QUICKTAKE

February 7, 2025

Income Builder Stock Pick

On a sunny day in June 2022, a sixty-six year old businessman stepped out of his elegant home in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco. Two men were waiting in the parking lot across the street. They pulled up in a car right next to him.

One of the men jumped out of the car, approached the businessman and waved a gun in his face. He went back into the car and sped off with his Patek Phillipe wristwatch.

The man who was mugged was physically unharmed—but he was pissed.

He was angry that his safety was violated. He was particularly angry about what this incident said about the city he had called home for decades.

As the top executive of one the largest publicly traded enterprises in the United States, he could have filed an insurance claim for the watch and moved on with his life. But that is not his style.

He was fed up with what was happening to San Francisco. He decided to use his position as a major business figure in the Bay Area to put pressure on local politicians to do something about it.

In a blunt letter to then Mayor London Breed as well as Governor Gavin Newsom, which was shared with the media, he demanded action.

When this happened I said 'somebody has to get up and actually say enough is enough' and I decided to do that…. I get all kinds of San Francisco jokes when I travel the world. It's almost embarrassing and that's the perception and that affects tourism and convention business. A lot of jobs are involved. Once you go over the tipping point, it becomes very, very difficult to getting it back.

This particular CEO understands what happens when society disintegrates and how quickly things can change. It’s the basis of his life story.

He was born in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, in 1956. Iran is largely known to Americans today as a repressive state, a sponsor of terror, and possibly the biggest threat to international security.

Iran was not always like this.

In 1960, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, began to implement the White Revolution—a Western-oriented reform agenda focused on industrialization, education and health care.

A cultured and refined aristocrat, Pahlavi was educated in Switzerland and France. He was known to be especially partial to Francois Rabelais, the great literary figure of the French Renaissance who wrote about personal freedom and the absurdity of war.

Many historians are critical of the Shah’s harsh treatment of political opponents. His regime was, after all, a dictatorship. But it was arguably a benevolent one, and Iran prospered under his leadership.

Photos from this era tell the story.

In the 1960s and 1970s, college girls in Tehran wore mini skirts to class. On the weekends, the country’s youth wore bell bottoms, drove around in Volkswagen bugs, and listened to rock music.

Tehran University - 1971

Do the “Tehran Twist”!

The future titan of American industry was being groomed to help his wealthy family advance their already considerable business interests in this booming Iranian economy. His father ran a conglomerate that was active in development, construction and off-shore drilling.

Like the Shah himself and other children of elite families, he was raised with a very Western outlook. As a youngster, he attended an American high school in Tehran and later a Swiss boarding school.

He was not just financially and socially privileged, but he was also intellectually gifted.

When he turned sixteen in 1973, he was accepted at MIT. He headed off to Boston where he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and stayed an extra year for a master’s.

His father then died unexpectedly. He immediately prepared to return home to help run the family business, which was always the plan.

But history got in the way.

In early 1979, the Iranian Revolution resulted in the exile of the Pahlavi family and the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Khomeini came from a family of clerics. He fiercely opposed the White Revolution, which he saw as a form of Western colonialism and submission to the United States and Israel.

Iran abruptly became an Islamic Republic. All of the businesses that the family operated were nationalized. Western influences of any kind were systematically rooted out of the country.

With Iran in turmoil, and nothing to come back to, his mother urged her son to remain in the United States for further education. He applied to various business schools and chose Stanford, primarily because he liked the northern California climate.

From privilege to pariah

The future CEO earned his MBA from Stanford in 1980. There was nothing left for him in Iran, which was in complete disarray. So he set out to look for a job in the United States.

Despite his fancy degrees, he encountered two main problems.

First, the U.S. was in the midst of a serious recession. Fed Chair Paul Volcker was lifting interest rates aggressively to combat runaway inflation. Unemployment rates were spiking.

Second, the Iran-Hostage crisis had been going on for several months. More than fifty U.S. citizens were being held captive by the Ayatollah. The American public was outraged.

As the young man interviewed for jobs, his Iranian heritage was not exactly helping. He applied for 86 jobs and got 87 rejections. One company accidentally rejected him twice.

Just a few years prior, he was at one of the most respected academic institutions in the world, preparing for his father to hand him a business empire.

Now his father was gone, the empire was gone, and corporate employers winced when they saw his name on top of a resume.

The twenty-four year old, who once had everything, now had nothing to fall back on but his own brains and instincts. He realized that if he wanted to run a business empire, he would have to build one himself.

And that’s exactly what he did….

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