The Bell and the Pattern
On the morning of April 2025, Brad Jacobs stood on the podium of the New York Stock Exchange for the eleventh time in his career and rang the opening bell. The first time had been in 1997, for United Waste Systems, a company he'd built from nothing into the fifth-largest solid waste hauler in the United States and then sold for $2.5 billion. This time the bell was for QXO, Inc., his newest creation — a building products distributor that had not existed eighteen months prior and had just closed an $11 billion acquisition of Beacon Roofing Supply. Between those two bell-ringings lay twenty-eight years, approximately 500 acquisitions, something north of $50 billion in raised capital, and the founding of eight separate companies, each of which reached a billion-dollar or multibillion-dollar valuation. The bell is the same bell. The man is — in certain essential ways that his story makes legible — the same man.
What distinguishes Jacobs from the broader population of serial entrepreneurs is not merely the scale but the repetition. Most company-builders have a signature move they execute once or twice. Jacobs has performed the same fundamental operation across oil brokerage, oil trading, waste management, equipment rental, logistics, contract warehousing, freight brokerage, and now building products distribution — entering a large, fragmented, technologically underserved industry, consolidating it through rapid acquisition, integrating the pieces through technology and operational discipline, and compounding shareholder value at rates that make the S&P 500 look inert. United Rentals is now a 200-bagger. XPO's stock returned more than 50 times initial investors' money. United Waste outperformed the S&P by 5.6 times in five years. These are not lottery tickets. They are the output of a system — refined over four decades, codified in books, and deployed again and again with an almost liturgical consistency.
The paradox is that a man whose entire method depends on finding ugly, fragmented, unsexy industries and making them hum — trash hauling, equipment rental, truck freight — has become something of a celebrity in business circles. He meditates daily. He cites cognitive behavioral therapy as a foundational business tool. He studied mathematics and music at Bennington College. He writes books with titles so brazen they function as their own marketing:
How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. And he is, at 69, doing it all over again — this time with roofing shingles.
By the Numbers
The Jacobs Empire
8Billion-dollar-plus companies founded
~500M&A transactions completed
$50B+Debt and equity capital raised
200xUnited Rentals stock return from inception
50xXPO Logistics stock return from 2011
$11BQXO's acquisition of Beacon Roofing Supply (2025)
11NYSE opening bell appearances
The Mentor and the Trend
Before there were billion-dollar companies, there was a twenty-three-year-old with a few thousand dollars and a tendency to ask questions of people older and more accomplished than himself. In 1979, Brad Jacobs — born August 3, 1956, in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of Charlotte Sybil Bander and Albert Jordan Jacobs, a fashion jewelry importer — founded Amerex Oil Associates, an oil brokerage. He had attended Northfield Mount Hermon School, studied mathematics and music at Bennington College and Brown University without taking a degree, and possessed the kind of restless, acquisitive intelligence that finds formal education both stimulating and insufficient. Within four years, Amerex was brokering $4.7 billion in annual volume, arbitraging price differentials between the New York and Chicago futures markets and the London and Houston spot markets. The young Jacobs had identified a structural inefficiency and built a machine to exploit it. He sold the company in 1983.
But the foundational relationship of his career — the one he returns to again and again in interviews, in his books, on podcasts — was with Ludwig Jesselson. Jacobs never called him Ludwig. It was always Mr. Jesselson.
Jesselson was the president and CEO of Philipp Brothers, for decades the world's largest commodity trading house, and he was a man of a particular type: deeply moral, profoundly religious in an ethical rather than dogmatic sense, and oriented toward relationships the way other men are oriented toward deals. He had lived through enough of the twentieth century's horrors to understand that honesty was not merely a virtue but a survival strategy. Long-term relationships. Honest relationships. Relationships you could come back to. Jacobs absorbed this not as sentimentality but as operating principle.
The maxim Jacobs credits to Jesselson is deceptively simple: Get the major trend right. Five words that contain an entire theory of wealth creation. If the secular trend is moving in your direction — if the fundamental demand dynamics, the regulatory environment, the technological trajectory all point the same way — then you can afford to make mistakes on execution. You can overpay for an acquisition. You can botch an integration. You can hire the wrong people. The trend will forgive you. But if you get the trend wrong, flawless execution merely delays the reckoning.
Jacobs would test this principle first in London, where he founded Hamilton Resources in 1984, an oil trading company that generated roughly $1 billion a year in revenue through an "opportunistic combination of crude oil trading, counter trade, pre-finance, and refinery processing deals." And then, in 1989, he tested it in trash.
The Garbage Thesis
The waste management industry of the late 1980s was, to most observers, exactly what it appeared to be: a collection of small, family-owned companies that picked up garbage in rural and suburban markets. It was fragmented — thousands of operators, no dominant national player outside of a few large incumbents. It was low-tech. It was, in the most literal sense, dirty work.
Jacobs saw something else. He saw an industry undergoing forced consolidation — environmental regulations were tightening, landfill permits were becoming harder to obtain, and smaller operators lacked the capital to comply. He saw an industry where scale conferred genuine operational advantages: route density, equipment utilization, landfill access, pricing power. And he saw a secular trend — the United States was generating more waste per capita, not less, and population growth in suburban markets was accelerating demand.
He called his new venture United Waste Systems, founded it in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1989, and took it public in 1992. The strategy from the beginning was acquisition-driven: buy small and mid-sized haulers in attractive markets, integrate them into a single operating platform, eliminate redundant costs, and reinvest the savings into technology and further acquisitions. Within five years of its IPO, United Waste had become the fifth-largest solid waste company in the country. Its stock compounded at 55% annually, outperforming the S&P 500 by 5.6 times.
In 1997, Jacobs sold United Waste to what became Waste Management, Inc., for $2.5 billion. He was forty-one years old. He had proven that his method — the identification of a large, fragmented, secularly growing industry followed by systematic roll-up and operational improvement — was not an accident but a template. The question was whether the template could travel.
United Waste taught me that I love working with outrageously talented people to deliver outsized returns for shareholders in public stock markets.
Thirteen Months
The answer came that same year. In September 1997 — the ink on the United Waste sale barely dry — Jacobs founded United Rentals. The target industry was construction equipment rental, which shared the structural characteristics he'd identified in waste management: massive fragmentation (thousands of small operators), low technology penetration, secular demand growth driven by infrastructure spending and construction activity, and meaningful economies of scale for any company that could achieve national reach.
The speed was extraordinary. Jacobs and his team — many of them veterans of United Waste, including Troy Cooper, who would later become president of XPO — invested $45 million of their own proceeds from the United Waste sale, raised an additional $10 million from outside investors, and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in December 1997. The founding management team's willingness to commit nearly all of their recent windfall to the new venture was not merely a financial bet; it was a signal of conviction that attracted institutional capital.
Then the acquisitions began. Six companies in October 1997 alone. The pivotal deal came in June 1998: the acquisition of U.S. Rentals, Inc., for approximately $1.3 billion, which instantly made United Rentals the largest equipment rental company in North America. Over 250 acquisitions were completed in the initial years. Within thirteen months of founding, United Rentals held the top position in its industry — a position it retains to this day.
The stock price at inception was $3.50 per share. As of the most recent reporting, United Rentals' stock trades at well over 200 times that price, making it one of the most spectacular long-term wealth-creation stories in industrial America. It was the sixth-best-performing stock in the Fortune 500 over the past decade. And the company launched its E-Rental Store in February 2000, an early e-commerce platform for equipment rental — a small detail that foreshadows what would become Jacobs's insistence on technology as a force multiplier in every industry he touches.
But United Rentals also delivered one of Jacobs's most painful lessons. Sensing an opportunity when Congress enacted TEA-21 — the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, which in theory allocated roughly $600 billion to rebuild the nation's infrastructure — Jacobs began scooping up road-rental companies, the ones that provide barricades, cones, and lane striping for highway projects. The trend was unmistakable: the government was about to pour money into roads. The execution was a catastrophe. Only about a third of the allocated funding was actually spent, and that in dribs and drabs. Jacobs ended up selling the road-rental companies at a half-billion-dollar loss.
If you want to make money in the business world, you need to get used to problems, because that's what business is. It's actually about finding problems, embracing and even enjoying them.
He attributes the quote to Jesselson, delivered at a lunch when the young Jacobs was still complaining about his problems. The $500 million loss at United Rentals was what radical acceptance looked like when applied to real capital: acknowledge the mistake, stop compounding it, move on. No sunk-cost fallacy. No narrative about how the trend would eventually vindicate the bet. Just a clear-eyed recognition that the major trend had been wrong — or at least the timing had — and the rational response was liquidation at a loss.
The Architecture of a Roll-Up
To understand Brad Jacobs, you must understand the roll-up — not as a financial trick but as an industrial philosophy. The basic mechanics are familiar to anyone who has studied consolidation plays: buy many small companies in a fragmented industry, combine them into a single platform, and extract value through operational synergies, purchasing power, and brand coherence. Plenty of people attempt this. Most fail. The graveyard of roll-up strategies is littered with companies that overpaid for acquisitions, botched integrations, took on too much debt, or lost the culture of the acquired companies in the transition.
Jacobs has articulated, with unusual specificity, why his version works. The first principle is industry selection: the target must be a market with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, genuine economies of scale, secular growth tailwinds, low technology penetration, and enough fragmentation to provide a deep pipeline of acquisition targets at reasonable prices. "I look for industries where there's synergy as you get bigger," Jacobs told Patrick O'Shaughnessy. "There's economies of scale, there's benefits of size that as you buy things and get bigger, you just don't get bigger. You get better."
The second principle is valuation discipline. Jacobs insists on acquiring companies at mid-to-high single-digit earnings multiples — cheap enough that the gap between acquisition price and the public market trading multiple of his own company creates immediate value on paper, but more importantly, cheap enough that operational improvements generate genuine economic returns. "It's the number one mistake that acquirers make," he told a crowd at the Economic Club of New York. "They fall in love with the deal and they pay some ridiculous price."
The third principle — and perhaps the most underappreciated — is the simultaneous pursuit of multiple targets. Jacobs never negotiates with a single acquisition candidate. He runs parallel processes, talking to many targets at once, which creates optionality, prevents emotional attachment to any one deal, and generates competitive intelligence about the market. It is the M&A equivalent of portfolio diversification applied to pipeline management.
And the fourth principle is integration speed. Not weeks or months but days. When QXO completed its $11 billion acquisition of Beacon Roofing Supply in April 2025, the integration was finished within nine weeks. Immediate rebranding across all signage and merchandise. Rapid systems consolidation. A single unified culture via the company's internal social platform. "One QXO from day one," as Jacobs put it.
Jacobs's four-phase acquisition and integration method, refined across 500+ transactions.
| Phase | Principle | Key Discipline |
|---|
| Industry Selection | Large, fragmented, secularly growing, low-tech | Must support multibillion-dollar outcomes |
| Valuation | Buy at mid-to-high single-digit multiples | Never fall in love with a single deal |
| Pipeline | Talk to many targets simultaneously | Optionality prevents overpayment |
| Integration | Rebrand, consolidate systems, unify culture — immediately | Speed prevents cultural drift |
The Freight Machine
In 2011, Jacobs was fifty-five years old, and by any reasonable measure he could have stopped. He had built and sold United Waste for $2.5 billion, had founded the world's largest equipment rental company, had made fortunes for himself and his shareholders multiple times over. But he had spent the preceding years — roughly 2007 through 2010 — in what he describes as a period of psychological searching. He'd become depressed when he couldn't find his next big thing. He read psychology books. He explored cognitive behavioral therapy. He attended workshops on mindfulness led by Marsha Linehan, whose technique of radical acceptance — being fully present in the moment, acknowledging reality as it is rather than as you wish it to be — became, in Jacobs's telling, one of the foundational tools of his business career.
The therapy was also, in a way, market research. The period of apparent idleness was Jacobs retraining his mind to see opportunities that conventional thinking would miss. And by 2011, he saw one.
The logistics industry — freight transportation, truck brokerage, last-mile delivery, contract warehousing — was vast, fragmented, and ripe for technological disruption. The insight was that truck brokerage, in particular, could be transformed by data science and automation. Only a fraction of loads were being matched digitally. Communication was still largely done by phone and fax. The industry was drowning in inefficiency, and efficiency was what Jacobs sold.
He started XPO Logistics with a $150 million investment, taking over a small freight brokerage generating about $175 million in annual revenue. Then he did what he always does: he bought. Seventeen acquisitions between 2011 and 2016, including the transformative purchase of Con-way, Inc., for $3 billion in 2015, which gave XPO a massive less-than-truckload (LTL) network. By the end of the acquisition spree, XPO was generating nearly $20 billion in annual revenue and was one of the ten largest logistics providers on earth.
But perhaps the most telling feature of the XPO story was what happened after the buying stopped. From 2016 onward, Jacobs and his team paused acquisitions entirely and focused on integration, optimization, and technology deployment. "We said, 'Look, this is what we got, a huge opportunity here to improve the business to integrate it, to optimize it, to grow out all the technology, to get an integrated global organization,'" Jacobs recalled. The discipline to stop buying — to resist the dopamine of the next deal — was as important as the discipline to start.
XPO became the seventh-best-performing stock in the Fortune 500 over the past decade. Initial investors in 2011 made more than fifty times their money. And then Jacobs executed one of the most audacious value-creation moves in modern corporate history: he split XPO into three separate publicly traded companies.
From one logistics platform, three publicly traded companies.
2011Brad Jacobs founds XPO Logistics with a $150 million investment.
2011-201617 acquisitions, including Con-way ($3B), build XPO into a global logistics leader.
2016-2021Acquisition pause; integration and technology optimization phase.
2021GXO Logistics spun off — world's largest pure-play contract logistics provider (~$5B).
2022RXO spun off — digital freight brokerage platform (~$5B). XPO retains LTL trucking.
2023Jacobs announces QXO and turns attention to building products distribution.
The logic was elegant. Each of the three businesses — LTL trucking (XPO), contract logistics (GXO), and digital freight brokerage (RXO) — had distinct growth profiles, capital requirements, and investor bases. Bundled together, they created a conglomerate discount. Separated, each could be valued on its own merits, attract its own specialists, and pursue its own strategy without the drag of cross-subsidization. It was financial engineering in service of operational clarity. Jacobs remained executive chairman of XPO and nonexecutive chairman of GXO and RXO. But his attention was already elsewhere.
The Lunch and the Competitor
There is a story that Jacobs tells — it appears in his book, in podcast interviews, in his conversations with David Senra — about a lunch he had early in the United Rentals years with the CEO of his major competitor. The details of the lunch are less important than what it reveals about Jacobs's competitive psychology. He approaches rivals not with hostility but with curiosity, not with contempt but with something closer to an anthropologist's detachment. He wants to understand what they see, what they fear, where they believe they are vulnerable. And he wants this information not to destroy them but to build a better version of what they do.
This quality — a relentless, almost clinical curiosity about other people's businesses — extends to how Jacobs evaluates acquisition targets. "First of all, I never buy a company if I don't really like the seller," he told O'Shaughnessy. "Because I've seen a correlation between how I feel about that seller and how that deal turns out one, two, three years later." He has described the selling process as analogous to getting married: sellers who have spent decades building their companies become nervous, anxious, stressed. They behave irrationally. They make demands that have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with identity.
Jacobs's response to seller psychology is not to exploit vulnerability but to offer empathy — a word that sounds strange in the context of billion-dollar M&A but that Jacobs deploys with tactical precision. "Usually there's this conflict and almost hostility, and that's just a complete waste of time," he has said. "Have a lot of understanding of what that seller is going through. And even if they're acting sometimes a little irrational or a little tough, just give them a break."
This is not softness. It is efficiency. Hostile negotiations produce worse integration outcomes. Sellers who feel respected share more information, cooperate during transition, and retain key employees who might otherwise leave. Kindness is, in the Jacobs system, a form of due diligence.
Big, Hairy Deals
A friend of Jacobs's — unnamed in the telling — once showed him a four-quadrant chart of M&A. The top-left quadrant held large, easy, no-hair deals. These don't exist. The bottom-left quadrant held small, hairy deals — small in size, complicated in execution, guaranteed to produce headaches without commensurate rewards. Nobody should do these. The bottom-right held small, unhairy deals — easy but trivial, incapable of generating meaningful value. Which leaves the upper-right quadrant: large, hairy deals. Big acquisitions with genuine problems, genuine risks, genuine hair that needs to be shaved off.
"That's where you make the big money," Jacobs said on LinkedIn, describing the framework on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's podcast. "You make the money on large deals that certainly they have issues, but they're issues that you've thought through, you've analyzed and you have figured out how you're going to solve them."
The word "hairy" is doing important work here. It is not a synonym for "risky" in the financial sense. Hair, in Jacobs's taxonomy, refers to operational complexity, cultural integration challenges, regulatory uncertainty, hidden liabilities — problems that scare away other bidders and therefore create pricing opportunities. The more hair, the fewer bidders; the fewer bidders, the better the price; and if you have a proven method for removing hair — which, after 500 acquisitions, Jacobs demonstrably does — then hairiness becomes an asset, not a liability.
This is the meta-principle that connects Jacobs's career across industries. He does not seek pristine companies at full valuations. He seeks messy companies at discounted valuations in industries where messiness is the norm, and then he applies a systematic process — technology, operational discipline, talent upgrade, cultural unification — to transform them into something cleaner, more efficient, and therefore more valuable.
The Superorganism
Jacobs uses a word that is unusual in corporate discourse: superorganism. He describes the ideal company as a superorganism — a collective entity where individual components operate in such tight coordination that the whole behaves as a single, intelligent being. Ant colonies. Beehives. The cellular structure of a living body.
The metaphor is revealing. It suggests a management philosophy that is at once deeply democratic and ruthlessly hierarchical. In a superorganism, every node matters. Information flows in all directions. The antennae of the colony are the frontline workers who detect changes in the environment before management does. Jacobs operationalizes this through obsessive surveying — he surveys employees constantly, asking what's broken, what's frustrating, what they would change. He uses crowdsourced agendas for meetings, democratic voting systems for priorities, and internal social media platforms for real-time communication across all levels of the organization.
But a superorganism also has a queen. Someone whose role is to set the direction, allocate resources, and — most critically — recruit. Jacobs believes that the single most important thing a CEO does is hire. "There's no substitute for smarts," he has said, channeling a
Steve Jobs interview he once read about the 50-to-1 dynamic range between average and extraordinary performers. Jacobs pays above-market compensation not out of generosity but out of ruthless economic logic: the difference between an A-player and a B-player in a key role is worth multiples of the salary differential.
And he is specific about what he wants in those A-players: intelligence, work ethic, honesty, collaborative instinct — and motivation by money. "I actually respect people highly if they're not motivated by money," he told Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project. "I know a lot of artists. I know a lot of musicians. I have friends and relatives who are professors... They're just not into money... But that's not who I want in my company. I want, in my company, people who are absolutely motivated by money; who are raw capitalists."
The clarity is almost startling. Most CEOs would hedge this sentiment, wrap it in language about purpose and mission and making a difference. Jacobs doesn't. His companies exist to generate wealth for shareholders. His employees are there because generating wealth for shareholders will generate wealth for them personally. The alignment is explicit, transactional, and — in Jacobs's telling — the foundation upon which everything else is built. Purpose is fine. Mission is fine. But capital allocation is the beating heart.
The Fourth Symphony
In December 2023, after a comprehensive yearlong search, Jacobs announced that his next industry would be building products distribution. The vehicle would be QXO, Inc. — named, like its predecessors, with the seemingly mandatory X — built atop a $1 billion cash investment into SilverSun Technologies, a tiny NASDAQ-listed software company whose existing operations would be spun off to make way for Jacobs's new platform. Of the $1 billion, roughly $900 million was Jacobs's personal capital. He was, once again, eating his own cooking.
The thesis was vintage Jacobs. Building products distribution — roofing, windows, doors, HVAC, plumbing, lumber, fencing, siding, electrical components — represented approximately $800 billion in annual revenue between North America and Europe. The industry was absurdly fragmented: roughly 7,000 distributors in North America, 13,000 in Europe. Technology penetration was minimal; e-commerce accounted for only mid-single-digit percentages of industry revenue, a number expected to triple by 2030. And the secular tailwinds were powerful: the average American home was over forty years old, commercial buildings averaged more than fifty, and the country faced a housing shortage estimated at three million units. Roofing alone was 80% repair and remodel — non-discretionary spending. If your roof leaks, it needs to be fixed. The metaverse is not a substitute for a functioning roof.
"I like the characteristics of the industry," Jacobs told an audience at the Economic Club of New York. "I think it's a safe bet that building products is not going into the metaverse five years from now or ten years from now. You're still going to go home to a real physical house, with a roof and windows and doors and a bathtub."
The ambitions were stated with characteristic directness: $1 billion in revenue by the end of year one, $5 billion within three years, $50 billion over the next decade. Jacobs described the path to $50 billion as requiring the purchase of $30–$40 billion in existing businesses, supplemented by organic growth through pricing, volume, and market share gains. "I have to buy one or two a year of large size," he said. "I don't have to do a zillion good deals."
The first large deal came in early 2025: the $11 billion acquisition of Beacon Roofing Supply, the largest publicly traded roofing distributor in the United States. Beacon's board initially resisted. By March, merger discussions were underway. By April, the deal was closed. Within nine weeks, integration was complete — rebranding, systems consolidation, cultural unification. The speed was, by industry standards, almost violent.
And then, in February 2026, came the second major acquisition: Kodiak, a building products distributor, for over $2 billion. QXO was a quarter to a third of the way to the $50 billion revenue target. The mountain was being climbed.
The goal is to get to $50 billion in revenue. That's the next mountain top we're going to climb. We'll climb another mountain top after that, but the first top is $50 billion.
The Rearranged Brain
There is a dimension to the Brad Jacobs story that resists the usual narratives of entrepreneurial aggression: the man meditates. Not casually, not as a trendy affectation picked up from a Silicon Valley retreat, but as a serious, daily practice that he credits with enabling everything else. He has spoken publicly about his engagement with cognitive behavioral therapy, about attending Marsha Linehan's mindfulness workshops with his wife, about the concept of radical acceptance — acknowledging reality as it is, without the distortion of what you wish it to be.
Linehan developed dialectical behavior therapy, originally for patients with borderline personality disorder, rooted in the Buddhist concept of being fully present while simultaneously working to change conditions. Jacobs adapted this framework for business. "Radical acceptance quiets the noise created by yesterday's decisions and today's wishful thinking," he wrote in
How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. "It allows you to make a logical, forward-looking decision based on what's likely to happen next — that and risk management are the big, relevant considerations. Otherwise, you're just gambling, and most gamblers lose."
He also credits the psychologist Albert Ellis — the creator of rational emotive behavior therapy — with the concept of unconditional self-acceptance and unconditional other-acceptance. The practical application: when you make a mistake (and Jacobs insists he has made every possible mistake), you do not compound it with self-flagellation. You accept the error as data, extract the lesson, and redirect. When others disappoint you, you do not waste energy on resentment. You accept their behavior as information about what to expect in the future.
This is not typical CEO talk. The juxtaposition of radical acceptance with radical ambition is the central psychological tension of Jacobs's career — a man who believes you must accept reality exactly as it is while simultaneously believing you can reshape entire industries through force of will. The two ideas, held simultaneously, create the dialectical engine of his operating method. Accept the market as it is. Then change it.
He recommends daily thought experiments — visualizing the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang, imagining the sweep of geological time — as a technique for recalibrating one's sense of scale. The exercise sounds absurd until you consider its purpose: if you spend thirty minutes each morning contemplating 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, the anxiety of a failed acquisition or a hostile board vote shrinks to its actual proportions. Rearranging the brain is not metaphor. It is infrastructure.
Shingles and Servers
The choice of building products distribution as Jacobs's latest battlefield reveals something important about how he thinks about technology — not as an industry unto itself but as a lever to be applied within industries that don't yet know they need it. QXO's strategy does not envision replacing roofers with robots. It envisions taking an industry where order management is still largely analog, where delivery routing is inefficient, where demand forecasting is rudimentary, and applying the same data-science and automation tools that transformed XPO's truck brokerage operations.
"Humans are waning and computers are waxing — that's the single biggest trend I see," Jacobs has written. "Any business that ignores this trend is likely to get smacked in the face."
The technology opportunities in building products distribution are specific and enumerable: price optimization algorithms that adjust in real time based on demand signals; warehouse automation and robotics for order fulfillment; AI-driven demand forecasting that reduces inventory costs; route optimization for delivery fleets; end-to-end digital customer connectivity that replaces phone orders with e-commerce; supply chain visibility platforms that give contractors real-time information about product availability and delivery timing. None of these technologies are speculative. All of them exist. The question is who will deploy them first in an industry that has operated largely unchanged for decades.
Jacobs's bet is that the deployer will be QXO, and that the competitive moat created by technology will compound over time — each additional branch added to the network generates more data, which improves the algorithms, which improves the customer experience, which attracts more customers, which generates more data. The flywheel logic is identical to what he built at XPO, where 96% of tendered loads eventually had a digital component.
The strategic question hovering over QXO is whether the building products distribution industry will follow the same consolidation trajectory as waste management, equipment rental, and logistics. Lowe's and Home Depot have both entered the professional distribution market — Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison has signaled a pause of several years after recent acquisitions, while Home Depot's moves are being watched closely. Jacobs sees the competition as validating the thesis rather than threatening it. The market is $800 billion. There is room.
The Accumulation of Errors
"During my 44 years as a CEO and a serial entrepreneur, I've made every possible mistake in business." This is the first sentence of
How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, and it is — in its baldness, its lack of protective irony — perhaps the most revealing thing Jacobs has ever written. He has overpaid for acquisitions. He has botched integrations. He has "run operations for cash when I should have invested for growth." He has "delegated tasks I should have done myself." He has "hired the wrong people." He has "made strategic bets that didn't pay off." The $500 million loss on the road-rental companies at United Rentals. The early integration delays that taught him, painfully, the necessity of speed.
What Jacobs has not done is make the same mistake twice. This is the distinguishing feature — not brilliance, not luck, not connections, but a metabolic capacity for learning from failure that allows each successive company to start at the ceiling of the prior one's capability. United Waste taught him the roll-up model. United Rentals taught him the consequences of getting the trend timing wrong and the importance of integration speed. XPO taught him the power of technology as a core competency rather than a support function. Each company was a laboratory, and each failure was an experiment.
The result, four decades and eight companies later, is what Jacobs calls a "codified playbook" — a set of documented processes for industry selection, acquisition targeting, valuation, due diligence, negotiation, integration, technology deployment, talent management, and performance optimization that can be applied to any sufficiently large and fragmented industry. The playbook is not secret. He has written two books about it. He discusses it freely on podcasts. He has, in effect, open-sourced his method.
And yet no one has replicated his results. This suggests that the playbook — while necessary — is not sufficient. What makes it work is the person running it: a Bennington-educated musician-mathematician who meditates daily, cites cognitive behavioral therapy as a business tool, has completed 500 acquisitions without losing his conviction that sellers deserve empathy, and believes that problems are assets because most people run away from them.
The building products trucks will roll out from QXO branches at dawn tomorrow. The algorithms will optimize their routes. The shingles will be delivered. And somewhere in Greenwich, Connecticut, Brad Jacobs will be sitting in meditation, contemplating the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang, recalibrating his sense of scale — before turning his attention to the next large, hairy deal.
