Brad Jacobs
58 statements across 5 episodes · 26 bullish · 4 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Mar 19, 2024 by Brad Jacobs · said 42 times in 8 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Brad Jacobs's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Shane Parrish (26), Adam Carr (10), Mario Harik (6)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 25 mentions in 3 episodes 8 per episode
2025 7 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2024 10 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Brad Jacobs, oldest first
Mar 19, 2024 bullish
Jacobs: QXO can reach $50B in revenue through acquisitions and organic growth
“There are, there's eight hundred billion dollars of distributors in Western Europe and in North America, which is where I want to plant my flag. I want to build a company that's called fifty billion dollars. I can do that. If there's an eight hundred billion d…”
Mar 19, 2024 positive
Jacobs: Meeting endings dictate participant psychology, requiring positive conclusions
“When I run meetings, I like to make it like an Oreo cookie. I like to make the good stuff, the negative stuff, but then end on the good stuff. It's very important how you end a meeting. For whatever reason, psychologically, how you end a meeting makes a big di…”
Mar 19, 2024
Mar 19, 2024 neutral
Brad Jacobs has led teams through roughly 500 acquisitions
“My teams that I've led have done about 500 acquisitions. I've been involved in those acquisitions. So I get into the details of what are we buying? And to buy those 500 companies, we looked at thousands and thousands of other companies that we didn't buy”
Mar 19, 2024 bullish
XPO's Conway acquisition yielded $15B in value and $5B in cash
“We bought it for about
Three billion dollars.
Roughly half of it was equities.
It really bought it for a billion and a half dollars plus, plus some leverage.
Today it's worth something like fifteen billion dollars, and that's after having taken out many, like …”
Mar 19, 2024 bullish
Jacobs structures executive equity to double-vest only at top-tier shareholder returns
“So that if our shareholder returns are less than 55% or so, I don't want it to vest. If it's 65%, it vests some. If it's 75%, it vests more. If it, if it's 85%, 90%, 95%, I want it to, I want them to make, I want it to double vest.”
Mar 19, 2024 positive
Jacobs: Getting the major trend right overrides operational mistakes in business
“In business, in the business world, you've got to get the major trend right. You've got to get the major trend right. And as my main business mentor, may he rest in peace, Ludwig Jesselson used to say, you can mess up a lot of things, but if you get the main t…”
Mar 19, 2024 positive
Jacobs underwent three hours of weekly therapy to improve business decision-making
“I did a couple years of therapy for three hours a week for a couple years, so I have spent a lot of time reflecting on how I think, what my automatic thoughts are, what my biases are, what my cognitive distortions are, and I'm aware of those, and I apply vario…”
Mar 19, 2024
Jacobs: XPO levered past 4x for Conway before $550M asset sale
“When I bought Conway, we levered up to about four times, a little more than four times, but we very quickly sold off, I mentioned that truckload division, for five hundred fifty million dollars, boom, we paid down a whole bunch of debt right from that.”
Mar 19, 2024 neutral
Mar 19, 2024
Banque Paribas granted Jacobs a $1B credit line for oil trading
“I took all the rest of my money. I deposited it with Banque Paribas, and now it's BNP Paribas, back then it was Paribas, and they gave me a billion dollar line of credit, and I swung for the fences. I used sometimes up to nine hundred and ninety million dollar…”
Mar 19, 2024
Mar 19, 2024
Mar 19, 2024 negative
Jacobs: Most Fortune 500 board meetings are scripted wastes of time
“Most Fortune 500 company board members, board meetings, are kind of, they're very scripted, and sometimes they even rehearse. And there's a careful It's a story that's being told by management, and it's done by PowerPoint, it's done by rehearsed presentations …”
Mar 19, 2024
Mar 19, 2024 positive
Jacobs: Leaders must validate and join before disputing someone's thinking
“Joining, then leading. Validating, then disputing. So even when they are changing the way you're thinking, say, gee, is there a better way to look at that? Is there another way we can look at that and be more constructive? Before doing that, before that disput…”
Mar 19, 2024 negative
Bureaucratic M&A diligence memos primarily serve to cover corporate liability
“So you see some companies when they're negotiated by a company do this very lengthy and detailed and bureaucratic diligence process and they hire a firm and they write this big huge memo that nobody ever reads and or some wonk reads it but nobody important rea…”
Mar 19, 2024 positive
Jacobs: Running high-value meetings requires device bans and absolute single-speaker focus
“Everyone in the meeting shuts off all their devices and concentrates, concentrates, non-judgmentally, non-judgmental concentration on the one person who's speaking at a time. No side conversations, no talking over each other. One person speaks at a time, but e…”
Mar 19, 2024 neutral
Jacobs: Shareholder returns are a business's single true report card
“In business, the bottom line, the report card is,
How much money did you generate for your shareholders?
That's the one, it's a, it's an examination with one question on it.
It's how much did you make your stockholders?
How much money did you make for your sto…”
Mar 19, 2024 neutral
Jacobs: Non-revenue overhead must be an organization's lightest layer
“Heavy, heavy on the non-revenue generating top
Part of the organization, which should be the lightest part of any organization.
The heaviest part should be parts of the organization that make money, that generate revenue, that close to the customer, that gener…”
Mar 19, 2024 bullish
Jacobs is investing $900M of his personal capital into QXO
“Last week we had a call with my 75 co-investors in my new company, QXO. So my wife and I are putting in nine hundred million dollars, and then Sequoia And a few dozen friends and family, like really friends and family, like my sister and my brother and my niec…”
Mar 19, 2024 positive
Jacobs delivered 32x to 150x returns across five consecutive companies
“So in my companies, we've been fortunate that we've been able to give back 32 times their money in one, and another company is over 150 times. So really, Really large, large, large returns, like over the top, unusually high returns. That wasn't by luck. That w…”
Mar 19, 2024
Jacobs: Capital cost spread and operational improvement drive M&A value
“The biggest lever, the biggest component is the differential between what I raise capital at due to my relationships with mostly institutional investors and because of the track record and what I can deploy that at I'm doing acquisitions. The second biggest le…”
Mar 19, 2024 positive
Nov 12, 2024 bullish
Nov 12, 2024 bullish
Dec 24, 2024 bullish
Jacobs: QXO will reach $50B by taking 6% market share
“There are this eight hundred billion dollars of distributors in Western Europe and in North America, which is where I want to plant my flag. I want to build a company that's called fifty billion dollars. I can do that. If there's an eight hundred billion dolla…”
Dec 24, 2024
Jacobs: Capital cost spread and business improvements drive M&A value
“The biggest lever, the biggest component is the differential between what I raise capital at due to my relationships with mostly institutional investors, and because of the track record, and what I can deploy that at I'm doing acquisitions. The second biggest …”
Apr 14, 2026
Apr 14, 2026 positive
Apr 14, 2026
Harik: An 'A player' is someone whose resignation causes immediate dread
“If an A player walks into your office and say, Mario, you know what? I don't try to talk me out of it. Maybe my wife is moving to a different state and I, you know, I took a job with another company and You know, don't try to talk me out of it. This is done. I…”
Aug 4, 2026 positive
Jacobs: Business Initiatives Are Meaningless Talk If They Do Not Enrich Shareholders
“All the things I'm doing of hiring people and putting in technology, all the things we've been talking about for the last couple hours, that all comes down to making money for shareholders. If you're not making money for shareholders, it's just jabber jabber. …”
Aug 4, 2026 bullish
Jacobs: QXO will reach $50 billion by capturing 6% of distribution market
“I want to build a company that's called fifty billion dollars. I can do that. If there's an eight hundred billion dollar size, I can take six percent of that through acquisition and through organic growth. I can get to fifty billion dollars.”
Aug 4, 2026
Jacobs: FP&A should calibrate manager forecasts against their historical accuracy
“The FP&A people are really good at figuring out who's sandbagging, and who's exaggerated? By that, what I mean by that is you have some managers who just do their personalities or for whatever reason, or maybe they're playing games with their bonus. They want …”
Aug 4, 2026 positive
Jacobs: Business leaders should validate and agree before disputing or leading
“They're not disagreeing with you without first finding a way of agreeing with you. Joining, then leading. Validating than disputing. So even when they are changing the way you're thinking and say, gee, is there a better way to look at that? Is there another wa…”
Aug 4, 2026 positive
Jacobs: High-performing meetings require zero devices and full non-judgmental concentration
“An element of that meeting is everyone in the meeting shuts off all their devices and concentrates, concentrates, non-judgmentally, non-judgmental concentration on the one person who's speaking at a time. No side conversations, no talking over each other. One …”
Aug 4, 2026
Aug 4, 2026 bullish
Jacobs: Kurzweil is probably right that human-technology merger will create new species
“Ray predicts a singularity whereby technology becomes more intelligent, more capable than humans, and we merge with technology, that we use so much technology in our own bodies, with wearables, and nanobots, and so forth, that, and AI, and outsourcing our memo…”
Aug 4, 2026 positive
Jacobs: Zero debt is suboptimal because modest leverage boosts per-share returns
“I don't think it's an optimal balance sheet if you have no debt. Because you can improve the returns by shrinking your share count, because you have fewer shares. So the same amount of returns is, is greater per share, because you have fewer returns. So I thin…”
Aug 4, 2026
Aug 4, 2026
Jacobs tripled post-2015 acquisition profits through integration without raising equity
“Sometimes we've done some acquisitions, like in 2015, we did two big acquisitions and then we digested them. And we integrated and optimized and doubled and tripled the profit without doing any acquisitions. During that period of time, we didn't need to raise …”
Aug 4, 2026
Aug 4, 2026
Aug 4, 2026
Aug 4, 2026
Aug 4, 2026
Paribas gave Jacobs's early oil trading business a $1B credit line
“I deposited it with Banque Paribas, now it's BNP Paribas, back then it was Paribas, and they gave me a billion dollar line of credit, and I swung for the fences. I used sometimes up to nine hundred and ninety million dollars of that line of credit, doing count…”
Aug 4, 2026 bullish
Jacobs is investing $900M of his own money into QXO
“Last week we had a call with my 75 co-investors in my new company, QXO. So my wife and I are putting in nine hundred million dollars and then Sequoia And a few dozen friends and family, like really friends and family, like my sister and my brother and my niece…”
Aug 4, 2026 bullish
Aug 4, 2026
Jacobs: Catching the main trend matters more in business than operational perfection
“In business, in the business world, you've got to get the major trend right. You've got to get the major trend right. And as my main business mentor, may he rest in peace, Ludwig Jesselson used to say, you can mess up a lot of things, but if you get the main t…”
Aug 4, 2026 positive
Jacobs only hires 'raw capitalists' who are absolutely motivated by money
“I want my company, people who are absolutely motivated by money, who are raw capitalists, who are people who want to make money for themselves and their families, and that we can figure out a way that by being part of our company, they can help us make money f…”
Aug 4, 2026 positive
Jacobs structures executive equity to double-vest above the 85th percentile
“If our shareholder returns are less than 55% or so, I don't want it to vest. If it's 65%, it vests some. If it's 75%, it vests more. If it, if it's 85%, 90%, 95%, I want it to, I want them to make, I want it to double vest.”
Aug 4, 2026
Jacobs asks target executives if they would buy the company themselves
“I like to interview the top 15 or so people, one on one, like an hour, hour and a half. And I like to ask them, if this was your money, would you buy this company? And what would, if you did buy it, what would you change? What would you do differently?”
Aug 4, 2026
Jacobs: Integration begins at agreement signing and standardizes immediately upon closing
“I integrate from the moment that we agree to buy a company, we're starting the integration process. And the day we close the acquisition, Gazaam. We're in there and we're standardizing everything as much as we possibly can.”
Aug 4, 2026
Aug 4, 2026 negative
Aug 4, 2026
Brad Jacobs self-identifies as a musician rather than a businessperson
“I define myself, I self-identify as a musician, more than a business person, which you might find odd, because I've spent a lot of time building big businesses and running large enterprises, but When I think about myself as a music, musician who happens to be …”
Aug 4, 2026 negative
Jacobs: Lengthy diligence memos are bureaucratic CYA exercises nobody important reads
“So, you see some companies when they're negotiated by a company do this very lengthy and detailed and bureaucratic diligence process, and they hire a firm and they write this big huge memo that nobody ever reads, and some wonk reads it but nobody important rea…”
Aug 4, 2026 positive
Brad Jacobs did three hours of weekly therapy to improve business decisions
“I did a couple years of therapy for three hours a week for a couple years, so I have spent a lot of time reflecting on how I think, what my automatic thoughts are, what my biases are, what my cognitive distortions are, and I'm aware of those. And I apply vario…”