Tilman Fertitta bought a piece of one seafood restaurant in Katy, Texas. He now owns 600 restaurants, 5 casinos and the Houston Rockets. He was outbid on that team in 1992 at $80 million. 25 years later he paid $2.2 billion for it, still sitting in the same seats. His father had a restaurant. One. He bought into the Katy place in 1986, bought out the partners, and has never taken a dollar from anyone since. He owns 100% and guarantees the debt himself. The Rockets come back up. Every serious bidder is stuck on the same question, how you justify that kind of money for a basketball team. "I was working on how I'm going to raise the money to do it." The recording is a long interview in a hotel suite. One camera, no stage, no audience, none of the questions he gets on TV. He came to sell a book and spent the hour doing arithmetic. Watch the part where he describes the second set of numbers. He runs 2 pro formas on every deal. The bank sees the optimistic one. The other is the worst case, kept close to his chest, and if a deal does not clear it he walks. 90% of the time it is the worst case that turns up, not the best one. Roughly 27 times in 25 years, in a category where no team has ever resold for less than it cost. The room read him as a man who overpaid on instinct. He was the only bidder who had stopped pricing the team and started raising the money. Everyone runs the optimistic numbers. Almost nobody writes the ugly one down. Deciding what a thing is worth is the easy half. Seeing that is free. You will still walk into the next one with a single set of numbers, because the second set is the one that says no. It is remembered as a gutsy call. It was the one deal where his careful numbers and his hopeful numbers landed on the same answer, which makes it the least gutsy thing he did.