Anti-Business Billionaires: Lessons from Steve Jobs, James Dyson, and Yvon Chouinard

**David Senra** (0:00)
They're like, would you be interested in selling your company? The response was, fuck you, this is a family heirloom.

**Sam Parr** (0:18)
Okay, so what we're talking about today is, basically, I don't listen to any business podcasts other than Founders. It's the only business podcast I listen to. I listen to Founders, and I listen to MMA, and true crime. That's pretty much it. And so, I view you as my friend, but I also am a fan of yours. And you tweeted out this amazing thing. It was about the anti-business person, the anti-business man billionaire. So the first tenet of these anti-business billionaires is they have high levels of disagreeableness.

**David Senra** (0:50)
This is very important because everybody around you, I just used a reference of Michael Dell. Michael Dell could be on this list too. I'm reading his autobiography, like I said earlier, and I got to the point where he's taking the company private and it's so difficult what he's trying to do. And everybody's just like, why don't you just give up, Michael, you're already rich. You could start another company. He's like, I don't want to start another company. I want this. This is my first and last company. In his case, that's very rare to have your first company or your last company. This is my last company. But then he has a line. He goes, I'm going to care about this company after I'm dead. I was like, oh, that's a different level. So the disagreeableness, if we use the three people in the clip, which is Steve Jobs, James Dyson, and Yvon Chouinard, it's like they are hell bent on making the world, they don't bend to the world, right? They make the world bend to them. And they refuse to compromise on the product quality, even when it seems absurd. And like James Dyson, I got to tell you a crazy story about James Dyson, because everybody's like, oh yeah, Dyson, the guy that like, I wash my hands and like dries my, it's a hand dryer in the bathroom everywhere. And it's that cyclonic vacuum cleaner. It's like, no, the guy has built one of the most successful companies of all time.

**Sam Parr** (1:54)
I think it's one of the largest privately owned companies in the world.

**David Senra** (1:56)
You want to hear some crazy, so there's always rumors, right? And again, privately held, so you don't have to tell. And it was like, oh, yeah, you know, he's probably worth like 10 or 20 billion. I was like, you're off by like a lot. So a friend of mine happens to know somebody that works for it. And usually you can find you can find hints, you know, if you look at their family office. Right. And a friend of mine knows somebody at the family office. So they're just like, man, we have a big problem. Like they have to deploy like four to five billion dollars every year. Right. Okay. And so they're like, you look and he's like, James Dyson now is like the largest producer of green peas in Europe. He owns the most sheep in the entire world. Like you see all these crazy. So like, where's the four or five billion dollars coming from? It's like, the rumor is that he's been taking out, you know, four or five, six, seven billion dollars a year in dividends, retaining the enterprise value obviously, because he never even saw a company that still has 100% of it. So I was just this like super fancy, private investor-only conference, right? There's only a handful of people there. One guy controls a shit ton of capital and he lists the podcast we were talking. And he has a problem where like, the more assets and management we have, the bigger, you have to, Buffet talks about this over and over again, like to move the needle, the opportunity has to be so large. And so they were buying like smaller family companies, maybe in like the billion to two billion range. And so now he's like, I have too much, too many assets and management, I have to like, I have to swing bigger. So they go to approach Dyson, okay? I'm gonna paraphrase. The response back from Dyson is gonna answer your question about high levels of disagreeableness, right? They're like, would you be interested in selling your company? The response was, fuck you, this is a family heirloom.
So it's like, again, he's not doing it for money. He's run out of the money he will ever spend. He's doing it because he loves it. He wants it. You just talked about maybe if your kids want to work in the business, you see that a lot. They're doing it because they want to pass on to the next generation. They want to die still owning this thing. You can't go to him and be like, I'll give you $2 trillion. It doesn't matter. There's no amount of money that you could give James Dyson to stop working on Dyson. Just like there would have been no amount of money you could have gave Steve Jobs to stop. If you go to Steve Jobs, imagine you go to Steve Jobs and be like, hey, this iPhone, you created the most successful consumer product of all time. How much would I have to pay you to not do this?