How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars

by Brad Jacobs

Are you ready to sharpen the skills that fuel extraordinary success?


In this sequel to his bestselling How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, renowned entrepreneur Brad Jacobs delivers a detailed playbook for mastering business success at scale. He explains how to partner with the smartest global investors, integrate acquisitions into cohesive profit engines, and build organizations where culture, compensation, and talent are perfectly aligned. How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars is both a practical how-to manual and a rich trove of insights you can apply to your own ambitions.


Jacobs reveals a wealth of proven techniques for cultivating a winning mindset—the foundation of his formidable track record as a Wall Street moneymaker. He details the meditation and psychological tools he uses to stay centered amid chaos, lead with clarity, and reframe irrational beliefs and cognitive distortions. His step-by-step mindfulness methods apply to any goal, whether you want to transform a global industry or create monumental value in any other area.


Jacobs concludes by distilling 2.6 million years of technological and tool-making evolution before confronting the responsibilities leaders face in shaping the future of AI. He presents four potential outcomes for humanity—from collapse to utopia—and argues that our choices right now will determine whether we merely survive or truly thrive at levels once unimaginable.

Genres: Business, Biography, Nonfiction

296 pages, Hardcover

Published December 9, 2025

Reviews

[Ferhat Elmas]

His playbook is personal but (claimed to be) transferable: first clear/calm the mind, then target a massive fragmented industry with durable growth and tech lag, raise patient public capital, buy at favorable multiples, integrate fast, and expand margins through culture and systems.

The deeper point is that wealth creation is a repeatable stack of interdependent advantages: industry selection, capital alignment, acquisition discipline, integration speed, data infrastructure, and talent. One weak layer collapses the whole model.

A sound framework but the book is thin on failed cases and on what distinguishes replicable method from operator-specific edge (base rates). A distillation on Charlie's lollapalooza.

[Graham Reynolds]

substance is fine but doesn't qualify as a book. more of a sub stack piece

[V]

3.8 ⭐️ Quick read into Brad Jacob’s thought processes and target signals — more relevant/valuable for those who follow him or the industries he enters rather than a general business book for the average reader. Was very helpful they included a summary of the first book at the end.

[C]

Should have been a blog post

[Tyler Hoffman]

Would have been 5 stars if longer / more substantive. Highly recommend the industry ID, org design, and integration chapters for anyone in M&A

[Charles Francis]

Book Review: "How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars" by Brad Jacobs
Narrated by Brett Barry
Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5) Reading time: ~4 minutes

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an advance audiobook copy for review.

Most business books teach you how to build one company. Brad Jacobs has built eight — and this one is the playbook for what happens after you already know how to win.

That's the promise of "How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars," the follow-up to Jacobs' bestselling "How to Make a Few Billion Dollars." Where the first book was about the mindset that gets a builder off the ground, this one is about what it takes to operate at scale — and having spent years on the receiving end of that exact challenge, I can say it delivers.

Why it matters
A lot of M&A guidance is either too theoretical to use on a Monday morning or too narrow to apply outside one industry. Jacobs — who's completed roughly 500 acquisitions across eight companies, several of them multibillion-dollar — writes from the trenches, not the sidelines. For anyone who has ever sat in an integration meeting wondering which parts of two cultures actually merge and which parts just collide (I have), this book speaks a language you already know.

The big picture
This is a direct sequel, and it wears that well. The first book laid the mindset groundwork — rewiring how you think about risk, opportunity, and failure. This one picks up where scale becomes the challenge: partnering with top-tier global investors, turning a string of acquisitions into one coherent, profitable engine rather than a patchwork of loosely related businesses, and building the organizational backbone — culture, compensation, talent — that keeps it all from coming apart under its own weight. Jacobs also extends the first book's interest in mindset into full psychological terrain here, detailing the meditation practices and cognitive reframing techniques he actually uses to stay level-headed through chaotic deals. He closes by widening the lens entirely, tracing technological evolution across 2.6 million years to frame the responsibility leaders now carry with AI — landing on four possible futures for humanity, from collapse to something close to utopia.

Key takeaways every leader should bookmark

If I'd had this book during my own years running M&A integrations, I'd have dog-eared these points early:
* Shed before you build. Cutting costly, redundant operations early clears the runway for the synergies that actually justify the deal.
* Culture and compensation aren't separate conversations. Jacobs treats them as one aligned system — misalign either, and the best-laid integration plan stalls.
* Employee engagement is a deal term, not an afterthought. The businesses that hold together post-acquisition are the ones where people were brought into the "why," not just informed of the "what."
* Mindset is infrastructure. The meditation and reframing tools aren't soft-skill garnish here — Jacobs positions them as load-bearing, the thing that keeps a leader clear-headed when a deal (or ten) is going sideways at once.
* Treat AI as a leadership responsibility, not just a tool, which is a trap some leaders fall into. Jacobs' framing — four possible outcomes ranging from collapse to abundance — is a reminder that how leaders deploy this technology now will shape which future actually shows up.

What works
The advance praise packed into this release — a wall of CEOs and fund managers, from Henry Kravis to Masayoshi Son — could easily read as noise. It doesn't, because the book backs it up: Jacobs writes in plain English about genuinely hard problems, and he doesn't dress up the mechanics of integration to sound more glamorous than they are. For anyone who has lived the acquisition side of a career — I've been through more than eight myself — that plainness is the whole point. This isn't theory. It's a debrief from someone who's run the play dozens of times.

The audio experience
Narrator Brett Barry earns real credit here. The material could easily have landed as a lecture — dense with deal mechanics and business philosophy in the same breath — but Barry's delivery keeps it conversational throughout. At its best, it stops sounding like narration altogether and starts sounding like Jacobs sitting across the table, talking you through it directly. For a book this heavy on both hard tactics and personal philosophy, that's exactly the tone it needed.

The bottom line
"How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars" is a worthy, more advanced sequel — less about finding the will to build and more about the discipline to build well at scale. For anyone who has lived through the acquisition grind, this reads like the manual you wish someone had handed you on day one.

This is a review of the audiobook.

[Tiny Quasar group]

The whole book feels like a LinkedIn post of a founder who’s begging for engagement. He doesn’t seem to take his own advice “Look for a space where companies are fragmented and using old technology, use ai and scale to trillions” that’s the exact thing he said, I’m not even exaggerating, he actually said trillions. Now if we look at his own ventures- a logistics company and an equipment rental company. How are these two companies following his advice? Did he actually think that he’s gonna make logistics and equipment renting a trillion dollar business? Equipment renting relies mostly on your luck and less on your actual skill, I don’t know about America but in other countries when a company defaults then multiple stake holders come in the way to claim that they have higher priority over company’s assets. Even if you have rented those equipments, the process is still messy and takes months before you get your equipment back, let alone your interest payments. Logistics is yet another boring business where all the companies in the field already have adopted the best technology that is available, the whole sector is a very low margin cut throat competition, which is against the authors advice.

The starting few chapters have some mind calming techniques which others might find useful. But they demonstrate the massive ego that the author has “swallow the whole universe”

[Emziethebookworm]

Was a nice short audiobook to listen to, to pass the time a mean it was certainly helpful in many ways of learning.
The only main issue I did really have with this audiobook is that, it was short one and I did feel that it could of went on for another few hours in my opinion.
I really enjoyed the narrator throughout this audiobook as well, I would love to find more works by this narrator in the future.
Thank you to netgallery for allowing me to listen to this audiobook.

[Sam]

I found this book hard to follow what its aim was to be honest. The first few chapters felt more like a health and well being book then middle part was talking through some helpful topics but feels very unattainable and not for the normal business owner and the last part was spent talking about acquisitions of billion dollar companies. Then spent time going into what he believes will happen to human kind because of AI. Again som helpful thoughts but felt a little unfocused to me.

[* Elle * the * Babbling * Dabbler *]

This book is helpful with adjusting to the expansion of AI all while still maintaining our human mentality. It blends how to gain a wealth mentality with how to grow with the ai change instead of fighting it.
Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Carlos Nunes]

Despite Brad Jacobs’ remarkable track record, the book feels surprisingly superficial. It jumps across a wide range of subjects, but instead of developing a clear thesis, it reads more like a compilation of blog posts than a structured business book.

[Book Bench]

Scaling a company is a learnable skill if you know where to look. The author shares hard-won lessons from a string of successful ventures from acquisitions to mindset. I wished for fresher ideas though the direct style doesn't waste your time.

[T]

A+ merely for the awesome meditation and self-talk sequence in the beginning.
Short and enjoyable read. Less of a book and more of a 1hr interview

[Calle U]

Good lessons and reminders on the culture needed to build and operate a successful company

[Myres Allen]

i think the first book was much more impactful and had a lot more helpful frameworks in it. This book could’ve been about 50% shorter i think and been better value for time spent reading.

[Lewis Manalo]

It's probably more useful if you already have a few billion dollars.

[C.R. Derbrauer]

I’m glad I got to read both of Brad Jacobs’s books. I especially appreciated how this second one clarified some of the questions I still had after finishing the first. I’m sure there’s more Brad could write, and I’ll certainly be on the lookout. But even if he doesn’t, these two books are absolute gold mines—he is a serial entrepreneur, after all.