Episode 26: Marvel

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
All right, listeners, to start the show today, we are going to play a little game of Two Truths and a Lie. Today's episode will be covering the Marvel acquisition by Disney, and we are going to throw out the Two Truths and a Lie right now, and we will tell you which one is a lie at the end of Acquisition History and Facts, so get ready to predict. Number one, for a brief stretch ending in an internal Time Warner investigation, the president of DC Comics acquired a large position in Marvel stock. Number two, famed corporate raider and comic book villain Carl Icahn once made a play to gain control of Marvel from bankruptcy. Number three, Marvel owned FLIR, the baseball card company, and was affected in a huge way by the 1994 Major League Baseball strike. Which is the lie, you be the judge.
Welcome back to episode 26 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (1:17)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:18)
And we are your hosts. Today's episode is Disney's 2009 acquisition of Marvel. It really completes the saga for us here at Acquired, where our first episode was the Disney acquisition of Pixar, then our sixth episode was Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm. And all three of these, I believe, will have pretty similar tech themes. And David, I think, will really be able to kind of understand Disney's strategy and what their portfolio looks like these days.

**David Rosenthal** (1:47)
Yeah, this is a, this will, I feel like I always say this, but this will be a fun one.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:53)
Yeah, no kidding. And kind of a fun one here, here going into the holidays.
It's a nice one to tie up the year.

**David Rosenthal** (1:59)
Totally. And speaking of Disney's triumvirate of IP acquisitions, I am pretty excited about Rogue One.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:10)
Yeah, I thought you'd bring that up. So I rewatched the trailer right before we started recording.

**David Rosenthal** (2:14)
Awesome, awesome. I can't wait.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:17)
Yeah, me neither. For listeners who, if you're wondering, I'm not sure if it actually will sound any different, but this is the first time David and I are recording remotely. David's in California right now.

**David Rosenthal** (2:28)
In the heart of Silicon Valley.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:30)
Indeed. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:36)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose built for AI and run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:02)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:07)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:25)
Yep. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost, since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:42)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the Internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:58)
Yep. If you, your company or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired, that's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. All right. Well, we don't really have too much before the show. Do you want to dive right in?

**David Rosenthal** (4:20)
Yeah. Let's jump in. So this, I can't remember, we've done so many of these episodes now, but this might be the earliest back in time that we're starting our acquisition history and facts.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:33)
Oh yeah, I think so.

**David Rosenthal** (4:34)
Yeah, I think it is. We are going back to 1939, almost, what is that, almost 80 years ago when a fellow named Martin Goodman founded a company that he called Timely Publications in New York City. Very timely. Goodman was a pulp magazine publisher, and he wanted to get on the gravy train of the fast burgeoning comic book industry that was starting to take off. And so he started Timely Publications as part of his publishing empire. And the first comic book that Timely published was called Marvel Comics Number One, which came out in October 1939 And it included The Human Torch and The Submariner, which would be Marvel comic book heroes for a long time to come. And...