David Rosenthal
Co-host, Acquired podcast · Founder, Pioneer Square Labs (PSL); investor
“The completely fascinating thing about Liberty Media today is it sort of doesn't exist anymore. They bought F1, then they did enough other spinoffs through the Atlanta Braves spinoff, through Liberty Live, the Live Nation spin off. At this point, like 90% of Liberty itself is Formula One and the stock is actually Formula One. It's like they spun out everything else that was left. And so the holding company is actually basically Formula One now.”
“There's 830 million people who identify as fans globally. This is different than viewers. There are 450 million global TV viewers. The last time that they broke this out and reported it in 2021, seems to have become like a state secret since then, where they no longer report this information. As of 2025, Forbes estimates team valuations at about $3.6 billion on average. This has been a huge growth — an 89% increase in the last two years. Every team is now north of a billion dollars, with the least valuable team, Haas at 1.5 billion. At the top end: $6.5 billion for Ferrari, $6 billion for Mercedes, 4.4 billion for McLaren and 4.35 billion for Red Bull Racing.”
“The multiples on these things are very silly. Most of these teams, except for the top three, produce very little in the way of profit. So if you look at an NFL team, they actually spit off a lot of cash. If you look at these teams, even the most connected to their intrinsic value, Mercedes is trading at 30 times operating income. They trade at values because they're scarce assets, not because they are cash generative assets. People got very excited when they started not being absolutely horrible businesses. And when they started being fine businesses, everyone sort of pulled forward many, many years of growth and potential profitability into their valuations.”
“Enzo was a natural born entrepreneur and marketer. He really was Italy's Steve Jobs in every aspect. Steve Jobs was not an engineer. He was a marketer, same as Enzo. Enzo is not an engineer. He's not a car mechanic. He can't build the cars himself. But they both had a sort of understanding and deep appreciation for the technical things that enabled their visions to be possible.”
David Rosenthal
One-line summary: Co-host of the Acquired podcast (with Ben Gilbert). Covers the narrative and operator-history side of Acquired episodes. Tracked here for the 'scarcity-as-multiple-premium' framing he applies to luxury and sport businesses.
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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:
"The completely fascinating thing about Liberty Media today is it sort of doesn't exist anymore. They bought F1, then they did enough other spinoffs through the Atlanta Braves spinoff, through Liberty Live, the Live Nation spin off. At this point, like 90% of Liberty itself is Formula One and the stock is actually Formula One. It's like they spun out everything else that was left. And so the holding company is actually basically Formula One now." — 2026-03-02-acquired-formula-1 (2026-03-02)
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On formula-1, liberty-media, ferrari:
"There's 830 million people who identify as fans globally. This is different than viewers. There are 450 million global TV viewers. The last time that they broke this out and reported it in 2021, seems to have become like a state secret since then, where they no longer report this information. As of 2025, Forbes estimates team valuations at about $3.6 billion on average. This has been a huge growth — an 89% increase in the last two years. Every team is now north of a billion dollars, with the least valuable team, Haas at 1.5 billion. At the top end: $6.5 billion for Ferrari, $6 billion for Mercedes, 4.4 billion for McLaren and 4.35 billion for Red Bull Racing." — 2026-03-02-acquired-formula-1 (2026-03-02)
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On formula-1:
"The multiples on these things are very silly. Most of these teams, except for the top three, produce very little in the way of profit. So if you look at an NFL team, they actually spit off a lot of cash. If you look at these teams, even the most connected to their intrinsic value, Mercedes is trading at 30 times operating income. They trade at values because they're scarce assets, not because they are cash generative assets. People got very excited when they started not being absolutely horrible businesses. And when they started being fine businesses, everyone sort of pulled forward many, many years of growth and potential profitability into their valuations." — 2026-03-02-acquired-formula-1 (2026-03-02)
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On ferrari:
"Enzo was a natural born entrepreneur and marketer. He really was Italy's Steve Jobs in every aspect. Steve Jobs was not an engineer. He was a marketer, same as Enzo. Enzo is not an engineer. He's not a car mechanic. He can't build the cars himself. But they both had a sort of understanding and deep appreciation for the technical things that enabled their visions to be possible." — 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 David specifically. Claims are filed source-attributed on vanguard, blackrock and index-fund-fee-compression-beneficiaries.