How to Make a Few Billion Dollars

Brad Jacobs

Do you have a burning passion to make a lot of money in business? Are you ready to turbocharge your chances of professional and personal success?

During his more than four decades as a CEO and serial entrepreneur, Brad Jacobs has created eight flagship companies across different industries, delivering tens of billionsof dollars of value to shareholders. In How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, Jacobs defines the mindset that drives his remarkable success in corporate America—and distills a lifetime of business brilliance into a tactical road map.

From provocative recommendations for “rearranging your brain”—an essential prerequisite to accomplishing enormous goals—to practical advice for dealing with colleagues, Jacobs will have you rethinking what it means to win big. He explains why it’s critical to spot key trends and capitalize on them, including the biggest trend of all—the rapid evolution of technology relative to human development. And, he shares his techniques for:

• turning a healthy fear of failure to your advantage,

• achieving lots of high-quality M&A without imploding,

• building an outrageously talented team,

• catalyzing electric meetings, and

• transforming a company into a superorganism that kills the competition.

How to Make a Few Billion Dollars is an inside look at how this entrepreneurial titan leads with humility, compassion, and accountability, while running hard toward the American Dream. If your personal dream is to create wealth through free markets or to triumph in sports, the arts, politics, philanthropy, or any other part of your life, this book will help you make that a reality.

Brad Jacobs is an American entrepreneur and a career CEO with a unique track record as a Wall Street moneymaker and business builder. He has founded and led eight companies, including six publicly traded, multibillion-dollar corporations: United Waste, United Rentals, and XPO—along with its two spin-offs, GXO Logistics and RXO—and, more recently, QXO. Over the course of his career, he has completed approximately 500 M&A transactions, raised over 60 billion dollars of institutional capital, and created tens of billions of dollars in shareholder value.

Jacobs grew XPO into a top 10 global logistics provider and the seventh-best-performing stock of the last decade in the Fortune 500. XPO’s stock became a “50-bagger”—initial investors in 2011 made more than 50 times their money. United Rentals was the sixth-best-performing stock during the same period and is now more than a “300-bagger.” United Waste’s stock outperformed the S&P 500 by 5.6 times over five years, from the time Jacobs took the company public to when it was sold in 1997.

Today, Jacobs serves as chairman and CEO of QXO, the second-largest publicly traded building products distributor in North America.