‘Never check a bag, ever,’ says Booking CEO Glenn Fogel

But Fogel stuck around and with an eye for smart acquisitions helped Priceline grow to become Booking Holdings, a $23 billion-a-year Fortune 500 travel company housing brands such as Kayak, Booking.com, OpenTable, Rentalcars, Agoda, Momondo, Cheapflights, and Priceline. He became CEO in 2019 and has since navigated pandemics, wars, disasters, and travel glitches beyond his control. But for a guy who suffered a debilitating stroke at 17 and graduated from Harvard Law School with honors less than a decade later, it’s just part of the journey. Here’s a bit more about how he thinks about business and life:

On being known as an M&A genius: “Somebody said once, ‘So you basically built the company through M&A.’ So, we bought Active Hotels in 2004 for $165 million, and we bought Booking within less than a year, in 2005, and that was $135 [million]. So $300 million. And that was 20 years ago, and that company is now worth about 90% of the entire $160 billion market cap. So during that 20 years, it wasn’t M&A, we bought a company that had a few hundred people, that was losing money. It’s kind of like, you really can’t say, ‘Well, you built the company through M&A.’”

On spotting growth opportunities: “Well, how big is the market? So, again, nobody really knows. And you pick numbers from anywhere, but I like to round off to the nearest trillion, so you could round it all to, let’s call it $3 trillion. Let’s do easy math: Well, if we were $150 billion instead of $160 [billion] now we have easy math. So that’s only 5% of the market. I said, ‘How about we get some more share of that $3 trillion market?’ Which we’re doing. So, for example, back when we started Booking.com it was only doing hotels, and we only did hotels for a really long time. In 2019, we start selling flights because we want to build this connected trip, this vision of putting it all together. So last quarter, the fourth quarter, is the first quarter we sold more airline tickets than the entire Expedia Group. And attractions is growing very nicely. Ground transportation. And of course, what I really want to do is make sure that we can put OpenTable as part of the whole thing. Because I know I do not need to spend any money on consultants: I am 100% certain that every single person who travels is not eating at home.”

On facing obstacles in his career: I was a banker at Kidder Peabody. Kidder Peabody was owned by GE. GE got tired of it, sold it to Paine Webber. And Paine Webber really only wanted the retail brokers, so all the investment bankers were pretty much let go. I say pretty much because not every banker was fired, just most, and so you couldn’t really get away with, ‘Well, they fired all of us.’ That’s a real bummer when you get let go. And if that had not happened, I’d probably still be a banker.” 

On the travel advice he always follows: “Never check a bag, ever.”

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Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

Top news

Fed keeps rates steady. The Federal Reserve announced it would keep rates on hold between 4.25% and 4.5% on Wednesday. Though “uncertainty” was repeated multiple times in his speech, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell indicated that two rate cuts later in the year are still possible.

Europe could fine Google 10% of its revenues. The EU said Google parent Alphabet had almost certainly broken its rules against abusive monopolies by prioritizing its own services in search results. It also said Apple must comply with pro-competition rules that would require it to make its iPhones interact more easily with third-party gadgets.

Trump’s “a very good telephone call” with Zelensky. The president and the Ukraine leader talked for an hour about the proposed ceasefire. During the call, Trump suggested the U.S. could take over various power stations in Ukraine, which would offer Ukraine “protection” from Russian attacks. Unanswered question: Can Kyiv trust the White House to not then give those power stations over to Russia?

Jamie Dimon diagnoses the economy. In a conversation with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas this week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon declared that the economy is still undergoing a soft landing but with “a lot of turbulence.” Dimon also warned that “The bottom 20% [of earners in the U.S.] didn’t get a pay raise for 25 years; they’re dying younger. Their schools aren’t good and they live in crime-ridden neighborhoods.”

Nvidia’s vision. CEO Jensen Huang laid out an expansive plan to move heavily into manufacturing and vowed to spend hundreds of billions building new plants in the U.S.

Ben & Jerry’s reignites Unilever feud. Ben & Jerry’s filed a legal complaint against parent company Unilever this week claiming that former CEO David Stever was fired earlier this month over his political views. It is the latest in a recent string of political conflicts between both companies that started in 2021.

Greenpeace could be bankrupted by $660 million court ruling. A North Dakota state court ordered Greenpeace—whose disruptive protests have long-plagued the corporate HQs of big energy companies—to pay hundreds of millions in damages for its actions against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Trump will order an end to the Education Department today, according to a copy of the text seen by Axios. 

GOP v Trump. Not all Congressional Republicans are on board with Trump’s desire to impeach judges he does not like.

The markets

• The S&P 500 reacted favorably to the Fed keeping interest rates steady by gaining 1% yesterday, to end at 5,675.29. It is still down -3.51% YTD. The VIX (volatility) declined 10% on the day and S&P futures moved up 0.3% this morning, premarket—suggesting that last week’s fears of impending disaster have been largely assuaged. Michael Saylor’s “Bitcoin treasury” company Strategy gained 7% yesterday and is now up 5% YTD, at $304. It’s still waaay below its all-time high of $473, however.

From the analysts

• JPMorgan on Nvidia: “We believe most investors will walk away reassured around any concerns they might have had regarding suppliers heading into the event. Specifically, the Blackwell Ultra and Rubin platforms emphasized the increase in compute density, along with the corresponding rise in power requirements per rack and the increase in bandwidth requirements,” per Samik Chatterjee.
• Wedbush on Nvidia: “The demand for NVDA GPUs remains extremely robust … we believe demand is currently outstripping supply 15:1 with more enterprises waiting their turn in line to receive the most advanced AI chips on the market,” per Daniel Ives et al.
• Convera on Canada: "A Bank of Canada survey last week revealed that due to tariff tension with the U.S., more Canadians are worried about job security, especially in industries that rely on exports to the U.S. People are also cutting back on non-essential spending. At the same time, businesses are reducing investments in response to rising inflation expectations,” per Kevin Ford.

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