Biglari Café - Sadars yellow Lambo...

Original Menue from the Biglari Café in Saint Tropez (2019)

AND a Steak'n Shake seasoning (2016).

part of the collection since… well, it is technically still trading – the museum’s rare live specimen, observed from behind glass.

Every value-investing era produces its tribute acts: men who read the same Buffett letters, bought the same dog-eared Graham, and concluded that the one thing missing in Omaha was simply more of themselves.

Sardar Biglari is the genre’s most committed performer. He took a tired burger chain, Steak ’n Shake, used it as a holding company, renamed the whole thing Biglari Holdings, and set about rebuilding Berkshire – minus, as it turned out, the returns.

The machinery is genuinely elegant, if you admire that sort of thing. Biglari runs an in-house investment vehicle, The Lion Fund. Biglari Holdings puts company money into the Lion Fund. The Lion Fund buys Biglari Holdings shares. Biglari does not retire those shares – he votes them. In 2015 a tender offer pushed his voting control past 50%. The net result is a public company at which the public mostly spectates.

Then come the flourishes. In January 2013 Biglari licensed his own surname to the company for twenty years. Should he ever be forced out or the company sold, he collects 2.5% of sales for five years – a parachute that could exceed $100 million for the indignity of being asked to leave. The governance watchers at 13D Monitor handed him a place in their “Hall of Shame”; even ISS, while declining to back an activist challenger, conceded the company had “serious governance problems.”

The capital allocation is where the homage turns experimental. In 2014 he bought Maxim – the lad’s magazine – and installed himself as editor-in-chief, because nothing says “disciplined long-term compounder” like personally art-directing swimwear shoots. In one year shareholders paid an $8.4m management fee to a Biglari-owned entity. The dual-class structure adopted in 2018 ensured that nobody could do much about any of it.

Meanwhile the actual business – flat-top burgers and milkshakes – quietly wilted. Same-store sales slid; dozens of Steak ’n Shakes went dark (57 closed permanently in a single pandemic quarter); the company pivoted to a “franchise partner” model dangling a 50/50 profit split before would-be operators for a $10,000 buy-in. Berkshire, this was not.

To be scrupulously fair – the museum prides itself on fairness before it resumes mocking – Biglari is neither a fraud nor a bankrupt. He has, in fact, made real money, notably a fourteen-year campaign against Cracker Barrel reportedly worth around a billion dollars. The man can clearly invest. The exhibit poses a narrower question: over the years, who captured the upside – the shareholders, or the name above the door?

The chart answers it without adjectives. A dollar in the S&P 500 since 2010 became several dollars. A dollar in Biglari Holdings became… roughly a dollar, give or take a wilted milkshake. The space between the two lines is not a rounding error. It is the exhibit.

The emotional short. There is nothing to short here – no zero, no scandal, no perp walk. Just a slow, decade-long demonstration that a company can be run impeccably for one person and indifferently for everyone else, entirely within the rules. We keep it as a memento mori for anyone tempted to mistake a Buffett tribute band for the real thing.

(We would gladly accept a framed copy of the Biglari-edited Maxim and a Steak ’n Shake paper hat for the cabinet. Strictly for research.)