Motley Fool Co-Founder David Gardner: What Rule Breakers Value

In this podcast, Motley Fool co-founder and Chief Rule Breaker David Gardner joins host Ricky Mulvey for a conversation about how he thinks about valuation.

They discuss:

• Palantir's current valuation, and what investors should prepare for.
• The value of paying up for "top dogs" and holding on to them for long periods of time.
• Tesla's surprising performance over the past year.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on May 24, 2025.

David Gardner: The rule breakers that become rulemakers and yet continue to break the rules as they lead their industry and the world forward are the greatest stocks of our lifetimes. I would say Amazon is a great example. I would say Nvidia is another great example. I would say, so is Netflix. By the way, are lesser known companies like Axon Enterprise or Mercado Libre these are companies that started out with David positioning and are now within their contexts, the Goliath.

Ricky Mulvey: I'm Ricky Mulvey, and that's Motley Fool co-founder and chief Rule Breaker David Gardner. He joined me for a conversation on today's show about his unique view on valuation and what really matters if you want to be an owner of industry leading rulebreaking companies. A quick note before we get started, no show on Monday. We are off for Memorial Day. Hope you're having a great long weekend. The reason I wanted to chat is, David, I've been thinking a lot about and not buying, maybe to my detriment, a company called Palantir. At the time of this writing, it's got a blistering valuation, about 95 times enterprise value to revenue. For listeners, that is all of the equity and debt over the trailing revenue. The market for this company is saying, we think that revenue can grow a lot. Almost to impossible standards to a normal valuation minded investor. The reason I wanted to talk to you is for a rule breaker, when a rulebreaker sees an expensive stock, that can actually be a good thing. Broadly speaking, to set the table, what are the first questions that a rulebreaker should ask when they see a stock with an incredibly optimistic valuation? I realized while we were chatting before, I didn't welcome you onto the show. It's also good to see you recorded medium. David Gardner, thanks for being here.

David Gardner: It is always a pleasure, Ricky, and thanks for the invite. I think, first of all, when you're looking at companies that you want to invest in and you're going to take the approach that I take, which is, by the way, just one of many different approaches to beating the market. But I'm looking at the top dogs and first movers in important emerging industries. That is trait number one of rule Breaker stocks and there are six traits. We don't have to talk about them all, but that's the most important one. That's why it's number one. Ricky, I would say, first of all, we're focused not on all the stocks or the whole market. I, anyway, focus on the innovator in each industry. Who's the top dog, who's the first mover, not just any industry. Important emerging industries. That, for me, is the way to maximize your returns as an investor. Once we're talking about those, the rule breakers, some of the valuation received mores and expectations and things taught start to break down. In fact, you will never buy Palantir if you're trying to find a cheap Palantir. I'm not just talking about Palantir itself, though I am. I'm talking about all the other companies like Palantir that people consistently don't invest in, whether it was Amazon in 1997 or by the way, 2017 and probably 2027. Amazon always looks expensive. Starbucks has always looked expensive within its industry. It's just coffee. Why is it trading at this kind of multiple? That's going to be true industry by industry, Ricky, for the rule breakers.

Ricky Mulvey: Then, to double click on this, what's so good about these stocks that value investors that financial media are very quick to call? That is an expensive stock, and let us move on to the next topic.

David Gardner: There are several intangibles that are going on in the innovators in each industry that are intangible in this sense. They are not counted in valuation metrics. Full stop. This is a critically important insight and one that I have discovered just by thinking about it and observing over time. I was like, Why are all the best companies always trading at premium valuations? Why was Intuitive Surgical when I first picked it in 2005, trading at something like 75 times earnings and yet, it's gone up more than 100 times in value since then in the 20 succeeding years. Ben a fantastic Rule Breaker. Virtually every great company from Tesla to Netflix, the list goes on. The great stocks of our time have all looked overvalued. Therefore, people who take traditional approaches never buy them. They don't recommend them. I think the intangible part is that that's not reflected on the balance sheet or income statement. We're going to talk about it in a sec. But the tangible part of this, Ricky, is that whether it's the CEO of the company, who is that? Whether it's the culture of the company, what is that? Whether the company is an innovator, can it innovate its way out of a box or not. Also, what about the brand of the company? The companies I've just mentioned in the last minute or so are some of the great brands of our time.

Apple, the greatest brand of our time is also the largest market cap of our time, and that's a really important point that I hope everyone is hearing and taking away, often the performance of a company and the quality of its stock over time is directly correlated to its brand, but the four things I just highlighted for you, who the CEO is, what's the culture of the company? Can it innovate its way out of a box? What about its brand? None of those four is included anywhere in the financial statements. Yet, what are the things that lead businesses to glory or shame. Who's running it? What the culture is? Can they innovate? What about their brand, the promise you make to your customers every day? This is an incredibly important point. It's one I try to make big in my rule Breaker Investing book that comes out this fall. I hope it's going to be an eye opener for a lot of people, but we're getting to talk about it months ahead of it coming out because I've observed this for years, Ricky, and it's such an important point. Price to EV or different multiples, price to sales, price to earnings, price to book value. None of these is accounting for those four intangibles that are so very tangible to any company's success or failure.

Ricky Mulvey: Brand is one that Lyncean investors can look at, as well. What do you perceive this brand to be in the marketplace? How do you feel about it? How do your friends feel about it? There's some examples we can't get into. But I also think it's important to separate, you know, there's the old saying and investing, price is what you pay, value is what you get. For listeners, one way to think about this for the meat eaters out there is steak. You know the difference between $25 stake, a $50 sake and $100 steak. It doesn't necessarily mean that one is less of a value than the other, depending on what your expectations are going in. When I'm looking back, though, on some of the biggest winners in the full universe, some of which you mentioned, David, Amazon, Netflix, Mercado Libre, I use Y charts, which sometimes can mess some things up, especially for historic multiples. These often traded above ten times enterprise value to revenue, sometimes even 45 times if you look at an early Amazon. But, that's a comparative value town to where Palantir is today, which is a more mature company. It is a nosebleed valuation even in the history of rule breakers. We can get to Palantir in a sec, but, you've come to this conclusion about buying so called expensive stocks over a number of years. As you were going through that experience, did you ever get that feeling, these stocks are getting awfully expensive when you were developing as an investor?

David Gardner: I think it's natural to recognize when companies are at all time high, not just for their stock, but for their valuation multiples. I think that's smart. I think it's good that you're paying attention to those things, Ricky. I will say for my own part, I pay some attention to them, but not too much because fundamental to my approach, which again, is not going to be true of everybody at the Motley fool, and not going to be true of everybody listening. But fundamental to my approach is that I'm going to be holding that stock for years. When I buy a stock at a dead minimum, I'm holding it for at least three years. Preferably three decades. What ends up mattering is not the valuation multiple that you paid for 17 or seven years ago, which I can't even remember now. What matters far more. You can only see this once you play yourself forward a few decades as an investor, and then you get to start looking back and realizing these things, you start to realize what really matters is the impact of that company in the world. For the benefit of customers, of course, shareholders, but their employees, their stakeholders, the companies that are winning for everybody, not equally in all the time, but the companies that just keep winning. That performance of their products and services, what they're doing for our world at large, whether they're the real company behind the electric car revolution or the real company behind the streaming revolution or and Nvidia my best stock pick for Motley Full Stock Advisor, the company behind, as it turns out, the AI revolution, even though I bought them as a graphics processing chip company, you start to realize it's not the valuation is such a temporary thing. I think most people tend to overrate the importance of valuation to the detriment of recognizing the importance of the company's growth and maturation over time and really leadership and success. I often say, Ricky Mulvey, what do winners do?

Ricky Mulvey: They keep winning.

David Gardner: They keep winning. That is something that's very hard for a lot of people to accept because we tend to think what goes up must come down. Oh, my gosh, look at Palantir. It's a new highs or look at any stock at new highs. Probably I should wait for the dip because obviously what goes up must come down. But the direction of the stock market is not parabolic. It's not a cyclical up down, up down, up down. Actually, it's more hyperbolic. It's lower left to upper right, not always at the same time and sometimes downward. But this is really what I think we have to have as our mental pictures. That's what enables me, by the way, to buy a Palantir which I did not ten years ago, more two years ago, but it's just been a phenomenal performer. There's more to say. I've gone too long this answer, but we should talk about how sometimes stocks really are overvalued and do drop, and that's just part of being a shareholder in them. We can go there or anywhere else you'd like to.

Ricky Mulvey: Can we finish up with Palantir real quick? Because when you talk about Palantir, there are things that people should know about this company. There is a defense contractor side, and that's something you should know about full well before getting in. Then before our conversation, I was watching the CEO of Walgreens talking about his use of Palantir and how it's automating, was it? 384 billion decisions in one day. For the entire enterprise of Walgreens is it can create a digital twin of the organization, and then you can go in and decide what needs stocking, where, and you think about all of the different items and prescriptions going on at a Walgreens and just what a complex logistics operation that is for that pharmacy. He's giving a presentation at a Palantir conference, and you think, this might be a lifetime customer because once Palantir gets in and has access to all of this company data, and you're able to automate decisions and immediately create value for an organization, they might stick with it. But still, for me, I'm not quite as rule breakery as you, David. I'm like, Man. I still think trees can't grow to the sky more than 90 times enterprise value to revenue. I've never seen anything like that before, and that scares me off the stock.

David Gardner: Well, I understand. I'm the first to say there are lots of great companies on the market, and if Palantir for whatever reason, doesn't fit your desire or your profile for what you'd like to invest in, there is no compulsion that makes any of us buy any given stock. I will say why I like companies like Palantir but admittedly, you know, it's up about four or five times the value since I first bought. It could be about to drop 50%, as indeed, we saw Nvidia do within the last couple of years, I think, more than once. There's volatility to rule Breaker stocks. For a lot of people, that's not something they're willing to accept. I'm watching Netflix lose two thirds of its value in the face of its self inflicted gunshot wound known as Quickstar more than ten years ago, it's not fun to watch companies lose half or more of their value within inside of one year. But this is often how these companies work because yes, they are premium priced, Ricky. If they stumble, if they make a mistake, if they come short on earnings or announce lowered expectations going forward, even with good results, that can quickly shave a third off of the share price for some of these companies, and that truly is the nature, I would say, of investing in rule breakers.

Ricky Mulvey: Stumbles and growth stories are things you have to watch. You mentioned Netflix and another example for them pretty recently they just a few years ago, hard to remember. It was just a few years ago, but when Netflix announced that it lost some subscribers, investors reacted very quickly to that. This was before they really started cracking down on password sharing and really grew the ad business there, and the stock has recovered really nicely since then. But these stumbles can happen, and it can be painful for a long period of time, David. You wanted to talk about valuation, though, because there are times where valuation really matters for the companies you're looking at. What are you specifically talking about there.

David Gardner: I think the earlier stage a company is, the less its valuation matters. The later stage it is, the more it matters. Yet I still don't think valuation matters that much overall. I think there's a perception that in order to really be a smart, successful investor, you need to be able to value stocks, and people will ask you questions, insinuating questions, Ricky like, What's your sell discipline? They'll often stare down their pans ne at you and ask you, What is your sell disabled and that would be part of your understanding of valuation. Benjamin Graham himself over the course of his life began to realize that valuation was not really an edge that investors could depend on much anymore. When he first wrote, really, when he came on the scene a century ago, the markets were so inefficient. The knowledge gap between somebody who had a balance sheet and people who couldn't look at the balance sheet or had to wait for the annual report to be mailed to them was substantial. Over the course of the last century, that's largely been erased, and I would say we're living with a pretty efficient market today, which might make it sound like I would think you shouldn't invest in stocks if the market's so efficient.

But I say both things out both sides of my mouth. At one side of my mouth I say, the market is extremely efficient. Information is in there. It's coming in from all sides. Looking at the future, the past, and where we are today. If you think you're going to get a real edge by valuing the stock in a way that's radically different from what the market's saying, I think you're probably fooling yourself small enough. I think Benjamin Graham would agree with that. Out the other side of my mouth I want everybody to know that as efficient as the market is, the prices you're seeing right now if you highly disagree with it, go right in and buy or sell and you will for one second affect the price briefly. But there's a huge amount of money just sitting there on the valuations you're seeing every day on the markets. Here's the problem with the efficient market and why we win as investors, because I believe the market's only looking six months forward.

Ricky Mulvey: Really? Why is that?

David Gardner: I think most managers care about what the next earnings are going to be and the quarter after that. I've harbored this belief after observing for years. Obviously, a lot of people are dialed into things like CNBC or Bloomberg and they're so incredibly short term. We also have algorithms. Most trading today is done by computers and they're trying often to make money inside of a second, literally. That's a lot of the volume that we see on Wall Street. I submit that if you're looking six years ahead instead of six quarters ahead or two quarters ahead which is where I think most of the market is, you will actually be playing almost your own game. What you're seeing are valuations that look in a two quarter period as if they're too high. You wouldn't want to buy any of these rule breaker stocks we've talked about right now based on the next two quarters, but we're missing the five years. There's a great tweet that I saved from former Fool, Joe Magyer who was pulling it from Bank of America. Bank of America did a poll of institutional money managers and said, ''What is your time frame?'' You can check it. This is a few years ago, but it's a Bank of America thing. It's official. It averages to six months. The average institutional manager is playing a six month game which coincidentally happens to be what I arrived at over the course of years just deciding, what are we really doing? The market is incredibly efficient in the very near term and most people are not playing the game that you and I will win which is to buy and to hold the great companies of our time.

Ricky Mulvey: What you're talking about reminds me of a story that Aswath Damodaran shared on Motley Fool Money a few years ago known as the Dean Evaluation. He's a professor at New York University, a widely respected investing professor. He went to the Berkshire Hathaway conference a few years back and spoke to a lot of Warren Buffett acolytes and said, ''Who here is trying to replicate what Warren Buffett is doing buy great companies at cheap prices?'' Many of them raised their hand, he said, ''How many of you were beating the market?'' Then he was not invited back to speak to that group, David. The reason is when you only look for cheap stocks, then you miss out on a lot of the big tech players and market-dominating companies that have come to emerge in the stock market. But there are times where not looking at valuation can bite investors and I'm thinking about a story with Shopify. This is a company that I own and I'm happy about it, because I just owned it a few years back, and those who have owned it for much longer than me are much happier than I'm. But a lot of people were getting excited about the market in late 2021. I had a friend who bought a lot of Shopify stock and he lost a lot of money on that. For those who bought Shopify at the peaks of 2021, they're still down on that at the height of a recent cycle of investing excitement. After that, he really didn't trust the stock market. I didn't have a great response for him other than that's painful and I don't really begrudge you for wanting to be in index funds only. We're now at a time where the market is close to all time highs once again. I want to caution newer investors especially, how investors can make the experience whenever the next downturn comes less painful especially, if they're following the rule breaker companies that you like to look at.

David Gardner: Well I would say, first of all to that friend, keep plugging. It sounds like and this is probably not the full story, Ricky and this is short form audio we're doing. We can't go deeper. We're not seeing his whole portfolio, but I would hope he had more than one stock. To me buying a stock and then having a bad experience with it and then concluding that you shouldn't do that, if it's only one stock is a real unfortunate approach. I think everybody should start with 20 stocks. These days, good news. Commissions are low to zero and you can buy fractional shares. With $1,000, you can have a 20 stock portfolio. I don't believe anybody should determine what they think about the stock market and investing directly in stocks based on one stock. I'm not trying to be unfair to him, I'm sure he had others, but that's how I heard it, so that would be my initial response. Then I would say in terms of Shopify, it is a clear out and out rule breaker. Happy to say, Karl Thiel on our rule breakers team brought that stock to my attention. In February of 2016, our cost is $2.10 for rule breaker members and that includes all of the good and bad times for Shopify, Ricky. Shopify is a 48 bagger for us, but you're right. I'm not sure it's back to its all time highs yet. I think for a lot of us, it's not about a single point in time where you buy a stock.

Ideally, you're adding more either to that stock or your portfolio on a regular basis. For me, dollar-cost averaging into stocks directly is the approach everybody should be taking. Let's not make it about the market's high or the market's low, or I'm waiting for a dip? Often I've made the joke, dips wait for dips. That's just a fun side joke that I've made over the years. But I really think we should all just constantly be investing every two weeks if we're wage earners, and adding to the market and the best companies that we can find. I think smoothing out market gyrations and not getting caught up in worrying about market cycles, and simply saving and investing your whole life is going to be such a huge win for everyone listening to us if they but play the game that way.

Ricky Mulvey: David, you mentioned brand earlier and you put Tesla in that basket, and that's an interesting one to bring up right now. A few months ago there were a lot of people, at least on my Facebook feed saying, I'm shorting Tesla. That was actually probably the worst time to either sell or short the company, but that's still one with a very complicated future. Yes, it was a trailblazer in electric vehicles, but I think many investors could fairly look at Tesla right now and say that its leader Elon Musk has poisoned the brand for quite a lot of people. There are acolytes of Musk and I don't want to dismiss that there are still fans of the company, but for a lot of people what car you drive is a branding mechanism for yourself. As Tesla has become an increasingly political brand, I think there are people in the let's say left and moderate that say, everywhere I drive. I don't want to necessarily promote a political affiliation with that. That harm to the brand may be undoable. Especially as people are making big purchases with electric cars. I guess any reflections on the brand of Tesla right now or what you would say to an investor who thinks, you know what? I'm getting out of Tesla. I don't think this brand is recoverable from what's happened. Is that a short term minded thinker? Is that a long term minded thinker? I don't know. I threw a lot at you.

David Gardner: I love that question and I have two responses. My first response is, I believe everybody should be making our portfolio reflect our best vision for our future. I'm the first to say, if somebody has feelings that strongly about Tesla, about electric cars, about the CEO, about the brand, if they don't like it, they don't want to associate with it, I'd be the first to say, don't buy that stock. Or if you had that stock and you just find yourself very disappointed, I certainly have friends who've sold their Tesla. Just disconsolate and just saying, I just don't like what Elon is doing in the world. There are a lot of other people who don't feel that way or really, most people are pretty neutral. There are a lot of people who just know the Tesla brand, may or may not have one, don't even really connect it with Elon Musk. But because you and I are so much part of the news cycle, I think the markets do this to us, we think it's so much bigger and plays so much larger in people's minds than it really does. I'm here to say we absolutely should be making our money reflect our best vision for our future. If Tesla's not there for you, don't do it. For me, it is. I'm not about Elon's politics. There are lots of people who work at Tesla who are widely minded and have lots of different thoughts. I think that Elon is a phenomenal innovator across multiple industries. While he's a little bit of a crazy man and I realize I understand why people wouldn't want him to babysit their kids or wouldn't want him to be the next president of the United States, at the same time let's look at facts and reality.

This is a company that created a revolution. Everybody else is still trying to catch up to the electric cars while Tesla is going to start bringing out robots. Robots are a bigger industry than cars and they won't be the only player. But I'm invested, because I love what the company does. I do drive a Tesla and I do so unashamedly. I don't put a bumper sticker on the back saying, please forgive me, I don't like Elon. I'm fine with people doing that. I just don't want to politicize all the things that people want to politicize these days. Let me have a fun quiz for not just you Ricky, but everybody listening. Where was Tesla's stock a year ago this very day with all the brand damage that's been suffered over the course of the last six months in particular, as you might say. Do you want to guess? You don't have to.

Ricky Mulvey: I don't have a chart, so I'm not going to cheat on this. I would guess, let me say 250.

David Gardner: The stock a year ago, the day we're recording, this conversation is Monday, May 19th was at 175. Today, it's just short of 350. We're talking about a stock that has basically doubled in the face of what you just described as huge headwinds and mistakes and branding problems, etc. I'm not again, a fan of some of the things that Elon has said and done, but I think we're possibly missing the forest for the trees if we're getting too. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about anybody who thinks this is a serious problem and long term damage. I disagree.

Ricky Mulvey: I think that listeners hopefully heard a couple of things. One is you have to understand the other side. Who's selling whenever you're buying a stock, but also willingness to have long term conviction, and an idea and ride out the bumps. I appreciate you sharing that. As we move forward, rule breakers can become rule makers. You think about companies former rule breakers, let's say Meta and Alphabet. These are companies now making the rules, practically owning the Internet. A lot of the Mag 7 stocks can be thought about this way. You talked about brand matters more, innovation, ability to change the CEO when these are younger companies. But when a rule breaker becomes a rule maker, does that change how you think about valuation for these companies?

David Gardner: It doesn't really. Although again, we're talking about some companies, but not other companies. I love you pointing out that cycle of a rule breaker, the David starting out as David positioning against Goliath and then eventually becoming as Amazon has, the Goliath. Amazon was tiny compared to Walmart when we first recommended it today. It's bigger than Walmart. Yet not every company that goes through that process, rule breaker to rule maker stops growing at that point or keeps growing at that point. I think often there's a perception or expectation. Once you become a rule maker, probably most of your growth is stopped or it's hard to turn that battleship around at this point. It's big bureaucratic things. No doubt there are companies that look like that in some industries, traditionally, and at present. However, in my experience the rule breakers that become rule makers and yet continue to break the rules as they lead their industry, and the world forward are the greatest stocks of our lifetimes. I would say Amazon is a great example. I would say Nvidia is another great example. I would say, so is Netflix, so by the way are lesser known companies like Axon Enterprise or Mercado Libre. These are companies that started out with David positioning and are now within their contexts, the Goliath, and they are innovating at a pace intuitive surgical, same thing. All of surgery may become robotic over the next 20 years. They started out as the only one doing it and right now I can't see any Pepsi to their Coke as surgery continues to get better and transform. It's not just that you stop growing when you're a rule maker or we need to have a new valuation approach. It's the context of the company itself and specifically are they the innovator? I'm always going to have my money on the innovators and I love to find them as early as I can, like we did with Shopify. I'm happy to hold them through some bumps as we have with Shopify. Shopify looks beautifully positioned to me today over the next 20 years. We're going to keep our investments in.

Again, Ricky I hasten to add, this is in a world where most money managers are holding for six months where most mutual funds sell out by December 31st of what they owned on January 1st of that year. When investors invest in those funds or just give their money over to the institutions, we are giving our greatest advantage away to Wall Street, the ability to hold and let things grow over time and not be rebalanced out of it or have short term thinkers shifting your money out of the great companies of our time. How many people have I met who said, I once owned Apple but I didn't hold. You could say that with a lot of the companies we've had in this conversation, because most people are simply not investing. They are trading which is the antithesis of investing. I hope what we're doing at the Motley Fool or at least I'll say in my own little corner with the rule breaker part of Motley Fool, we are holding for at least three years, preferably three decades and not any company. We are specifically focused on the rule breakers and the innovators, and I hope that wasn't too long an answer. But I'm just having fun, because I think this is such a profound insight. It's easy to say it's another thing to actually do. But I know many of the people listening to us as Motley Fool members have done this over the course of five or 15 or 25 years along with us, because I get emails from them saying, guys thanks. I just took early retirement because I bought and held Nvidia because you guys did through some thick and some thin. That to me is how to invest.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about in the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against buying of stocks based solely on what you hear. A personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only to see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Tuesday.