Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
220 episodes listed below
Business history with the machinery left visible.
Acquired is a business-history show built around unusually detailed case studies of companies, sports, finance, technology, and media events. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal move patiently through origins, incentives, ownership, and strategic turning points, with enough dry banter to keep the machinery human.
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Acquired is a long-form business-history show about how exceptional companies, sports, platforms, and leaders actually came to be. Its center of gravity is preparation. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal tend to begin with the terrain: dates, institutions, market structure, ownership, capital, and the early constraints that shaped what followed. Then the narrative widens. A Formula 1 episode becomes a story about dangerous racing, postwar engineering, bankrupt teams, media-rights leverage, bank debt, Bernie and Slavica, and the private equity dealmaking that changed the sport’s governance. A Jamie Dimon interview becomes a banking-history arc about mentorship, dismissal, turnaround work, and a long corporate run. A Steve Ballmer conversation becomes a study in models that worked until mobile changed the game. The Mark Zuckerberg live interview turns Meta’s open-source and infrastructure decisions into a broader discussion about platform dependence, supply chains, and control. The show is not brief. That is part of the point. It trusts that business outcomes make more sense when the audience can see the machinery around them, from legal fights and licensing models to distribution windows, enterprise software gaps, and the peculiar timing of an opening in the market. The tone is warm but exacting. Banter appears, then the episode returns to the operating question. Acquired also documents its own growth as a media company, including a 10-year anniversary, a Chase Center event with Mark Zuckerberg, and a Radio City Music Hall production featuring Jamie Dimon, Meredith Kobit-Levian, Barry Diller, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Those moments are treated with enthusiasm, but also as case material for audience scale, niche media, partnerships, and production ambition. The show works best for listeners who enjoy patient explanation and do not mind a long runway before the central thesis lands. It is less interested in slogans than in the messy path between a decision and a durable advantage. Many episodes arrive at lessons, but they rarely pretend the lesson was obvious at the time. The strongest recurring idea is that great outcomes are idiosyncratic, and that the history is where the useful pattern, if one exists, can be found.
Made for: Acquired is for listeners who enjoy long, carefully built stories about companies, markets, founders, executives, and strategic turning points. It suits people with stamina for detail and curiosity about why outlier success rarely fits a simple formula.
What sets it apart: The show combines deep historical preparation with conversational warmth, keeping interviews and case studies anchored to a clear editorial arc. It makes scale concrete through ownership structures, market timing, audience growth, capital flows, and operating tradeoffs rather than relying on quick founder mythology.
Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Acquired makes corporate strategy concrete by connecting institutional history, pivotal decisions, and candid interviews with the people involved.
Acquired turns company building into narrative history, with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal tracing the decisions, ownership shifts, and constraints behind major institutions.
F1 ownership becomes a bankruptcy relay, and suddenly your business-history appetite has dinner plans.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A business-first F1 history about control, debt, private equity, and the long road from Bernie's empire to Liberty Media.
Acquired treats Formula 1 less as a racing story than as a long fight over control. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal start with the sport's dangerous early roots, then follow the business as it becomes a strange asset class: teams burning cash, Bernie Ecclestone pulling value out…
A banking story told as corporate history, not celebrity gloss.
Acquired treats Jamie Dimon less like a public figure than like a force moving through modern banking, starting with a small but memorable detail: the hosts visit his office and still miss the pair of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr pistols kept in JPMorgan's headquarters.
A live Zuckerberg conversation that treats Meta as a sequence of eras.
Acquired frames this live Mark Zuckerberg conversation as a company-history story rather than a celebrity Q&A. The hosts place Zuckerberg into distinct eras, then use that structure to move through Meta's infrastructure choices, open source stance, and the drive to keep core…
A summer update that pairs a September 10 live show with Acquired's reminder that great success stories are usually outliers.
Acquired uses the summer break to point listeners toward a September 10 live show at Chase Center, in partnership with J.P. Morgan Payments, with Mark Zuckerberg set to appear on stage and a few surprises still kept back.
A Charlie Munger conversation that uses Costco to trace how durable business ideas spread.
This episode treats Charlie Munger less like a tribute and more like a way into Costco, imitation, and the long view only a 99-year-old investor can really bring.
A grounded look at the history and strategy of Stratechery.
This episode does a solid job tracing the full arc of Stratechery, with Ben Thompson in the room on the eve of its 10-year mark. It works best once it gets past the origin story and into the business side of paid access, where the pressure of building a public product before it…
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
Naval Ravikant on epistemology, startups, and crypto, from David Deutsch to Vitalik Buterin.
Alex Theuma interviews SaaS founders and investors on scaling to $10M-plus ARR.
Guy Raz traces founders' origin stories and fields live advice-line calls from entrepreneurs.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
The F1 theme is already bumping.
This episode announces the release of a full video special of Acquired's live show at Radio City Music Hall, featuring interviews with notable CEOs like Jamie Dimon and Meredith Kobit-Levian, presented as a concert-style production.
They missed the pistols.
The hosts announce that Acquired Live is coming to Radio City Music Hall in New York City for their 10-year anniversary, promising a large-scale event with a surprise guest.
Thirty to forty interviews set the table.
After 10 years without a real Acquired break, the hosts explain why six weeks off from episodes is mostly six weeks of Chase Center work.
Acquired records a dinner conversation with Charlie Munger in Los Angeles.
The hosts of Acquired interview NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang about the company's rise to a $1.1 trillion valuation, its role in the AI explosion, and whether it can maintain its dominant position in the evolving market.
Ben and David interview Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi about Uber's transformation, financial growth, and strategic focus on mobility and delivery.
An interview with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek about how Spotify saved the music industry and built a massive subscriber base.
This episode explores how Sega went from dominating over half the U.S.
This episode interviews Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi about their framework for building successful second business lines in companies, using examples like Amazon AWS and LVMH.
Stratechery gets the Acquired treatment, but the interesting part is less grand than a strategy case usually sounds.
This episode of Acquired features a conversation between value investor Howard Marks and growth investor Andrew Marks, discussing their different investment styles and strategies.
This episode features an interview with Congressman Anthony Gonzalez, discussing his unique background from NFL player to startup COO to a key figure in Congress regulating crypto and Web3.