Richard Kinder Quotes

If you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, you're worried about quarterly returns.

In market valuation, Yahoo is worth about as much Walt Disney and the News Corporation combined.

My guess is that Apple won't just pass Microsoft in market capitalization, but will go way beyond it.

Every public company depends to some extent on the trust of its investors.

Whether you stay private or go public, after all is said and done, a CEO's job is to create lasting shareholder value.

By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption.

But the minute we went public on the stock market, which is how our wealth was created, it was no longer how many people you employed, it was how much you were worth and how much your company was worth.

You have to have in mind what you want when you go public. It's not just an end in and of itself. Suddenly, you have investors to satisfy. Investors who want - who demand - a return.

Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.

With a private company, you've got to get into who's investing and what's the balance sheet like. So going public is a positive thing from the perspective of the sales organization.

If the goal is to build companies that maximize long-term equity value, then optimizing corporate performance in a way that Wall Street appreciates is obviously critical to that goal.

The stock market clearly values companies that can deliver disruptive innovation.

We absolutely take no decisions based on the share price, not for LVMH.

The relationship between executive CEO pay, stock performance is tenuous and not easily unscrambled, just one of myriad factors that affect the price of a stock.

When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options.

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

Sometimes it takes longer to create value, but if the companies generate more earnings, the stocks will ultimately reflect that.

Some of the analysts were saying, Now you're a cash cow, there's no growth at all, pay it all out in dividends, give me it all, you can't invest wisely.

The ultimate arbiters of the models of banking and the management of banking are the investors. It's the shareholders.

I met with several public company CEOs to learn about their experiences of going public and listened to as many earnings calls as I possibly could.

When we took Netscape public, if people wanted to invest in the web, that was the only stock that they could do it by investing in. So Netscape's market value was higher than it probably otherwise would have been if there were lots of other ways to play that theme.

There are several things that can create an alpha - stock buybacks are one. High dividend yields are another, especially nowadays because the stock market yields more than the banks and the tenure treasury. But by and large, it tends to be companies with a strong cash flow, rising sales, accelerated earnings, a profit margin expansion.

All I'm trying to do is manage money and take care of my shareholders.

I think businesses live longer that are on the stock market.

Clearly as you move to being a public company, probably even more than growth, there is a huge value based on predictability.