The Billionaire Lobster King

John Risley started with a rusty lobster truck.

He ended up cashing out of billion-dollar empires across seafood, nutrition, and telecom.

Thread John Risley grew up watching his father struggle to pay bills

At 10 years old, he told his class he wanted to be a millionaire.

The class and teacher smirked

Golden Age of Football M&A

Two Hollywood guys with zero football experience turned £2M into £350M in 4 years

The Playbook Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham AFC for £2M in February 2021.

When they took over, the club was basically irrelevant.

Fifth-tier English football!!!!

You have to understand how far DOWN the pyramid that is....

The level where geezers show up in vans and half the players have day jobs selling insurance

Golden Era of Finance: Lord Moneybags

This ruthless Investor built a £12 BILLION empire

He started as a playboy who seduced Audrey Hepburn

Epic playbook of a legend

Thread The Playboy Years

In his younger days, Hanson was the ultimate socialite.

He was tall, charming, and engaged to Audrey Hepburn in the 1950s.

The wedding never happened, but his reputation as the Lord of Glamour remained

How Dr. Karp Thinks

The philosopher who built a $400B+ tech giant.

A thread on the philosophy and mental models The Philosopher Who Studied How We Lie

Karp spent five years writing a PhD dissertation about one obsessive question:

How does language let us say things that violate the rules while technically following the rules?

His argument boiled down to this:

Jargon is how culture provides psychological relief from contradictions without actually resolving them.

You can satisfy your aggressive instincts while maintaining the fiction that you're a good person.

The language does the work.

How to Think Like Peter Thiel

To understand why Thiel avoids competition and consensus, you have to understand the man who shaped how he thinks about desire.

You start with René Girard

Thread Peter Thiel studied under René Girard at Stanford

Girard’s work shaped how he thinks about desire and rivalry. Thiel later applied that framework to business.

Private Equity Legend: EQT

How do you turn rats into €7.2 BILLION?

You buy 400 boring exterminators and wire them with tech.

This is the playbook behind 28x MOIC Why pest control?

1. Recession-resistant demand
2. High recurring revenue, sticky contracts
3. Extreme fragmentation (thousands of mom-and-pop players)
4. Clear route for margin expansion with basic operational excellence

Regardless of recessions, pests keep coming back.

The Data Center Billionaire Playbook

The new monopoly is simple:

If you control the power, you control the future.

The Playbook Every big winner controls one of four chokepoints:

Compute: CoreWeave, Groq​

Connectivity: Astera Labs​

Power: Fermi America​

Land and hard assets: QTS, Nebius​

Own the bottleneck and you can tax the boom.

$20 Billion: Power of Boring Businesses

He bought 88 tiny companies and built a $20B empire

30 years buying 1–5M EBIT niche businesses.

One of America’s greatest compounders.

The Playbook 👇 Larry Mendelson started as accountant, trained to stare at numbers until the truth appeared.

He loved this combination:

1. High margins
2. Repeat demand
3. Real cash

Aerospace replacement parts ticked all three

KKR Data Center Investment Guide

One of the best papers on AI infrastructure investing

KKR explains where the next 20 years of compounding will come from.

The KKR playbook⬇️ When a NVIDIA, makes up 8% of the S&P 500, it’s reasonable to wonder whether an AI bubble is inflating.

Look at the numbers:

AI-related capex = ~5% of U.S. GDP, growing 10%

Hyperscaler capex: $350B+ in 2025, up 30–35% YoY.

Total AI capex across tech: ~$500B this year.

Private Equity Legend: KKR’s $7 Billion Buyout

A legendary 56x return with a struggling grocery chain.

One of KKR’s biggest wins⬇️ A Giant Under Siege

The mid-80s. Safeway’s grocery empire looks massive, but inside it’s leaking profits.

Profitable West Coast stores subsidized weak, distant markets burdened by high costs and local competition

Herbert Haft, a hard-charging raider, smells blood and moves to snap up the chain, piece it out, and make a quick buck.

Denny’s $620M Take-Private

For 72 years, it was where America’s night owls met.

Now it’s a PE turnaround bet

Thread ↓ For decades, Denny’s WAS America

The place where truckers got coffee at 3am.

Where families had Sunday breakfast.

By 2025, Denny’s had lost its rhythm.

Revenues were flat, margins shrinking, and the stock had fallen 34% year-to-date.

Software Private Equity Billionaires

Four Italian friends burn years on a failed startup.

€40,000 left in the bank.

They used it to buy one dying app for €10K.

Today, they run an $11B buyout empire.

The Playbook Buy and Rebuild

Bending Spoons is a hybrid creature:

25% Private Equity, 75% Technology.

They acquire 100% of digital companies and own them forever

They rebuild everything from the code to the culture, from the cloud architecture to the product vision

The Screw Billionaire

He built a €40B empire from a box of screws and a Bible.

He prayed in the morning and sold in the afternoon.

Reinhold Würth’s Playbook for Building an Empire

Thread Germany, 1945.

The war is over, but the ruins still smoke.

A 10-year-old boy named Reinhold counts screws beside his parents in a cold mill.

From those endless hours of repetition, he learned the two laws that would guide his life:

Discipline creates freedom, and detail creates empire.

Boring Cash: The Candle Investor

Wall Street was buying internet stocks.

Ted Forstmann bought Yankee Candles and made $830M

The Playbook of the Private Equity Legend

Thread TARGET

A quirky candle maker from Massachusetts making over 80 million candles a year yet starved of capital.

Revenues had crossed $100M, but it lacked structure, governance, and strategy.

Perfect Forstmann prey: profitable, premium, undercapitalized

The Contrarian Private Equity Genius

David Bonderman made billions by doing what others feared

Turned $66M into $700M

Lost $1.3B in one of history’s worst deals.

And still built a $100B empire.

This is the David Bonderman playbook The Rebel Lawyer

Born in LA, 1942. Son of Russian immigrants.

Harvard Law & clerked for a Supreme Court Justice.

He could’ve had the easy life…partner track, DC cocktail parties.

But he wanted to learn how to fix broken companies.

The Billionaire Bulldog

Buy. Strip. Flip.

Ron Perelman made billions buying unloved assets and flipping before the market woke up.

His Investment Playbook⬇️ First Taste of Leverage

No baseball. No television. Only balance sheets and discipline.​

By 11, Ron was attending board meetings.​

By 16, he was analyzing cost ledgers.​

At 21, he helped his father buy Esslinger Brewery for ~$800K and sell it for $1M profit

The Godfather of Venture Capital

He turned $50K into $100M.

Drank Chardonnay in meetings and fired slow thinkers

Fred Adler wrote the original venture capital playbook.

Thread⬇️ $150K Bet That Made $15 Million

In 1968, Adler invested $150K in a small computer firm:

Data General.

It was his first big hit and turned into $15–20 million

He’d found his formula:

“Marry money with innovation.”

The Marine Banker Who Conquered Wall Street

He fought in Vietnam.

Then used battlefield tactics to buy 100+ banks

The playbook of Hugh McColl Origins of a Warrior Banker

McColl grew up on discipline, faith, and ambition.

He joined the Marines, and learned his first principle:

„You win by moving forward. Always.”

When he joined North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) in 1959, he treated every market like a battlefield.

Europe’s Next Danaher

Backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Danaher’s Mitch Rales.

Jan Mohr acquired 60 software firms and 10×’d his stock in five years.

Goal: NASDAQ-listed European Tech Champion

The Chapters Group story⬇️ What They Buy

Chapters buys boring but essential niche software:

• Police & fire dispatch systems
• Gun-license & civic-registry platforms
• Fintech rails for payments & compliance
• Cybersecurity infrastructure for municipalities

Retention ≈ 97 %.

Master of the LBO: Private Jet King

Ted Forstmann turned a dying Gulfstream into billions.

His funds earned 55% annual returns for 19 years.

The Playbook of the Private Equity Titan⬇️ The Legend

"I like deals like I like women: big, complicated, and with a lot of surprises"

Ted Forstmann dated Princess Diana, fought Michael Milken and made Billions.

WOW!!!

@OrlandoBravoTB just dropped a masterclass on Software Private Equity

AI. Valuations. Exits.

Notes from his latest interview ⬇️ Valuations & the Dot-Com Era

AI valuations today are a bubble:

A $50M ARR company cannot be worth $10B.

To double investors’ money, it must produce $1B in free cash flow.

Even if the product is right, even if the market's right, that's a tall order.

Difference vs Dot-Com:.

Now you have some really big companies with big healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which was different than what happened roughly 25 years ago.