Acquired

Across its entire 79-year history, Ferrari has sold ~330,000 cars at an average price of $500,000. Hermès sells that many Birkins every two years; Rolex moves that many watches every three months.

Scarcity as the entire business model, not the marketing layer.

A modern leading-edge fab costs ~$20 billion to build and depreciates over the better part of a decade. The whole semiconductor industry depends on a few of these existing in places they could plausibly be defended.

First time I understood why "fabs" appear in geopolitics articles.

Costco built a business where the membership fee is the profit and the merchandise margin is roughly zero. Charlie Munger called it his favourite company of all time and sat on the board.

Two opposite characteristics combining to create something neither could on its own.

The NFL split media rights across networks specifically so no single broadcaster could own the audience. The league captures the surplus by being the supply.

Distribution control as a deliberate, decade-long design.

Rolex sells objectively inferior mechanical timepieces for 10-1000x the price of more accurate digital ones — and demand is the strongest it has ever been.

Status goods don't behave like normal goods, even when they're the same category.

Google is profitable enough to build its own data centres, its own servers, and its own undersea cables — which gives it cost advantages competitors can't replicate even with the same architectural decisions.

The four-part Google series treats the company as four businesses, not one.

Hermès won't expand a popular product line if it can't be made by the same artisans to the same standard. They will leave revenue on the table to keep the constraint.

Refusal to scale as a strategy, not a limitation.

Munger's reading habit wasn't a tactic — it was a system. He wanted the latticework of mental models more than he wanted to be right on any particular question.

Care a lot, read a lot, think slow.

Jensen Huang has been NVIDIA's CEO since 1993 — through four near-death pivots, the financial crisis, crypto crashes, and the AI boom. The CUDA bet predates the use case by more than a decade.

Long tenure compounds in ways quarterly thinking can't.

Trader Joe's breaks almost every rule of modern retail — limited SKUs, no national brands, no loyalty programs, no online ordering — and is more profitable per square foot than any competitor.

The constraints are the brand.