Beatrice Companies, Inc.

So we're not talking about some billionaire showing up with a mountain of his own money, you know? This man had to figure out how to finance a billion-dollar takeover while competing against institutions that had more people, more power, and absolutely no reason to think that he was about to beat them, and then he did.

That company becomes TLC Beatrice International, and it does about 1.8 billion in annual revenue, making it the first Black-owned company in American history to cross that billion dollar mark.

And once I tell you how Reginald Lewis got into Harvard Law School, this whole story is gonna make a whole lot more sense, because apparently this man had been walking into rooms that just weren't expecting him and leaving with what he came for his entire life.

Reginald Lewis was born in a segregated Baltimore in 1942, and there's a story his family tells about him when he was six years old.

Lewis goes after it.

He outbids much bigger competitors and closes the deal for $985 million.

Now, TLC Beatrice eventually reaches billions of dollars in annual revenue and becomes the largest Black-owned business in America.

Lewis lands on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, the little Black boy from segregated Baltimore.

Marketable securities.

At year end 1985, all of our positions in marketable equities with a market value over $25 million were in affiliated publications, American Broadcasting Companies, Beatrice Companies, Geico Corporation, Handy and Harmon, Time Incorporated, and the Washington Post Company.

Including all other common stock holdings, our total common stock portfolio had a cost of about $275 million and a market value of about $1.2 billion.

The interests attributable to minority shareholders of Wesco and Nebraska Furniture Mart are excluded from these figures.

However, the market now values the company at over $1.8 billion, and there is no way that the value can progress from that level at a rate anywhere close to the rate possible when the company's valuation was only $100 million.

Because market prices have also been bid up for our other holdings, we face the same vastly reduced potential throughout our portfolio.

You will notice that we had a significant holding in Beatrice Companies at year end, This is a short-term arbitrage holding, in effect, a parking place for money, though not a totally safe one since deals sometimes fall through and create substantial losses.

We sometimes enter the arbitrage field when we have more money than ideas, but only to participate in announced mergers and sales.

I sort of describe Japan as...

Like the US in the 1980s, where you were coming off the conglomerate era, where you had Beatrice Foods and ITT and Fortune Brands and all these companies that were conglomerates that owned things that had nothing to do with each other.

And we've gone through a 30-year period of rationalizing that sort of strategic mantra that was sort of focused in the 60s and 70s.

coming off the Carol Janine ITT era.

By the late 1930s, Reed was selling about one and a half million bags of this a year.

The business changed hands several times, eventually becoming part of Adams International and later Beatrice Foods.

Meanwhile, another company, Elmer Candy in New Orleans, was independently developing a similar puffed corn snack called Chewy's.

Then came Cheetos in 1948, which built on the extrusion techniques these earlier pioneers had developed.