About these summaries
Octagon has summarized 15 episodes of Acquired published between Jul 16, 2025 and Oct 19, 2026. The companies discussed most often are Apple, Microsoft and Netflix. Frequent guests include Jamie Dimon. Each summary lists key takeaways, short timestamped quotes and the companies and tickers mentioned, with a link to the full episode.
Most-mentioned tickers
- AAPL 4
- GOOG 4
- GOOGL 4
- AMZN 3
- JPM 3
- NFLX 3
- CMCSA 2
- DIS 2
- MSFT 2
- SHOP 2
Most-mentioned companies
- Apple 4
- Microsoft 3
- Netflix 3
- Google 2
- JPMorgan Chase 2
- Shopify 2
Frequent guests
- Jamie Dimon 3
Episodes
- Seinfeld - Full Episode (Audio)
The episode traces how Jerry Seinfeld went from a relentlessly self-trained stand-up comic to the center of one of television’s most valuable deals.
- Home Depot: The best-performing stock in the S&P 500 since IPO (Audio)
Home Depot is framed as an outlier in American retail: a North America-only specialty retailer with about a $350 billion market cap, 470,000 employees, and the best total-return…
- Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire
Disney opens in 1984 as a company that looks structurally broken: animation has stagnated, Epcot is over budget, the stock has been hammered, and raiders are circling to sell off…
- The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio)
The episode traces Disney’s business origins from Walt Disney’s childhood in Marceline and Kansas City through the company’s first real breakthrough in Hollywood.
- Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio)
Vanguard’s origin story begins with Jack Bogle’s conviction that mutual funds should serve investors, not outside shareholders.
- Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio)
Ferrari is presented as a paradox: a company that sells only about 14,000 cars a year, mostly by hand in Maranello, yet carries extraordinary global brand power and some of the…
- Formula 1 (Audio)
Formula 1 became a major business by turning a chaotic collection of dangerous European races into a centralized commercial property.
- The NFL (2026 Update)
The episode traces how American football evolved from violent college mob games into a tightly managed professional league, and why the NFL only became a national powerhouse…
- 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)
Michael Lewis frames Acquired as a rare podcast that has worked by leaning into scarcity, depth, and trust rather than the usual industry pressure to publish constantly.
- Coca-Cola: How a sugar water formula came to represent America, Happiness, and... Christmas
Coca-Cola began as a late-19th-century patent medicine, then evolved into a mass-market refreshment business by combining sugar, caffeine, flavorings, and a tiny amount of cocaine.
- Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)
The conversation centers on how JPMorgan Chase became the dominant U.S. bank by prioritizing risk control, liquidity, and conservative accounting over short-term returns.
- Trader Joe’s (Audio)
Trader Joe’s began as a response to two different threats: 7-Eleven’s convenience-store model and the supermarket industry’s move toward scale, brand dominance, and price…
- Google: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (audio)
Google’s AI story starts long before ChatGPT, with Larry Page treating search as an artificial intelligence problem and early Google engineers building language models that…
- Alphabet Inc. (Audio)
Google’s expansion beyond search was framed as both a strategic defense and an expression of its mission.
- The Jamie Dimon Interview: How JP Morgan Became an $800 Billion Bank
Jamie Dimon framed JPMorgan Chase’s rise as the product of two things: a long-term strategic model and an unusually conservative approach to risk.
Acquired, its episodes and artwork belong to Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; these pages are independent summaries.
