Those of us old enough to have lots of stock market battle scars will, if prompted, recall vividly the stock market collapse that occurred as we entered the 21st century.

The portfolio I was managing at the time had a large position it had held for about a decade in a transformative tech firm. It was the last thing I wanted to sell, but it was tech and my fund owned a lot. Undecided, I flew to the west coast to attend the company’s annual analyst day. Everything sounded fine …and then came the Q and A session with the CEO and his heir apparent.

An analyst asked what I thought was an incredibly obsequious question–what do you think has been your greatest accomplishment as founder, owner, CEO? The reply was surprisingly revealing–the greatest accomplishment was that success gave him the ability to give jobs to his friends (like the soon-to-be new CEO). The new CEO then satepped to the midrophone and berated the audience for not understanding how hard it would be to have eps grow faster than, say, 5%. In other words, his aspirational goal was to have the firm not lose ground to inflation.

I sold everything.

A decade+ of stagnation later, activist investors tried to unseat the founder’s friend. It took them years to overcome the founder’s resistance. But they were finally successful. I bought a bunch. The stock has been up by over 10x since, or about 3x the performance of NASDAQ. My wife and I are now making charitable donations to unwind.

My thought?

The current cabinet in Washington, chock full of wealthy business people, seems to me to be unusually inept at, well, doing things. Maybe its main super power is the ability to become friends with powerful entrepreneurs.