Kurt MacAlpine’s company manages $525 billion and it didn’t even exist six years ago. At 39, he set his sights on the ultra-high-net-worth wealth management industry and decided to take it over as if he were a Canadian Genghis Khan. He went into debt to fund acquisitions, and when the stock market turned against his strategy he kept buying back shares and eventually took the company private. This is a fascinating conversation about incentives, conviction, and building a business that can compound for generations. 0:00 Building Corient and managing $525 billion 5:32 Why wealth management’s incentives are broken 11:42 Bringing the partnership model to wealth management 22:15 Sharing the benefits of scale with clients 24:25 One compensation plan, one P&L, no exceptions 27:58 Why independent wealth managers join Corient 39:21 Staying the course when the stock market disagrees 48:25 Betting on the business through share buybacks 51:52 Taking CI Financial private with Mubadala Capital 59:08 Acquiring great partners and building one company 1:04:43 Giving employees a voice in building the brand 1:12:39 Building a business that lasts for generations Includes paid partnerships.

Great advice from Jeff Bezos: “When you’re on the field, be on the field. But remember, you can’t always be on the field. There has to be a time-out, halftime. You have to heal. Recover. The show must go on, sure, but the game must stop, now and then, for the players to catch their breath.”

For everyone asking me to record an episode with @MrBeast, we already did. It will be out in December:

it took @alexandr_wang a full year to get his first meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. “Mark obviously has an insane calendar, and has a bajillion different things to deal with, and he's also very good at prioritization.” “He will spend a lot of time on the things that are really, really important. In some ways, too much time on the things that are really, really important.” “The only way he's able to do that and be a good dad and a good partner and all this other stuff is to just ruthlessly prioritize.”

Corient manages $525B for ultra-high-net-worth families. They offer a unique value: owning private jets for clients to use. “Through just the size and scale and the relationships that we have at Corient… we could provide them a relatively unique service.” “We own aircraft on behalf of our clients for their collective use.” “We take the balance sheet risk from buying the asset. We take the risk associated with the monthly management fee, and then clients effectively pay for the use of the aircraft.” — Kurt MacAlpine

Kurt MacAlpine’s unique way to decide the name of a company: let the employees have a live vote. “I have no idea what the name’s going to be. I don’t actually care what the name’s going to be.” “I did a live vote, and we named the firm together.” “People embrace the change better because they can see their input reflected in whatever you ultimately decide.”

Jeff Bezos opened his 2000 shareholder letter with one word: “Ouch.” Amazon’s shares were down more than 80% in a year. He quoted Benjamin Graham: “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it’s a weighing machine.” Kurt MacAlpine lived through the same situation with Corient: “You’re seeing all of this progress in the underlying business… but the share price ultimately isn’t tracking.” “You have to stay true to the convictions that you ultimately have.”

Why a $525B wealth manager put his headquarters in Miami: “If you think about it with a totally clean slate, where do you want the headquarters for the business ultimately to be? I picked Miami.” “I think we're still in the early days of what we'll see in South Florida.” “We were by no means a pioneer of moving to Miami. But we were a little bit early relative to the flood of movement that’s happened on the back of us.” — Corient CEO Kurt MacAlpine

“Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” — Charlie Munger Kurt MacAlpine built Corient into a $525B firm with ~3,000 people, all on 1 compensation plan: “I’m obsessed with alignment.” “Incentives drive a lot of behaviors, a tremendous amount of behaviors.” “I feel very strongly that every single client of Corient, regardless of where you live or how you've entered the business, should have the same opportunity for an equally elevated experience.” “Similar to clients, I want to make sure that all of our employees have the same opportunity regardless of how they've entered the firm.” “By having one compensation plan, I can literally walk into any one of our offices in the world, and every single person knows that for an equal level of performance, they’re going to be treated exactly the same as all of their colleagues.”

AppLovin’s stock collapsed from $115 to $9 per share. Adam Foroughi’s response: deploy ~$6B buying back AppLovin stock over the next 18 months and borrowed billions to do so. The company made ~$50–60B from those buybacks. Kurt MacAlpine ran the exact same play: “I felt like our shares were, in my opinion, criminally undervalued.” “We were buying over a period of time, but it was a significant return and we were buying a lot of those shares back at $12 or $13 a share.” “You just need to have conviction in yourself. We said, "Look, we want to do two things. We think there's a tremendous opportunity in building Corient, while at the same time, we're not letting these shares trade the way they are without buying them. There's no way. And so we were buying and buying and buying and buying.”

You know a story is wild if people are asking Grok if it’s true:

Some of my favorite photos from my conversation with Kurt MacAlpine, partner and CEO of Corient, the world's largest multifamily office. Episode is out tomorrow.

Kurt MacAlpine. Corient. Kurt built a half a trillion dollar multi-family office in 6 years. This is a wild story. Tomorrow !

You would have made billions if you gave seed checks to everyone who was at @alexandr_wang’s 19th birthday party: - Jeff Yan (@chameleon_jeff) went on to start Hyperliquid (~$20B) - @ScottWu46 went on to start Cognition ($48B) - @thejessezhang went on to start Decagon ($4.5B) And Wang himself who started Scale AI, and got $14.3B from Meta for 49% of it. Wang explains: “I was doing a winternship at a trading firm called HRT. There were 12 of us, almost all of whom were students at either Harvard or MIT. I recently met up with the founder of HRT and they were talking about, ‘We're starting to do some private investments.’ I was like, ‘Just invest into the interns! All the interns get seed checks!’”