Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)

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Summary based on the YouTube transcript and episode description. Prompt input used 79979 of 118042 transcript characters.

Jamie Dimon, Barry Diller, and NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien headline Acquired’s Radio City Music Hall live show, with Dimon’s fortress-balance-sheet philosophy and Diller’s media-to-tech arc as the sharpest material.

  • Dimon invested $60M of personal net worth — roughly half his wealth — into Bank One stock the day he took the CEO job, to signal total commitment.
  • JPMorgan’s 2006 stress test assumed high-yield credit spreads could hit 17% (worst ever); in 2008 they hit 20% and the bond market effectively ceased to function.
  • Pre-2008, major investment banks ran 35x leverage, up from 12x, due to accounting and Basel I rules; JPMorgan ran roughly one-third of that leverage.
  • Dimon killed profit-pool bonus structures tied to specific trades, arguing percentage-of-profits incentives directly cause reckless leverage increases.
  • Barry Diller called Netflix the singular winner of the media-entertainment business and said no one will beat them; Amazon and Apple treat video as a loss leader for subscriptions and hardware, not as a hit-making business.
  • Diller’s epiphany at QVC in 1993 — screens used for interactive commerce rather than storytelling — gave him a two-year head start understanding internet connectivity before the web reached mainstream consumers in 1995.
  • The Starbucks episode with Howard Schultz is Acquired’s all-time most downloaded at 1.3 million downloads, narrowly ahead of the Rolex episode.

2025-11-05 · Watch on YouTube