Red Bull's Billionaire Maniac Founder

24:07I think I might have been using this to try to raise money. But he says, there is no market for Red Bull. We will create one. And there's this great line in the English translation of this German biography where it says, rarely in the world of business has such a bold announcement been implemented into reality like this one. And so creating your own market is also not only do you have to educate the potential customers, but then you have to deal with all the regulators. And so he tries to set up shop in Germany. And they didn't even know what the hell an energy drink was. And so he applied for what was going to be the first ever Europe-wide approval of a new type of indulgence, which is the energy drink, right?

24:43As you might imagine, European bureaucracy is not known for fast approval time. So he's waiting over a year to try to launch just in Germany. He gets extremely frustrated. So then he winds up packing his bags and going to Austria. And he's like, I'm just going to launch in Austria. There's a lot of benefits from that. But it also, one of the main benefits is he launched in a single small market. And for nearly five years, he was able to run experiments and really improve the product, but also figure out the marketing and the messaging because he's only in a single small market. So I think he launches in 1987 in Austria and doesn't launch to his second market till 1992.

25:22So they're launching in just one small market. They don't have a lot of money. They just put up, you know,$500 ,000 each. It's not like Massachusetts has any other money. And so when sales didn't take off, he did something that was really smart. He invested some of that money instead of in advertising at the very beginning. He actually made more of his product and he would bring it and deliver it to places by palate and let people try it and drink it free of charge. This is very similar to one of my favorite entrepreneurs of all time is Estee Lauder. And in the early days of her company, which she also started when she was 40, I just realized that now, she actually took money out of her advertising budget and instead made more of for a product to give away.

26:00And this is what she said about that. You give people a product to try. If they like it, it's quality, then they buy it. They haven't been lured in by an advertisement, but convinced by the product itself. We took the money we had planned to use on advertising and invested it instead in enough material to give away large quantities of our product. It was so simple that our competitors sneered when they heard what they were doing. Today, they're all copying us. And so Mattisitz knew he needed more money. He went to a bunch of banks. They all said no, only one. There was a small private bank. Oh, my goodness.

26:30Spangler. I'm butchering these words, but this bank called, I'm going to call it Spangler, was the only one to actually believe in the product and the concept behind it. And so they actually lent him money. Now, this is another main theme that's repeated over and over again. Massachusetts is excessively loyal. And so to this day, that is the only banking house that Red Bull used in that country. This is where they get the early start. Red Bull started to flourish when bartenders and nightclub operators were convinced that it was a suitable new component for mixed drinks. The energy drink was sometimes referred to as poor man's cocaine.

27:07So this spreading in nightclubs and bars actually gives them their initial traction. The first year they sell about several hundred thousand cans were sold in the first year. The next year, that number goes to 1.2 million. And then the year after, so year three, they're at 1.7 million. So they're growing, but they're not growing crazy fast. They're also spending a ton. This is when they really start putting a lot of their money. I think it's something like over 30 % of their gross revenue they spend on advertising. At the beginning, it was even more than that. But the remarkable thing is they hit their break-even point in year three, and they've been profitable every single year since then.

27:44And so there's three ideas that he's going to go into here. One, that he was all in. He had that burn the boats mentality. He wanted to go high end from the start, and he knew that there was no market for this, so he had to create one. And so he talked about the great personal risk that he did in starting a company. He says, if things had gone wrong, I'd be sleeping under a bridge today. And so he talks about his decision to have a high-priced product, plus use a lot of that revenue from people spending more money on it to actually reinvest into advertising. Red Bull was to become very expensive, and it was a new product for which there was not even a market yet.

28:17So it was necessary to create demand first. Potential customers had to be explained why they now desperately needed Red Bull, which they had not even known existed before. And so one of the things that he does that's very unique that I don't know if I've heard before is he hires an advertising firm from the very beginning. It calls him his former study buddy. So I'm assuming that this is his friend from college. This guy named Kastner. At this time, Kastner was already a founder of an advertising agency called Kastner & Partners. So Kastner is going to play a very important role because he's the guy that comes up with the slogan, Red Bull gives you wings.

28:50Now, here's, I think, a testament to how unique Massachusetts is. He doesn't have any money, but he's also a perfectionist. And so he keeps turning down over and over and over again all the different marketing and advertising campaigns that they're trying to come up with. And you're like, well, how could he be doing that, David? Like he has no money. All this time is going by. I think it's like a year and a half that they're working on this. So they finally figure out the positioning and the actual initial launch of the marketing and advertising. And so he actually paid for this initial work with labor.

29:20He had no money. So he actually helps out in the agency as a freelance employee just to pay for that marketing advertising that the advertising agency that his friend started is doing on behalf of Red Bull. Real quick, before we go back into this incredible story, I need to tell you about two tools that you should be using for your business. The first one is Vanta. Vanta's value prop is very clear. Vanta helps your company prove that you're secure. So more customers will use your product or service. Many companies will not sign contracts unless you're certified. And this is causing you to lose out on sales.

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31:24I have friends that have used collateral for their marketing collateral and have raised billions of dollars of capital and have made hundreds of millions of dollars. Make sure you go to collateral.com and improve the way your company tells its story. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage, and you should invest heavily in it. And you can do that by going to collateral.com. Another important point. Everybody's telling this is a bad idea. His friend immediately recognized its potential. And he said, if this is pursued consistently, this idea will lead to success. So again, Mesh is very self-confident, has a ton of, as you can imagine, has a ton of self-confidence in himself and the idea that he's doing.

32:00But it is very helpful for other people, especially people that you trust and admire. Because he said he says that Kastner was a very clever fellow and he knew that he was a perfectionist like me. And so you have somebody like that, that you know is smart, that you admire, you trust their judgment. They're like, no, you know, everybody else might be telling you this bad idea. But if you pursue this consistently, you give it like it will lead to success. And so Kastner was talking about this time. He's like, listen, the birth of this campaign was not easy because for a year and a half, he's just rejecting every single suggestion that I have.

32:30I think they went through 50 different ways to either slogans or ways to market it. Mastis rejects every single one of them. But Kastner understood his friend. He says he wants the absolute best. He believed in his product to the end of his days. And so even after 50 failed attempts, they're having this conversation where they're like, well, anybody that drinks Red Bull becomes damn strong. So that's the conversation they're having. That's how they were thinking about it. It's like, well, you drink it and you become strong. What's the right tagline or motto for that? And in the middle of the night, Castor has the idea that Red Bull gives you wings.

33:05And so he calls Massachusetts in the middle of the night and immediately Massachusetts is like, yep, that's it. So the fact that that was a good idea was immediately obvious to both of them. The thing about how crazy that is, you're fighting for a year and a half, going through 50 things. He calls you, you hear it, you're like, yep, that's it, let's go. And so now they had the branding and the tagline. They wanted the advertising to be, this is the traits that they were looking for. They wanted it to be self-ironic, non-conformist, smart, and rebellious. And their point was that that's how they viewed their own personality.

33:32And so they're like, we're going to put a lot of our own personality into this. And so now they're up and running. Five years, they're still in, just in that small single market in Austria. Five years in, then they expand to Hungary. That's the second market that they open up. And then they start adding market after market after market in Europe. Now, this part was a bit confusing to me, but it seems that the formation of the European Union was one of the waves he surfed. If you listen to episode 329 on Port Charlie's Almanac, there's something fascinating that Charlie Munger would talk about that because several times in the book, he will analyze like outside success.

34:06And he's trying to teach people like, well, what would account for the success of like a Les Schwab or Sam Walton? And he goes through and one of the ideas that he has, he says, surfing is a very important model to understand. And so it seems like this brand new formation of the European Union was one of the waves that Massachusetts surfed because if a product is approved to be sold in one European Union country, it is automatically approved in another one. So it says Berlin, remember, he's trying to get in Germany, finally allowed Red Bull for the German market as well. This made Massachusetts one of the first big EU beneficiaries.

34:41The approval was only possible through a detour. Red Bull managed to get approved in Great Britain. Great Britain was not in their sights at that time, but an EU law laid tracks for approval in Germany. And so practically the next day, Red Bull set out to conquer the market in which it actually wanted to settle down. So it's talking about Germany. Now, here's the crazy thing. Way before they launched in Germany, there was a black market. People were selling cans of Red Bull on the black market. So let's go back to this idea that I've seen a bunch of times, but the one that comes to mind most is most top of mind right now because I just covered Christian Dior's autobiography and he talks about this is that rumors and innuendo you have to think about them as great free propaganda and so Christian Dior says the relative secrecy in which I chose to work sounds a lot like Massachusetts right the relative secrecy in which I chose to work aroused a positive whispering campaign which was excellent free propaganda gossip malicious rumors are worth more than the most expensive publicity campaign in the world.

35:42That is the end of Christian Dior's quote. This is what this book says about it. And again, I have to like rewrite this because the translation is kind of funny, but there was a thriving black market for Red Bull in Germany long before it was approved. Remember it's banned and people are flocking to it. So they're actually people are making money by smuggling it in from Austria into Germany. And so all that does is increase the desire for it because now you're drinking something that's oh my god this is illegal and it actually made it more charming because it's like more forbidden so this is the foundation of like this cult-like following that red bull had at the very beginning and it is in germany where they're spreading these rumors that the drink contains an extract from bull testicles there was also a rumor that it was secretly enriched with amphetamines remember this is spreading in like clubs and bars and stuff like that and it says the company did not did nothing to counter these bizarre rumors.

36:34And again, I want to repeat that excellent quote that he had. As Mastersitz once lectured, the most dangerous thing for a branded product is low interest. Then they get approved, right? In the first three months of a legal market presence, they sell 33 million cans in Germany alone. This idea is not new to you and I, right? This idea is like if something's banned, it's all it is is free propaganda, it's free advertising, it's going to drastically increase the amount of demand. And if you remember on the Michael Jordan episodes and also on the Nike episodes, when the NBA banned the original Jordan shoe, at the very beginning, Nike's like, oh, hopefully we're going to sell like, I think it was like$4 million or no, I think it's$3 million by the fourth year.

37:16And then the NBA bans the shoe and they make a smart decision like, just keep wearing it, Michael, we'll pay the fine. And so instead of hitting, I think,$3 million by the fourth year, they did$125 or$126 million the first year. And so Masters does something that he does for his entire career. He really pushes the pace. They launch in Germany, and his marketing budget, right? So right now, the entire revenue of the company at this time, where we are in the story, they're doing 70 million euros at that time. They're in a few different markets. He sets the marketing budget for Germany at 10%, just that one market, more than 10%, to 7.5 million euros for that year.

37:55And then I learned something that was actually surprising, because you go look, like Red Bull essentially just has Red Bull. They might have like different versions, right? But they essentially sell one thing. In the book, there's all kinds of examples. Like they have this coffee and this cola line. But in the early days, you could tell that he's learning from his mistakes and eventually goes and really puts like all of his energy behind one arrow. Because let's see, he's a couple of years into the company. It's in 1989. He comes out with this drink. drink it's a lemonade drink called the red rooster which is like maple and lemon syrup it sounds disgusting by the way but they launch it and just complete flop and i went and searched all the other drinks that are mentioned in the book that were still in operation and none of them seem to be in operation today so i think he's he obviously learned from his mistakes like well red bull has this power law outcome it's really silly for us to like try to introduce anything else we should just stick with that and put all our energy and money behind the one thing that we know is a smashing success.

38:56And so this is where they just start hitting new markets after new markets. By 1997, they're opening new markets, which are new countries, nearly on a monthly basis. And every time they hit a new market, sales just keeps... Now you just see this huge spike in sales on the graph. And then he also launches in America. It was very fascinating. So he actually launches in one state. He's like, well, I think it's working in Europe. It should work in America. And so he just launched in California as a way to test a single market before expanding nationwide. He'll mention multiple times the fact that he hates banks and is very afraid of debt.

39:33And so most of the growth is just fueled from actual the profits the company's making. And so he's able to do something that's very rare, which he's able to control costs and maintain financial discipline, even when they're making a lot of profits. And he preaches that to his employees over and over again, his employees have to argue and justify the expenditure of the smallest amounts, even at the same time that the company's annual record profits were being produced. And so as I was reading how he interacts with his employees, there's something, if you listen to the Anna Wintour episode I did on episode 326, I said, if Anna had a tagline, it would be, I have to make sure things are being done right.

40:09I feel Mattress just was the same exact way. And sorry if I'm mispronouncing his name. When he died, there was a bunch of different reports. I went on YouTube to try to figure out how to pronounce his last name. and they're all like European press reports, so they all pronounce it differently. But anyways, this idea, it's like, well, the role he's making, he talks about the fact that he's a control freak, he's a perfectionist, he's going to make sure things are being done right. And so former employees are saying there's always a great deal of pressure to perform. One can make a mistake, but you can only make the same mistake once.

40:40So he expects a lot, but he also provides a lot. He pays salaries that are above industry average. And in addition, this is wild, every Red Bull employee from the secretary to the board has a company car past employees repeat the same thing that he is extremely loyal they describe him as a gentleman they say if you've helped him once he will never forget it and there's also some bizarre things when I got to this part this is the note I left myself when I read this part I go uh because he's talking about you know there's it has a cult-like following outside and then you get the the the idea that there's a cult like following inside.

41:15And I read I wrote to myself, am I reading this right? They drink special water only available internally. And so at these internal company events, they drink this thing called Luna Aqua, which is mineral water that is allegedly only drawn at the full moon. And they say it's advertised that it supposedly awakens the spirits of life. And so they serve it to Red Bull employees and then a bunch of Red Bull athletes or anybody in like the Red Bull family. And I think it might be served at Red Bull events as well. And so there's this great quote in this section that I think applies to this. Cult brands have their own laws.

41:51Otherwise, they would not be cultish. And again, to you and I, when we describe something as cult, that's not a pejorative. This is a very positive thing. A lot of the greatest companies in the world, a lot of the greatest brands, you could describe them as a cult-like following. And Red Bull definitely has that. A lot of the culture and the ideas of Red Bull, it's just really the founder's personality writ large. The accepted code of conduct for Red Bull people is set by Massachusetts himself. He is a fine and elegant person who values a cultured tone of conversation and good manners. You're supposed to hold doors open for the ladies and you do not get drunk in public.

42:24Red Bull is Massachusetts and Massachusetts is Red Bull is a quote from a former employee. And so let's go into this idea that he views Red Bull as a marketing conglomerate. Again, marketing is our core competency. We're going to outsource everything else. Red Bull has no production facilities or warehouses. Many large corporations outsource their marketing and advertising activity. Red Bull consistently took the opposite approach. It outsourced production and distribution and takes care of sales and advertising itself. Basically, Red Bull is just a large marketing machine. Production, bottling and delivery, which require simple manual labor are outsourced.

43:01Now, this is also speaks to being a gentleman, being more like an old school way of approaching things. The main relation. So when he's outsourcing all the bottling and the production, right, his main bottler relationship was sealed with a handshake. The bottler is this family business that has been around for over 100 years. He meets with the lead, the head of that company, right? It's in German. I'm not going to try to pronounce it. They agreed to produce Red Bull on a handshake. That was in 1987. And they still have this collaboration. This is what, 40 years? How many? Yeah, about 40 years.

43:38He says, we are hopelessly loyal to each other. Mastresitz once described his, that's how he described his relationship with his bottling partner. For Dietrich Mastresitz, a handshake among men is still worth something. So Charlie Munger said something that was excellent. There's actually two, he said this in, Charlie Munger said this in this interview that he did with the release of the republication of poor charlie zominak it's on the invest like the best podcast feed if you haven't listened to it i keep talking about this it's so important uh it was released december 5th 2023 it is invest like the best episode 355 it is john collison uh co-founder of stripe interviewing charlie munger in that podcast which i've listened to i think four times already charlie munger says something fascinating.

44:23He says trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth. He is constantly trying to maneuver. In his whole life, he maneuvered himself into a high, I think he calls it a web of a seamless web of deserved trust, where it's like, in some cases, we just have a handshake or an agreement. We don't even have a contract. And there's another great Invest Like the Best episode on Rolex. It's on the founding of Rolex. And the founder of Rolex did this exact same thing. One of his important suppliers, I can't remember what part of the watch they produced for him, but they had a handshake deal, no paperwork at all, that lasted 70 years.

44:59So again, I think this all ties to the great way that Charlie described that, that trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth. This is the trust that Mattashitz had with his main bottler. And if you really stop and analyze everything else, the way he set up his business, it's like, well, why would he do that? Well, this asset light approach frees up funds for marketing. He was building a marketing conglomerate from the very beginning. He understood that at the very beginning, he's going to outsource anything that's not his core competency. Something else you see that he thinks like a marketer.

45:32So if you remember, James Dyson had this great realization from trial and error in his career. And he says, you should, if you're making a physical product, make your product look different from the start. Talked about it at a huge advantage, right? He's distributing his vacuum cleaner at the same place everyone else buys vacuum cleaners. You go to a store, he said you'd see a line of, let's say, five vacuum cleaners. You see four that look very similar. And then a fifth one is like, what the heck is that? It doesn't mean you're going to buy it, but again, indifference is the enemy to the inventor, right?

46:01He's like, you might not buy my vacuum cleaner, but you're sure as hell going to notice it. And Matt just did the same thing where he made the can. I think everybody's seen what a Red Bull can looks like. No other can looked like that back then. Now, some have copied this, but he made that tall, slim can with the intention of looking different and standing out from every single other thing that would be on the same shelf. And one hilarious little story is Red Bull has its own private aircraft fleet. It's called the Flying Bulls. They use them for a bunch of events. The can holders in those planes only hold cans the size of Red Bull.

46:36I thought that was cool. I also thought it was cool when asked. He was asked why he did that. And Dietrich said, everything is marketing. Let's go back to this focus that he has. He puts all of his energy behind, you know, one arrow. I sell Red Bull. I sell energy drink called Red Bull in a can. Might have a couple different variations, but I don't do anything else but that. And so as the brand got more and more popular, he got assaulted with all these offers. They're like, hey, let's license it. We can make Red Bull gummy bears and we can make Red Bull underwear and Red Bull perfume. And he said no to every single one.

47:11He does not want to use the Red Bull brand for anything else but to sell the actual energy drink, to sell cans of Red Bull. All marketing is just made to sell more energy drinks. And so I found this fact in a couple different places. It's insane to me. Like, I can't believe this is true. So he talks about the fact, like, he hates banks. He does not like debt. He's aiming for fun and for durability over every single thing else. And so his motto, it says absolutely no debts to a bank. And he has stuck to that since the founding of the company. Only in the second year of Red Bull did it accept minor bank financing, which we talked about earlier, that he's still loyal to them.

47:52But the company says that they only spend what they've already earned. And so all the growth and expansion has been funded, self-funded. And this is the crazy part. To not go into debt, there were no dividend payouts of Red Bull until 1999. So you're talking for the first, what, 15 years of the company, he essentially just lived off of his own salary as the managing director of the corporation and that all the profits had flowed back into expansion. And so how many people would have been able to do that? 15 years, you're just making, I'm sure the salary is great, but nothing like, I mean, why is it paying off?

48:34Because then in the 2000s and the next for like 20 years of his life, he's paying himself. I've seen all kinds of reports. He made$100 million this year. He made$165 million this year. He made$400 that year. He made$700 this year. His son inherited, after his dad died, his part of Red Bull. And his son's dividend this year was$615 million. So that is a crazy, crazy dedication to no dividends for 15 years, living off your salary, and then plowing everything back into expansion. And then by that time, the company is so valuable that you essentially just are living on unlimited money. And when he talks about this, I think you get insights onto why that was so important to him.

49:13If you really think about it, I think it was Warren Buffett said, it was either Warren Buffett or Charles de Gaulle, but to win, you must first survive. And so the way he's operating his company, what he's saying here without saying is like, we're never going to do anything that could potentially compromise our survival. And here's a quote from him. I have been raised on the motto that one does not incur debt. We at Red Bull spend the money that we've earned, not that we might earn someday. We never want to endanger the existence of the company, not even for a second. And so this constant expansion is something, another theme that just flows to this entire story.

49:46I love General George Patton's speech to the Third Army. I listened to it to hype myself up. I don't know. I probably listened to it hundreds of times. But there's something that he says that Patton says to his soldiers in that speech when they're about to fight the Germans that I think is very similar to how Machetez kept – it says that he kept his empire constantly in motion, that he was constantly trying to grow and expand it. And so Patton tells his army or his soldiers that I don't want to get any messages saying that I'm holding my position. We're not holding a goddamn thing. We are advancing constantly.

50:23And when I'm getting to this section about the fact that the Red Bull empire, you know, through the founder, he's constantly keeping that empire constantly in motion. for some reason that quote from Patton popped my mind goes back to this idea that Red Bull, as viewed from the founder's lens, is a marketing conglomerate. His economic empire is a marketing conglomerate and hence the entire activity of Red Bull is to be seen against the background of marketing. All corporate projects like Formula One, football, air races, media serve the core business, which is the sale of the energy drink. And he was way, way ahead of his time on this.

51:00economics, especially in the consumer goods industry, he said, is essentially a battle for attention. Red Bull throws more material into this battle than all of its competitors, focusing primarily on sports and increasingly on culture in recent history. No other company spends nearly as much money on advertising and marketing, meaning other company in the same market. And something that he picked up, too, was the importance of differentiation. He says, you learn this in the first semester of marketing, that you have to differentiate yourself. Consumers want the original, not the copy. So he even applies that not only to his product, but also to the way he markets, like all these media events and these crazy things.

51:32So these outrageous and unique events, like the guy jumping from space, if you think about like why that's so smart, an outrageous and unique event will get covered for free in other media. So essentially he, this is multiplying his advertising and marketing spend for free. And so some of the things that they spend money on, it says about half of the marketing budget is spent on unusual, unusual sports as running in the Himalayas, skydiving over the English channel, surfing on the Amazon or mountain biking in a mine. That's crazy. These events may not attract too many spectators since they don't take place around the corner, meaning in person.

52:07But due to their extravagance, they attract interest from numerous media outlets and thus reach a larger audience. And so even his approach to sports sponsorship, right? You would think, okay, you can go to any sports event, you see this beer's advertising and this company's advertising. He buys. So he has bought his Formula One teams, his football teams. The crazy thing is when he starts, he's essentially what he's saying is like, hey, I don't want to just sponsor. I want to own and then I want to rename it to the company. So his soccer teams, they rename the teams the Red Bulls. So that is their actual name.

52:39And then the logo on the jerseys is the Red Bull logo. And this is what he says about it. Our philosophy and sports sponsorship is not to run around with a suitcase full of money and buy advertising space. We don't want to be like Marlboro on the Ferrari, but we want to be integrated into the sport. That's why we own an F1 team. We want overall responsibility and to make our own difference. He calls F1 a very important marketing tool. And then he makes sure that all of his marketing and all the events and all the stuff that he's investing in, he has a very symbiotic relationship with other media, like other larger distribution forms of media.

53:17So what they'll do is they control everything, right? They put up the money for the event. They make the event. then they make sure that they never relinquish media rights to every event so as a result they've produced hundreds and hundreds of hours of material every year from like tv shows radio stations print and then they'll go to other tv broadcasters other radio stations other newspapers and magazines and they will give them their content for free and so when they put on the red bull Air Race, the Red Bull Air Race World Series, that content that Red Bull made and owned, they gave it to over 70 different television stations all over the world and said, hey, we put all this money into this.

54:01Here's something that you can't get anywhere else that your customers will find, your watchers or listeners or whatever, your audience will find interesting. Here, we don't want anything for it. You just play it for free. And because the media outlets don't have to pay to produce that material, they jump all over it. So again, a very clever way to just multiply his advertising and marketing spend. And so I mentioned earlier that he has developed his own company building philosophy, one that is very unique to him. And so he talks about the fact that even though he went to school for business, he just doesn't really believe a lot of the stuff that he was taught.

54:30And so it says, Masterchips has amassed his wealth despite, or perhaps precisely because he's at odds with some basic business principles. If someone says to him that the primary goal of a company is to maximize profit, he simply declares that to be incorrect. He thinks longer term and more broadly than his competitors. I just don't believe everything I learned at business school. He has repeatedly said he never tires of emphasizing that money was never his main motivation for starting his own company. Rather, the driving forces were longing for freedom and independence as well as finding joy in the work.

55:06This is why you don't retire, right? If you love what you do, you're obviously making a bunch of money in it. You're free and you have complete independence to control what you work on, who's around you. There's nothing better than that. Our motto, going back to a quote from him, our motto is the journey is the destination. I don't want to go to the summit to stand at the top, but to do the climb up. One of the great, one of this maximum I have saved on my phone, this great line that I think about all the time and I try to apply it to my work. I love the climb. I don't care where the summit is.

55:37You don't last 40 years into the same business if that's not true for you. It is true for Mesh. He's like, I don't care. I'm having fun. I'm free. I'm independent. And I get joy from the work. And I think in addition to all that, I think one thing that helped the longevity is the fact that he decided to move. Originally, the company was headquarters in a bigger city called Salzburg. And he winds up moving the headquarters to this tiny village that I can't even pronounce. And it only has 1500 inhabitants. It's like almost all Red Bull. the local governing, the local politician said that if it wasn't for Red Bull the place would be impoverished and I think it's one of the richest communities in Austria and so he actually moves the company headquarters to this little tiny village this is very similar to the idea if you listen to the podcast I did on the founder of Bugatti, he did this exact same thing that's episode 316, Brunello Cuccinelli you know it was a huge again, Bugatti did his business for till he died you know brunette cuccinelli still alive but he's been doing his business for like 45 years that's episode 289 this idea is like okay you're controlling the product that you work on you're controlling who's like who works in the company but you should also put a lot of time and emphasis like where you're actually doing your work and i'm fascinated by these people that actually build like physical manifestations almost like their entire like building and building their own like miniature world inside of the world i guess george lucas did the same thing with skywalker ranch but we see this idea again with matches this little community is on this picturesque lake in some word i can't pronounce and he said they asked like why he why he moved it there and his simple his answer was simple the aim was to create a more pleasant working atmosphere now there was one funny thing i have to add though because people are having these rumors about why he did this and it goes back to the fact that he's secretive and likes to control his environment.

57:25It also said that he wanted to build a network of underground tunnels so he could move from building to building without being seen. And then more about the fact that his business is kind of like his personality writ large. He stays incredibly fit. He loves extreme sports, aviation, riding his motorcycle. And he constantly talks about he refuses to ever get married. I'll tell you this funny sentence on that. They call him the top bull, which is hilarious. I don't know if that's just it's the German translation in English. I hope not. I hope they actually call him the top bull because I thought it was funny.

57:58The top bull takes care of his body, keeps fit, and is amazingly good shape for someone almost 70 years old. He says everything that gives me pleasure in life is connected with a certain physical fitness and a physical well-being. And so it is pure selfishness that I do something for my fitness. I like going to the mountain. I like skiing. I like sailing. I like riding my motorbike. Like everything I do is connected with a with physical agility, motor skills, dexterity, strength and stamina. In order to enjoy it outdoors, I need the indoor program. So he's saying his dedication to physical fitness to be able to perform well in the outdoors.

58:35He has to be dedicated to his gym routine, his workout routine. And he says he is a declared opponent to the marital state. He was never married his entire life, just has his one son. And what I love most about him is that he was true to his authentic self to the very, very end. One thing he's categorically ruled out again and again, exiting the company in the form of selling his shares. I hardly even allow this question, he said. We could have done it a dozen times already. Our view on this has not changed. We neither have the desire to do so, nor is there a need. And this is the one exception.

59:09Of course, one can never say never for a strategic minority stakes. sometimes they can be helpful and indeed make sense. Mattis has also consistently and categorically ruled out a stock market listing. A sale or an IPO is not even remotely tempting. And when asked if he's going to retire, he answered, I'm having more fun than ever.