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Ben Gilbert

Co-founder & Co-host, Acquired

Search every verified Ben Gilbert interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ben Gilbert, co-founder and co-host of the podcast Acquired, has been active in the fall 2026 season with episodes on Seinfeld and The Home Depot. In the Seinfeld episode, Gilbert discussed the show's business history, including its ownership structure and production schedule, and noted that he purchased a DVD player and box set for research to access commentary not available online. In the Home Depot episode, he described the company as the world's largest specialty retailer and said his research changed his view of its significance, comparing its scale to general retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. Gilbert also appeared on the September 14, 2026 episode of TBPN, where he discussed recent tech news, including an AI debate and a phone call between Donald Trump and Jensen Huang during an All-In podcast interview. During that appearance, he mentioned he had been hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis, an illness he attributed to overworking out and dehydration, and said he was recovering. Across episodes, he promoted the Acquired companion PDFs and encouraged listeners to join the show's email list and Slack community.

Recent appearances

  • Seinfeld - Full Episode (Audio)

    October 18, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    As you know, most of the time, Acquired episodes are audio-only. But this episode, there's a full video version! And it was only fitting to release it on Netflix, the streaming home of 'Seinfeld'. Seinfeld, which ended three decades ago, has been watched by 72 million Americans so far THIS YEAR. Behind that incredible stat is an equally incredible business story: obsessive creators, perfect market timing, an ownership structure that aligned incentives for the long term…all of which created a sitcom that became number one by breaking all the rules. Sponsors: Many thanks to our fantastic Fall…

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  • Pacing the Frontier, Perfect Little Angels, Nico Wittenborn IRL, Home Depot with Acquired

    September 14, 2026 · 📺 TBPN

    TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN:  https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...    / @tbpnlive  

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  • The Home Depot: The best-performing stock in the S&P 500 since IPO (Audio)

    September 13, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After being unceremoniously fired from their previous hardware chain at ages 48 and 35, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank took the words of their New York banker Ken Langone (who had also just accidentally caused their firings) to heart: they'd just been "kicked in the ass with a golden horseshoe.” They proceeded to author the greatest compounding story in American retail history, helped by some legendary cameos along the way from Sol Pri…

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  • Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire (Audio)

    August 10, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corporate raiders circled, salivating over offers to sell off the film library to MGM and offload the parks to hotel operators. But what followed instead was the greatest turnaround in media history under Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. Beauty and the Beast. The Lion King. Broadway. Bringing the Disney Vault home on VHS and DVD. And the greatest media acquisition of all time — ESPN. And then... it all almost fell apart. A…

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  • #108 with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal - Brainstorming with the Acquired Podcast

    July 10, 2026 · 📺 BlackNova Productions

    Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) hosts the pod today with guests Ben Gilbert (@gilbert) and David Rosenthal (djrosent) from the Aquired podcast (@acquiredfm). In today’s episode you’ll hear: Shaan asks Ben and David to give some background on themselves and the Acquired podcast (0:30), Shaan gives four personalities that every company needs to succeed (11:00), the Acquired guys pitch an idea for an Airbnb that says whether or not the location has wifi (18:00), the Acquired guys talk about making your own stock index (29:10), Shaan talks about putting solar panels into space and beaming energy back down t…

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  • Behind Google's strategic bets in AI: A conversation with the hosts of Acquired

    June 25, 2026 · 📺 Google Cloud

    Join Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, hosts of the Acquired podcast, for a deep dive into the inflection points that defined Google’s AI infrastructure. In this story-driven spotlight, Google Chief Technologist Amin Vahdat and Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, reveal the high-stakes history of the TPU and the secret ""build vs. buy"" silicon battles that shaped the modern cloud. Discover how a decade of custom hardware, cutting edge software, liquid cooling, and supply chain innovation is now architecting the future of computing for the agentic era. Watch more: 100+ sessions from Google Cloud…

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  • The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio)

    June 23, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it's the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual property rights to the childhood memories of billions of people (including, likely, all of you) and is a reliable, predictable profitable business. But it didn't start that way. During Walt's era, Disney operated like an unhinged moonshot factory, blowing its finances on one seemingly crazy project after another, like the very first feature-length animated film or a theme park inspired by Walt's fascination with model trai…

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  • Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal in Conversation with Michael Grinich | Acquired Unplugged 2026

    June 02, 2026 · 📺 WorkOS

    What do Hermes, Ferrari, Apple, and Google have in common? They leaned into what made them weird. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, hosts of the Acquired podcast, joined WorkOS CEO & founder Michael Grinich for a live conversation at Acquired Unplugged in San Francisco. 230 episodes in, 10+ years of studying the greatest companies ever built — they share what separates enduring businesses from the rest, how they research and produce some of the longest episodes in podcasting, and how they're using AI to do it. Topics covered: • The pattern across every great company they've studied • Why "be…

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  • Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio)

    May 18, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, on behalf of 50 million clients (including, likely, many of you). And yet Vanguard itself is essentially a communist organization — it has no shareholders, makes no profits, and operates more like REI than Fidelity. If you own a Vanguard fund, you own a piece of the firm itself. Any excess margin instead gets returned to clients in the form of lower fees, which since 1975 have added up to roughly f…

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  • Acquired's Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal live from Google Cloud Next

    April 22, 2026 · 📺 Google Cloud

    Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal from the Acquired podcast join Jason Davenport on the Google livestream stage. Together, they analyze the massive shift from the "Era of Search" to the "Era of Agents" and what it means for the next decade of business. In this high-energy conversation, the trio explores the rapid evolution of AI infrastructure and why the "boring" parts of the stack—like inference chips—are actually the most exciting part of the story. Key Highlights: TPU v8 & The Inference Shift: Why inference (running models) is officially eclipsing training as the dominant workload, and ho…

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  • Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio)

    April 13, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermes sells that many Birkins and Kellys roughly every 2 years, and Rolex moves that many watches every 3 months. And yet this ultimate luxury product also lives under the same roof with a widely-beloved professional sports team… one with 400 million rabid fans from all walks of life who live and die by the Scuderia’s performance every F1 race weekend! How is it possible that these two seemingly contradictory customer base…

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  • Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio)

    March 05, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality television. It's also the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million fans globally — a fact that would shock most Americans, who until a recent viral Netflix series had barely heard o…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“So taking a step back here, you're probably like, why do I need to know all of that? And what's the bigger picture here? Just think about the incentives. If you're Castle Rock and you own the rights, all of your returns are super backloaded. If you make a show, like, great, I'm gonna make a show for $500,000 an episode. You're only getting paid $400,000 an episode by a network to buy that show from you, right? You ha”

“So, the way to think about it is that up until now our data center business has been almost entirely GPUs. Vera is our CPU, and you know what's really exciting is that Vera opens a brand new 200 billion TAM for NVIDIA, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscaler is partnering with us to get it deployed, and that's huge for the company because for the first time we have a second engine of that”

“Home Depot is an astonishingly large company. Before I started this research, I thought of it as a big store at the middle of a bunch of shopping centers, but not really like an important company to the world, but I was wrong. And the stats are uh large, David. It is the world's largest specialty retailer. The only retailers larger are general, not in a specific vertical like home improvement. So think Walmart or Ama”

“The core of the Disney Flywheel and the ESPN beautiful affiliate fee business model are both compromised and perhaps permanently impaired. The old Disney business model and content model was completely dependent on the movie theater. The way that you seeded new stories and characters and reinvigorated old stories and characters into the public consciousness was through the movie theater. People go once or twice a yea”

“I think if you were to bet on SPACs as a whole and say, they all go public. They trade right around $10 a share because they're effectively worth exactly the amount of cash that they have in the bank, which is a trust in the Cayman Islands or something that's like untouchable. And then at some point they announce an acquisition and you either can redeem and get your money back or you can roll it into the acquisition.”

“The way to think about it is that up until now our data center business has been almost entirely GPUs. Vera is our CPU, and you know what's really exciting is that Vera opens a brand new 200 billion TAM for NVIDIA, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscaler is partnering with us to get it deployed, and that's huge for the company because for the first time we have a second engine of that sca”

Other executives at Acquired

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →