Chapter 1: What is Ferrari's unique position in the luxury market?
Okay, David, so the question, do you have a favorite Ferrari?
Ooh, that's a tough one. I would never actually want to get behind the wheel of it, but I think I got to go with the F40. Of course. I remember just being like a kid in elementary school and getting a model of one and thinking like, oh my God, this is the most incredible machine that mankind has ever created.
Yeah, it's the defining supercar. Yes, yes. How about you? I actually have two. One is the car from Charles Leclerc's wedding. It's the 1957 250 Testarossa. And the car from Ford versus Ferrari. That 1966 330 P3 is just beautiful. It's got these curves. It looks like a spaceship. It's gorgeous.
Beauty and power. The story of Ferrari. Yes. All right, should we do it? Let's do it.
Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way.
Welcome to the spring 2026 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Dresenthal. And we are your hosts. Almost everyone needs transportation. It is a giant market serving a huge human need, and it is one of the top three things that households spend money on along with their housing and their food.
And the automobile has become the default way that humans move around the world. And that is not what we're talking about today. And this episode has absolutely nothing to do with any of that. Today's episode, listeners, is about selling dreams. We are talking about Ferrari, one of the most paradoxical companies that we have ever studied here on Acquired.
Ferrari ships very, very few cars, around 14,000 per year. That is approximately the number of Toyotas that are sold every 10 hours. But of course, we know Toyota and Ferrari are a silly comparison. So what about a company that we have covered in the past? Porsche. Yeah. Even Porsche ships 22 times the number of cars that Ferrari does.
And yet, even though almost nobody owns a Ferrari, only about 180,000 people globally, they have among the highest brand recognition. I would argue that over a billion people know what a Ferrari is. Easily. Which means, David, that Ferrari has the highest ratio of people who know about their products to people who actually own their products of any company in human history.
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Chapter 2: How did Enzo Ferrari's early life shape his future?
Yes, just like how we say every company has a story, every company's story is powered by payments. And JPMorgan Payments is a part of so many of their journeys from seed to IPO and beyond.
So with that, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. David Rosenthal, take us to Italy.
Ooh, all right. Well, we start... in 1898 in the medieval Italian town of Modena with the birth of our hero, Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari. Better known, of course, either by the name of the company he would found that bears his last name, Ferrari, or to his hundreds of millions of fans around the world, simply as Enzo. So Enzo is born here in 1898 in Modena. the second of two sons.
And his mother, Adaldisa, is a beautiful young woman. His father, Alfredo, is 12 years older than his mother. And his father runs a successful metalworking shop and is kind of like a, you know, fairly well-to-do middle-class entrepreneur about town. And Enzo and his father are often at odds growing up. But part of his dad does rub off on him in this sort of entrepreneurial influence.
His dad says something to him which sticks with Enzo for the rest of his life. A company is perfect when the number of partners in it is odd and less than three.
Yeah.
I don't take on partners. Always be self-sufficient. It's a great quote. We should say that much of this history, this whole episode comes from the fantastic, really definitive biography of Enzo called Enzo Ferrari, written by Luca Del Monte, who worked at Ferrari and Maserati for many years.
And then after he retired, dedicated about a decade of his life to researching and writing this definitive biography. It's really excellent. So anyway, his mother and his father are always fighting. They're always yelling, arguing, swearing. And this has a very different effect on each of their two children.
For Enzo's older brother, who is named after his father, he's also named Alfredo, nicknamed Dino to tell them apart. He, Dino, becomes like the golden child. He's the peacemaker, the pleaser, the striver, the smart and successful one. He's going to make his parents proud and he's going to take over everything. the family business.
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Chapter 3: What tragic events influenced Enzo Ferrari's career?
Yep. And for a team that would go on to adopt the prancing horse, I am loving the thick metaphor here with the stable and the... Oh, yeah.
Enzo, as we shall see, is a natural born marketer. So important to note a couple of things here. The Scuderia Ferrari is very much intended to be a junior partner to Alfa Romeo, or at least Alfa intends it that way. But Enzo does in the back of his mind have broader ambitions, as we alluded to with the whole coach building thing.
Unless you're one of the few new, at this point, really mass assembly line consumer car companies like Fiat or like the Ford Motor Company over in America, the line and the barrier to entry between being a garage who develops and maintains racing cars and graduating to making your own cars that you sell to the privateers who go racing is pretty thin. And Enzo's...
Always got this in the back of his mind. And he's got some examples out there. So there are other garages, for lack of a better word, out there in Italy at the time that have made the jump from developing race car versions of other cars made by other manufacturers to selling their own cars. The prime example being Maserati right there in Modena, right across town. The Maserati, bro.
In the video game world, this is modding. You're sort of taking someone's kind of basic game and souping it up into something really special for you that you're customizing.
Yep. So Forenzo, in the back of his mind, he's like, okay, this is my opportunity to build my own team, hire my own engineers and mechanics, use hopefully my team's success combined with the Scuderia Ferrari brand that I'm building. Maybe someday I too can launch my full-on car company like the Maserati brothers across town.
So as he gets going with his grandmaster plan and developing the Scooteria, he knows that he needs to build up more than just his own operations. He also does need to build a brand if he's going to sell his own car someday. And specifically, he needs a logo. And he's got the perfect one. But before we tell the story of the legend... of the Ferrari Prancing Horse.
Now is a great time to thank our presenting partner, JP Morgan Payments.
Yes. And one thing that kept coming up, listeners, in our research for Ferrari is just how global they have been from their early days. Of course, headquartered in Italy, but selling cars to the US and around the world, as we will soon get to from those early days. And behind any company operating at that scale, there is a massive engine orchestrating money movement behind the scenes.
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Chapter 4: What were the circumstances surrounding Enzo Ferrari's final years?
my last days on this earth doing what I love, which is running the racing team.
The incredible irony was the end was nowhere near.
Nowhere near.
And actually, the world would change enough between this moment and when he would eventually pass that Piero is able to take over as Piero Ferrari, son of Enzo. Yes.
Yes, yes.
So how many years was it between 1969 is when the 50% sale to Fiat. He doesn't pass away until... He lives another 20 years.
Yes. 19 years.
1988. Like he lives until I was born. Yes. Where's the sort of the end of his life.
Well, he lives to launch the F40, which is the last car that Enzo launches.
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Chapter 5: How did Luca di Montezemolo's return influence Ferrari's Formula One team?
And so I think Fiat basically got a steal on this because it needed to stay in Italy and it needed to go to a strong, thriving car company.
Car company and family in the Agnelli's. Yes. Interesting. Well, all of this just underscores the most critical point here. I think this is probably the moment in history where the false legend that Enzo only cared about racing and wasn't a real entrepreneur emerges from. Because if you look at the fact pattern, it makes sense here. Like he wanted to spend his last days racing.
He did this not great deal with Fiat. The only reason this happened is because he truly thought he was about to die. And he really did just want to spend his last days on Earth racing. running the racing team, and he wanted to ensure continuity for the company and a role for his son, Piero, going forward. That's what happened here.
The state of Ferrari is kind of grim at this point, too. The factory needed investment. The racing program was unbelievably expensive. They're starting to face very real competition from Lamborghini. They were founded in 1963 specifically to challenge Ferrari, at least Lamborghini Motors, which we'll come back to. And there was manufacturing headaches happening because of Italian labor unrest.
And so asking someone to take on Ferrari's operations was a tall order in addition to needing to sell.
Yes. I'm glad you brought up Lamborghini. Lamborghini had just launched the Mira, the Lamborghini Mira at this point in time, which was a truly excellent car, like a better Ferrari than a Ferrari at the time. So there was real headwinds in the business. And this is really why Fiat and Gianni Agnelli had to be the buyer to start Ferrari through this period. Now,
As we said earlier, fate had plans other than death for Enzo. Right after the sale in 1970, Enzo does go into organ failure and is hospitalized. He's away from the business for many months, which really makes it incredibly fortuitous that he had already done the deal with Fiat. So there was management to keep the company running while Enzo is away. Miraculously, though, he recovers.
And in the spring of 1971, Enzo, the grand old man, is back in Maranello at the head of Ferrari. But it's a Ferrari that he barely recognizes from when he left. He had his come in. And this is where he intersects with another young man who would go on to carry the legacy and the spirit of Ferrari for really the next 40 years and into the next generation and build Ferrari what it is today.
With a break in between.
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Chapter 6: What strategies did Ferrari implement post-IPO to maintain its brand exclusivity?
This actually reminds me of Ferrari on race day. It's not just about having the fastest car. It's about coordinating thousands of signals across tires and fuel and brakes and more, all in real time to make the right decision. That is where companies are with AI right now. Tons of intelligence, but not a lot of control.
And that's the shift. Intelligence is becoming a commodity. The hard part now is making all of that AI actually work together inside a real organization, securely, reliably, and in sync.
That's what ServiceNow has been building for over 20 years. Today, they run the workflows behind more than 85% of the Fortune 500, which amounts to over 80 billion workflows a year. So in a very real way, a big part of the world already works with ServiceNow.
And with their AI control tower, they're giving companies a single place to manage all of it. Not just agents, but every AI system across the business. Yes.
So listeners, it's not just about AI that thinks. It's about AI that actually works. If you're thinking about how AI really operates at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, so David, Luca de Montezemolo, at least the first act of Luca anyway.
Of Luca's story, yes. So in 1971, when Enzo gets back to the office in Maranello after his hospitalization, he tunes in to a fateful talk radio show where he discovers a young man who will bring a Breath of fresh air into his life. Luca. So Montezemolo, to many of you listening, is already a living legend. I mean, as much as anyone in Ferrari history besides Enzo, Luca de Montezemolo is Ferrari.
And as I mentioned, I was very lucky to get to speak with him for a few hours and research for this episode. And I also got to watch this great movie about him that has just been made. It's called Seeing Red. It's with Chris Harris, the Top Gear presenter.
Yeah, how did you get that? Because that's not out yet.
Yeah, it's not distributed outside of Italy yet, but I got a link to watch it. It's directed and produced by Manish Pandey, who wrote and produced Senna, the Senna movie. It's really, really excellent. When it's available in whatever geography you live in, very, very, very much worth watching. So Luca was born in 1947, the same year that the modern Ferrari commenced operations. Very poetic.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of Ferrari's voting shares structure?
I mean, that is an independent company. However, the voting shares are a different story. So together, Exor and Piero have the right to vote about 49% of the voting shares. So it doesn't take much for them to control the vote on any given decision as long as they vote together. They just need to go sway 1% or 2% of the public float to vote with them as a bloc.
Yes, that's true. I think the really interesting thing to look at is how... The Ferrari model range has evolved in the years since the IPO.
Chapter 8: How has the Ferrari model range evolved post-IPO?
Yes. I'm so glad you took it here. So Ferrari effectively makes four types of cars that consumers can buy. 85% of units shipped fall into what they call the range. These cars are a few hundred thousand dollars each, of course, before any personalization or customization.
So this is the collection of sports cars and GT Grand Touring cars that have always been the core of Ferrari. You've got your mid-engine V8s and V6s, you've got your front-engine V12s, and you've got your hybrids that have been a relatively new addition. Yep.
This is your Amalfi, your Roma, your Tessarosa, your 12-cylindry, these sorts of models. So that's 85%. And actually, sometimes it flexes up even higher if they are not shipping a supercar at the moment. Because the supercar that we had talked about, the F40, the F50, the Enzo, the LaFerrari, and now the F80, these are not being made all the time.
They just make them for, I don't know, 24 months, once a decade. Special occasions.
Yeah. Shall we say. So at the end of the Luca era... That was the product lineup. It was the core range and the occasional halo supercar. That was it.
Now, 10% are what they call the special series. These will run you between $500,000 and a million again before customization. David, what are these?
These are like the special versions of the range. cars, the high performance, you know, if you take like BMW, you know, you've got your regular BMWs and then you've got your M series or Mercedes, you've got the regular Mercedes, then you've got the AMG.
Oh, Ferrari people would scoff at you for making that comparison.
Part of me is dying by making this analogy for Ferrari, but it's telling, right, that this was added. This never existed before. And now there's, you know, essentially the M series or the AMG series of the Ferrari range. Yeah.
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