#402 Thomas Peterffy: The $80 Billion Founder Who Automates Everything

Before a few days ago, I didn't know who Thomas Petterfi was, and I was shocked to learn that he's 81 years old. He's worth $80,000,000,000, and he's built his $120,000,000,000 company, Interactive Brokers, into one of the most efficient companies in the world. So for example, in 2024, they generated 3,700,000,000.0 in profits on just 5,200,000,000.0 in revenue. And I discovered Petterfi by reading this incredible profile about him that was written by Colossus. And I actually couldn't put it down and immediately called my friend Patrick, who's the founder of Colossus, and I told him that I wanted to make an episode on Petterfi's incredible life story. So that is what this episode is about. I wanna get right into the profile, which will be linked below and is written by Dom Cook. And so Dom writes, I'm at the $108,000,000 Aspen House of Tomas Petterfi. Once inside, I find Petterfi hunched over his chair. His piercing eyes look up at me in confusion as I was introduced. I thought we were doing this over Zoom, he said. My stomach dropped. Where have you come from? He asked. London. That's crazy, he said, as if I'd come by boat. To a man who has spent the past sixty years automating as much of his business as possible to the point where Interactive Brokers has 71% profit margins, my journey to meet him was an absurd misallocation of resources. Pedderphi is the twenty third richest person in the world. He pioneered automated trading and built one of the largest options market makers on Earth. He is the reason that you can trade stocks in your pajamas. His second act, Interactive Brokers, is worth over a $100,000,000,000. I was surprised that he was surprised that anyone would travel to hear his story. He settled down in his chair and began to explain how he got his start in life by dragging a metal bathtub through the rubble of post war Budapest. I was born during a Soviet bombing raid, Petofi began. It was 09/30/1944, and the Red Army was pushing into Hungary. He remembers nothing until he was five, by which time Hungary belonged to the communist and his father had vanished, having divorced his mother and fled the country when Petofi was two. I often remember my mother crying, and I'd ask, mom, why are you crying? And she'd reply, we're going to starve to death, and she was dead serious about that. At school, Petterphi had no hope, but his grandmother's library had survived the war. And through the nineteenth century French classics written by Balzac and Hugo and Zola, he learned about capitalism. I always wanted to make some money because we didn't have any, he said. At 12, he went into business with a classmate who returned from Austria with packets of gum. Petterfi took out a knife, cut each stick into five pieces, and worked the schoolyard until they were sold. The principal, upon hearing …