Ben Gilbert
Co-host, Acquired podcast · Co-founder, Pioneer Square Labs (PSL); investor
“In September of 2016, it finally gets announced that the American media company Liberty Media is acquiring F1 for $4.4 billion of equity value and assuming all of the outstanding debt that the company has for a combined total enterprise value of $8 billion. The way they do it is interesting. Liberty and John Malone and Greg Maffei are masters of deals and financial engineering. They initially acquire a like 18, 19% stake in F1 from CVC, so enough to make them the largest shareholder. And then they actually changed the whole name of Liberty Media, the company, the publicly traded company, into the Formula One Group. Create a new tracking stock to track the value of F1 Group, FWONK. And then they issue fwonk shares to the remaining equity holders, including CVC and Bernie, et cetera, such that 100% of the company is now liquid and publicly traded.”
“Ford makes 160 times the number of cars that Ferrari does. Yet Ferrari has a higher market capitalization. They're worth more than the Ford Motor Company and Volkswagen and Honda and Stellantis and Mercedes Benz. This company is worth so much more than most giant manufacturers. Ferrari makes all of their cars mostly by hand, inefficiently, and one off in a single town, Maranello, Italy. And they have the highest margins in the entire auto industry of the very few cars that they do make. About 80% of them are earmarked specifically for people who already own a Ferrari. So that means there's less than 3,000 new customers buying Ferraris in any given year.”
“They did $8.2 billion in revenue in 2025. In terms of profits, they did 3.2 billion in EBITDA. So they've got a 38.8% EBITDA margin. Ferrari is 50% gross margins. That is a luxury brand. The supercars and the Icona cars are way above 50% gross margins — I get the sense the range is like 30ish percent, maybe 35%. And then the supercars are in the 80 to 90% gross margin range. Compare to Ford 7%, GM 10%, BMW 14%, Volkswagen 14%, Mercedes Benz 16 to 22%, Porsche 15 to 25%, Toyota 18 to 21%. LVMH is 66% and Hermes is 71%.”
“F80 — $2.9 billion of revenue to Ferrari over about two and a half years of deliveries. So give or take one and a quarter billion dollars of revenue in the first 12 months is going to Ferrari from that supercar. That's 15% of revenues for the year just from that one car model.”
Ben Gilbert
One-line summary: Co-host of the Acquired podcast (with David Rosenthal). Deep-history company episodes are the wiki's primary moat-tracing source for publicly-listed scarcity businesses (FWONK/FWONA, RACE, etc.). Ben covers the financial-engineering and capital-structure side of Acquired episodes.
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Said
Speaker-attributed claims extracted from diarized sources. Each bullet mirrors one entry in quotes: frontmatter — keep them in sync.
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On liberty-media, formula-1:
"In September of 2016, it finally gets announced that the American media company Liberty Media is acquiring F1 for $4.4 billion of equity value and assuming all of the outstanding debt that the company has for a combined total enterprise value of $8 billion. The way they do it is interesting. Liberty and John Malone and Greg Maffei are masters of deals and financial engineering. They initially acquire a like 18, 19% stake in F1 from CVC, so enough to make them the largest shareholder. And then they actually changed the whole name of Liberty Media, the company, the publicly traded company, into the Formula One Group. Create a new tracking stock to track the value of F1 Group, FWONK. And then they issue fwonk shares to the remaining equity holders, including CVC and Bernie, et cetera, such that 100% of the company is now liquid and publicly traded." — 2026-03-02-acquired-formula-1 (2026-03-02)
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On ferrari:
"Ford makes 160 times the number of cars that Ferrari does. Yet Ferrari has a higher market capitalization. They're worth more than the Ford Motor Company and Volkswagen and Honda and Stellantis and Mercedes Benz. This company is worth so much more than most giant manufacturers. Ferrari makes all of their cars mostly by hand, inefficiently, and one off in a single town, Maranello, Italy. And they have the highest margins in the entire auto industry of the very few cars that they do make. About 80% of them are earmarked specifically for people who already own a Ferrari. So that means there's less than 3,000 new customers buying Ferraris in any given year." — 2026-04-12-acquired-ferrari (2026-04-12)
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On ferrari:
"They did $8.2 billion in revenue in 2025. In terms of profits, they did 3.2 billion in EBITDA. So they've got a 38.8% EBITDA margin. Ferrari is 50% gross margins. That is a luxury brand. The supercars and the Icona cars are way above 50% gross margins — I get the sense the range is like 30ish percent, maybe 35%. And then the supercars are in the 80 to 90% gross margin range. Compare to Ford 7%, GM 10%, BMW 14%, Volkswagen 14%, Mercedes Benz 16 to 22%, Porsche 15 to 25%, Toyota 18 to 21%. LVMH is 66% and Hermes is 71%." — 2026-04-12-acquired-ferrari (2026-04-12)
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On ferrari:
"F80 — $2.9 billion of revenue to Ferrari over about two and a half years of deliveries. So give or take one and a quarter billion dollars of revenue in the first 12 months is going to Ferrari from that supercar. That's 15% of revenues for the year just from that one car model." — 2026-04-12-acquired-ferrari (2026-04-12)
Sources
- 2026-03-02-acquired-formula-1
- 2026-04-12-acquired-ferrari
- 2026-05-17-acquired-vanguard — co-host on this episode, but AssemblyAI could not name speakers (labels are only "A"/"B"), so no quotes from this source are attributed to Ben specifically. Claims are filed source-attributed on vanguard, blackrock and index-fund-fee-compression-beneficiaries.