Brad Jacobs on His Big Bet on Building Insulation
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
He's done it again. On Sunday night, building supply company QXO announced that it would be acquiring TopBuild for $17 billion. TopBuild sells and installs insulation for both the residential and commercial markets. For Brad Jacobs, the CEO of QXO, this is just the latest in a lifetime of deals he's made. In fact, he's made over 500 deals in his life across numerous public companies that he's founded, most of which have XO somewhere in the ticker. Brad's companies all tend to be highly focused on the so-called "old economy" or real physical world, but of course, as we've seen with the datacenter boom, the old economy is still hot and crucial. So we talk about the logic behind this deal, how the insulation market works, and the general state of the building supply market right now.
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| 1:22.0 | Joe, we like talking about the old economy on this podcast, right? I don't even think when people use that term old economy, |
| 1:28.1 | I think it's kind of unfair. It's funny. I was literally about to respond and say that maybe |
| 1:33.3 | like this whole old economy, new economy distinction. It's a little unfair. The old economy |
| 1:38.9 | is still here. It's not, you know, it's not it's not generative AI, but it's arguably, maybe it's |
| 1:45.8 | even more important. The things that we call the old economy, you know, you couldn't have the new |
| 1:50.7 | economy without cooling and heating. This is exactly what I was going to say, because like the old |
| 1:56.7 | economy and the actual business of making things and moving things, heating and cooling, is very much |
| 2:03.3 | enmeshed with the new economy, which is all about generative AI. And in order to have |
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