How Ron Baron Became the Greatest Fund Manager of All Time

**Josh Brown** (0:00)
So, Ron, I know we just met, but I have a slight bone to pick.

**Ron Baron** (0:03)
Go ahead.

**Josh Brown** (0:04)
I want to read your Q2 letter.

**Ron Baron** (0:06)
I want to write it.

**Josh Brown** (0:07)
It's July 22nd, 23rd.

**Ron Baron** (0:09)
I know. I'm so late.
You know, it's tough writing it, but once you get it written, you say, man, I really like how it sounds, but I go over and over and over it.

**Josh Brown** (0:20)
Baron AI, you have no excuse.

**Ron Baron** (0:22)
I know.

**Josh Brown** (0:22)
Michael, am I right?

**Michael Baron** (0:24)
I'm behind as well in letters, so it's a sensitive topic at the moment.

**Josh Brown** (0:28)
All right. Not the first person to say this.

**Ron Baron** (0:30)
But there's so much you have to do all the time to write letters or to be in a program and prepare for it.

**Josh Brown** (0:38)
And your letter is, it's not one page.

**Ron Baron** (0:40)
No, it's three.

**Josh Brown** (0:41)
No, it's more than that.

**Ron Baron** (0:42)
For?

**Josh Brown** (0:42)
The Ron letter?

**Ron Baron** (0:43)
Yeah, the letter from Ron.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:44)
It's substantial. It's a lot of work.

**Josh Brown** (0:45)
Yeah, it's substantial.

**Michael Batnick** (0:47)
I find that it's very hard to write about markets given the pace of change. You write something and something happens the next day. Whoops. And you either say, this changes what I just wrote, or I wish I had incorporated this new piece of information.
Find that things are speeding up, do you?

**Ron Baron** (1:06)
Really fast. I don't really write very much about the markets. I write mostly about investing and about businesses and about people principles. What we do, the mission that we follow, we have. That's my idea.
Everyone else is writing about, you watch television, the market is going to do this, the stock is going to do that. We don't worry about that at all. Right.

**Michael Batnick** (1:30)
There's no value in that kind of commentary because it comes and goes. There's no reason to write it down.

**Ron Baron** (1:36)
We're an investor in MSCI, and a lot of what they do, the information they provide to hedge funds, investors, they enable a lot of this to happen. So a lot of volatility comes about because it's going to systematic investing instead of investing in fundamentals the way we do.

**Josh Brown** (1:53)
You probably love the AI sell off of MSCI and S&P and Moody's as if AI was going to replace all of these companies.

**Ron Baron** (2:02)
Well, MSCI is going to be amazing. I was talking to Henry Fernandez, who is the founder and chairman of that company. He owns a little bit over a billion dollars and we own over a billion dollars. We're having a contest and he said, Ron, if you lent me $100 million in 10 years, it's going to be worth $400 or $500 million.
I said, I'd rather own it in my name.

**Josh Brown** (2:32)
Is this the most exciting time? I know you've been doing this for a long time, but it's got to be up there in terms of business change.

**Ron Baron** (2:38)
56 years.

**Josh Brown** (2:39)
What do you think?

**Ron Baron** (2:41)
Most exciting time for me, we've never had such a large position as we have in SpaceX and Elon. When you think about how we started our business, and we had, so I come to New York in 1969, in the summer of 1969 and 1960s, I didn't get into medical school, and I taught for a year of biochemistry at Georgetown Medical School. I taught there, couldn't get into that school. I was hoping I would get in after a year on PhD fellowship.

**Josh Brown** (3:12)
Same. Where'd you grow up?

**Ron Baron** (3:13)
Asbury Park, New Jersey, Boardwalk.
And so after a year, I got a job in the patent office, working in the daytime as an examiner, and went to law school at night on a scholarship. And when I was working in the patent office, my art was chemistry. That was draft exempt job, critical skill. And so I issued the patents on the nose cone, on the coatings for the nose cones that they used to come back to earth and not burn up. So I always advise my friends, if you ever have a chance to ride in a nose cone, don't do it.

**Michael Batnick** (3:53)
You had first hand knowledge.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:55)
That would be a good idea.

**Ron Baron** (3:56)
No. And so that was in 1960s. I come to New York in 1969 I'm in debt, $15,000.