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Philip Anschutz bought railroads for oil beneath the tracks, got stadiums free through leverage, and monetized the 20-minute pre-movie window at Regal Cinemas. He made billions by seeing value others missed.
Philip Anschutz bought railroads for oil beneath the tracks, got stadiums free through leverage, and monetized the 20-minute pre-movie window at Regal Cinemas. He made billions by seeing value others missed.
There's this new podcast that I've been listening to that's fantastic. It's called Rainmakers. It's this guy out in LA, basically he's like trying to find investors that no one's ever heard of before. One of the guys that he profiled was Philip Anschutz. He owned a bunch of real estate, oil and gas, railroads, and there's like a tie-through of this guy's career where he basically tried to find value no one understood. So he would buy up railroad companies not for the railroads, but he'd buy because there was oil underneath the ground. Or he bought up like a bunch of local sports teams because he figured out a playbook of how he could get the stadiums for free. But the one I loved was he bought Regal Cinema, the movie Theaters were crashing and everyone was like, oh, this is a horrible business. You can't make money on tickets and food. And what he realized was for 20 minutes before the movie starts, you have a captured audience that are just sitting there looking at the screen. And so he started to sell ads and he made the movie theater an ad business. And then all of a sudden he completely changed the unit economics and was able to like save Regal Cinema, became this huge thing, sold it, etc.
