Ross Brawn bought the Honda team for £1 in 2008, sold 75% to Mercedes for $200M in 2009, and that team is now valued at $6 billion — with Toto Wolff owning nearly a third.
Where this was said
At 3:40:50 · chapter starts 3:36:45
Liberty's US strategy began with a classic market development move: giving ESPN the rights for free in 2018, just as Bernie had seeded European public broadcasters with cheap rights in the 1980s. As Drive to Survive grew and the US gained more races — Miami in 2022, Las Vegas in 2023 — the rights became genuinely valuable. ESPN signed a 3-year deal in 2022 at a rumored $80–90M per year, up from zero. Meanwhile, the F1 movie starring Brad Pitt — produced with Apple's involvement and using specially designed cameras that fit the standard F1 camera package — grossed $630 million worldwide, the highest-grossing sports movie ever and the biggest box office result of Brad Pitt's career. Approximately 21 million tickets were sold, potentially reaching more people than any single Drive to Survive season. Apple then won the US rights bidding for a 5-year deal at a rumored $150M annually. For context, this $150M represents 13% of F1's total global media rights of $1.1 billion — and the US is still dramatically underpenetrated, with only 1.3M average race viewers (half of NASCAR). Ben's bull case: if Apple brings its Vision Pro technology, immersive cameras, and tech storytelling chops to F1 broadcast, the American market could grow dramatically. Liberty also bought the Las Vegas Grand Prix infrastructure directly rather than using a promoter — a $500M bet on operating the race themselves that has had mixed early returns.
Despite months of meticulous preparation, Starter Story's initial launch attracted zero users — a humbling reminder that building alone guarantees nothing.
A single Reddit link post quickly drove 100 visitors to the Starter Story website, igniting the founder's belief in social traffic.
After reformatting content as a native self-post (no direct link spam), the post exploded with hundreds of upvotes and thousands of readers.
By posting again and again with the native-content strategy, the founder's posts repeatedly hit Reddit's front page, reaching millions of readers.
Before Reddit banned his domain, the founder converted his viral traffic into an email list of tens of thousands — a self-owned audience independent of Reddit.
Redditors eventually organized a petition to ban starterstory.com posts, effectively ending the Reddit growth channel — but the email list was already built.
The Reddit attention strategy ultimately served as the foundation for a million-dollar business, proving that free distribution channels can replace paid marketing.
The key tactic was keeping content fully on-platform (no direct link spam), then adding a small link at the post's end for users who wanted more.
With a thriving email list and a self-owned audience, the founder quit his six-figure New York City salary job to go all-in on Starter Story.
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