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Founders: #131 Robert Friedland (Billionaire Miner)

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What I learned from reading The Big Score: Robert Friedland and The Voisey’s Bay Hustle by Jacquie McNish. ---- [0:04] Promoting a stock is like making a movie. You've got to have stars, props, and a good script. [2:22] He had learned that there was nothing that Robert Friedland could not sell. [2:50] This book is about how Robert Friedland accidentally discovers the largest nickel deposit in history. He winds up selling that discovery for over $4 billion. [3:50] Robert Friedland and Steve Jobs were friends in college. Robert influenced Steve. [4:50] Friedland grinned as if he had just won an award. But the prize being handed down was a two year jail sentence for selling drugs. Police confiscated 24,000 tablets of LSD valued at $125,000. [7:01] He is a very complicated character. He was involved in a lot of shady stuff on the way to becoming a billionaire. I was struck by the contrast between how the book describes Friedland and how he comes off in this sales presentation: China Is About To Ban The Internal Combustion Engine. He comes off as extremely likable and knowledgeable. [9:42] At Reed College Friedland’s drug conviction no handicap. The prison term only added to his mystiqu

[00:00:00] With typical impatience, he had been searching for a shortcut. Promoting a stock is like making a movie, Friedland said. You've got to have stars, props, and a good script. Lately, good scripts had been hard to come by. Friedland's reputation as a daring penny stock promoter with a Midas touch was unraveling with the collapse of his high-flying gold mining company, Galactic Resources. Thirteen months earlier, Galactic had sought bankruptcy protection in the wake of pollution and regulatory problems at its Colorado gold mine. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was billing the…

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