Jon Huntsman Sr. Quotes

Our mantra has been, 'We will not buy a company unless we think the people that make up the company have a better job the day after the acquisition than before.'

The business part of the game is ugly.

The people who work in Wall Street still look up to Gordon Gekko. He's sort of a guru.

From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books.

I'm not interested in business for business's sake.

Google has been amazing at acqui-hiring, buying small companies for the engineers. I think in the competitive market of Silicon Valley, it's really a good way to do it. Big acquisitions often don't work out.

Marketing is the devil.

Yes, you are running businesses, and yes, we understand and accept that, but surely there must be a level beyond which profit from news is simply indecent.

It is instructive, for instance, to trace the computer industry's decline in vision, idealism, creativity, romance and sheer fun as it becomes more and more important and prosperous.

Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct.

[Corporate] takeovers are for the public good, but that's not why I do it. I do it to make money.

My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it till now.

I sometimes wonder how some people can live with themselves in some of the big companies today. So many far-reaching decisions are based on how they will affect the next shareholders' meeting.

Now, I will say, most American companies - most are run by honorable patriotic people who care about their employees and communities. But there are still too many powerful interests fighting to protect their own profits and privileges at the expense of everyone else.

I'm a corporate thug. That's the best way to be.

I don't want a mercenary management team.

We're in this business to make money, but then nobody wants to talk about how much money we're making. That's serious, but nobody will talk about it.

Transparency is so important in business.

I support the free enterprise system, and I want companies to make money, but they shouldn't be reaping profits from the deaths of their employees or former employees.

If you want a job, do what I did: work for other people for 50 years; but the odds of you getting swallowed up by the blasphemous godless, decadent, deadly spirit of today's show business are thousands to one.

At the end of the day, it's a business; people want to make money. That's the intention with every film. It happens for some movies. For others, it doesn't.

What I'm denying is that I'm this cutthroat financier.

Private equity is a science project for many, many years, and when you have a science project, it leaves the human beings as a secondary fact.

When I have people trust me with their money, I am obligated to give them a great film. I am not obligated to give them a profit.

All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.