company for thirty-eight billion dollars like Sam Zell did, then you learn all this shit. You don't make incredible movies like Django Unchained and Inglourious Bastards and Pulp Fiction and then learn all this shit. You learn it way before, i…”

“And the way he built his audience in Chicago was he would write op-eds in newspapers. As a result of that, he was invited to make an investment in the Chicago Bulls.”

“Freedom allows you to control what you work on. If you control what you work on, then you can work on what you love. If you love it, you'll do it for a long time. And if you do it for a long time, you'll get really good at it and money will come as a result.”

“He always said that if there were 12 steps in a deal, the whole thing depended on just one of them. The others would either work themselves out or were less important.”

“I think that's why you find in people that reach the top of the profession, they have this historical database they can draw in, draw from in their head. It's exactly why Sam Zell and Charlie Munger spent so much time reading and studying history.”

“There's only one true luxury in the world. And that's a private jet.”

“This company lost fifty million dollars of cashflow last year, and you never would have known if you talked to anyone around here.”

“The true test of an entrepreneur is someone who spends his life constantly testing his limits. The definition of an idiot is someone who has reached his goals.”

“There is one generally infallible tenant when it comes to real estate developers, no matter how disciplined they might presume themselves, given access to easy money, they will feed at the trough and overindulge.”

“Zell insists that briefings be kept to a single page, no matter how complicated the deal or issue, anything more is summarily dismissed.”

“For the next 10 years, Sam and Bob snatched up distressed and bankrupt companies, riding out the ugly mid-nineteen seventies U.S. Economic recession. They shunned the high risk, high debt development game, which saw many real estate titans, Teeter on the brink…”

“This book was published in 2009, right after Sam Zell suffered his greatest failure in his career, which was the bankruptcy of Tribune Media, a little less than a year after he had purchased it.”

“He raises two opportunity funds. He does this in 1988 and 1989. I think he raises over a billion dollars in 13 months.”

“The fact that they decided to finance their thirty two billion dollar offer with six Team banks at two billion dollars each instead of three banks at ten billion dollars each might have suggested. Perhaps They were thinking that if they could get 16 banks for …”

“And so as he's going through this negotiation in the contract, he put a breakup fee in there in case Rockefeller Center was sold to another buyer, which it was. So he went up pocketing an 11.5 million dollar breakup fee.”

“Frankly, there's no substitute for limited competition. You can be a genius, but if there's a lot of competition, it won't matter. I've spent my career trying to avoid its destructive consequences. Competition skews people's assessments. As buyers get competit…”

“I don't do business with anyone who's not afraid, and I won't hire anybody who is confident to the point where fear is not very close to the surface.”

“In February, 2007, he sold his equity office properties trust, the largest owner of office buildings in the world for a hefty thirty nine billion dollars to Blackstone. That was the largest leveraged buyout in corporate history at the time.”

“One thing Zell repeats too, is the importance of salesmanship of sales is like the, maybe the most valuable skill you can have. According to Zell, salesmanship is a gift that should be revered. Contrary to popular belief, he said, Nothing is bought and everyth…”

“He gets invited to buy into the Chicago Bulls a few years. I think it was two years before they drafted Michael Jordan. And so if I remember correctly, he said something like, you know, the annual div, he has to do nothing for that, right? He just has like the…”

“What's more important is now we have a good relationship and a true partnership. And so it's not about the money I'm going to make or lose on this deal. It's what happens on the next one, and the next one.”

“Both Munger and Zell were exactly that way. They did not try to hide their eccentricities. They embrace them. And that's part of the reason that they had such a cult-like following.”

“Sam Zell told me to my face, I'll be doing deals till I die. He did that.”

“I had lunch with Sam Zell before he died. He told me exactly this. He's like, what you own eventually owns you. And so even though he's one of the wealthiest people on the planet, he didn't own a lot of things. He had his place in Chicago, his compound in Mali…”