FTAI Infrastructure at Midwest Ideas Conference: Strategic Growth Plans

On Wednesday, 27 August 2025, FTAI Infrastructure LLC (NASDAQ:FIP) presented its strategic roadmap at the 16th Annual Midwest Ideas Conference. The company, recently spun off from FTAI Aviation, outlined ambitious plans to double in size by year-end, driven by strategic asset sales and reinvestment in short line railroads. While the company is optimistic about its growth potential, it emphasized the need for patient investment due to the long-term nature of infrastructure projects.

Key Takeaways

• FTAI Infrastructure aims to sell three major assets and reinvest in short line railroads to achieve $400-500 million in EBITDA within two years.
• The company has successfully refinanced key facilities, reducing interest expenses significantly.
• FTAI Infrastructure is focusing on long-term value creation, contrasting its strategy with short-term models like Spotify.
• The recent acquisition of Wheeling & West Virginia railroad is expected to diversify revenue streams and realize cost savings.

Financial Results

• FTAI Infrastructure has refinanced the Long Ridge facility debt, securing over $1 billion.
• Municipal financing for the Repauno facility was secured, totaling between $300-400 million.
• The company reduced its cost of capital from 14% to 8.25% by refinancing holdco debt.
• Annualized EBITDA based on Q2 figures stands at $184 million, with a decrease in interest expenses from $130 million to $100 million at the HoldCo level.

Operational Updates

• The acquisition of Wheeling & West Virginia railroad for $1.5 billion is expected to diversify the revenue base, reducing reliance on U.S. Steel from 95% to the 30% range.
• Repauno is projected to generate an additional $80 million in EBITDA starting in Q4 next year.
• Wheeling railroad is expected to achieve $20 million in cost savings.

Future Outlook

• FTAI Infrastructure plans to sell the Long Ridge asset for $1.5-1.6 billion, extracting $500 million in equity.
• The sale of the Repauno facility is anticipated following New Jersey DEP approval for underground caverns.
• The Jefferson facility in Beaumont, Texas, is also slated for sale.
• The company plans to acquire more short line railroads, leveraging Ken Nicholson’s expertise, with expectations of trading at a 15x multiple due to the monopolistic nature of the business.

Q&A Highlights

• Approximately 500 short line railroads exist in the U.S., with many being family-owned.
• A 10% PIK dividend was taken by Harris, who will also receive a warrant position in the combined rail business.
• Minimal tax leakage is expected from asset sales due to NOLs and construction-related deductions.
• Major railroads are not participating in buying short lines, though the reasons remain unclear.
• There was immediate interest in topping the bid after the Wheeling acquisition was announced.

In conclusion, FTAI Infrastructure’s strategic plans are set to transform its business landscape significantly. For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 16th Annual Midwest Ideas Conference:

Unidentified speaker: Good

Unidentified speaker, Host, Midwest Ideas conference: morning, and thank you all for joining us for our next Midwest Ideas conference presentation. Presenting next is Eftai Infrastructure listed on the NASDAQ under the symbol FIP. Representing the company today is their Head of Investor Relations, Alan Andrini.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: Thank you

Unidentified speaker: for coming. I noticed a lot of the people here own both EFTAI Aviation and EFTAI Infrastructure. For those of you who aren’t aware of the history here, about two and a half years ago, these two entities were one company, Eftai, Fortress Transportation and Infrastructure. And the problem with that was that, you know, these are two areas that we knew extremely well, but the problem was, one, there was a K1 terribly tax efficient, but K1s and everybody hates K1s and nobody wants to, you know, so we knocked out 40% of the market. And it was too complex a story.

You had aerospace guys who said, I know aerospace, but I don’t know infrastructure, and I don’t want to learn infrastructure. You had infrastructure guys that I don’t want to learn aerospace. So about two and a half years ago, we split the companies. We spun out this entity, which was the orphan that took a lot of the debt, and aerospace, you know, was on its own. At that time, the stocks were trading at the combined companies were trading at $17 Today, the combined companies are trading at $155 So it would be safe to say that, that worked out pretty well.

This is the orphan. Now, you know, people have said to me, you know, which you you now are responsible for EFTAI aviation and EFTAI infrastructure, you know, you which one do you like better? And, you know, you love all your children, but you have to you have to make decisions about that. And what I would tell you is that I think Eftahi Aviation is on cruise control, that stock is at 1.5 I think by the end of the year, that stock is $1.701.0.8 dollars maybe a little bit higher. Things are going great there.

This company is at an inflection point. This company is at a place where this company could double by the end of the year. So percentages are what you care about and if you understand the infrastructure, this is something that is worth looking at. Let’s go back to the beginning of the year for this company, FIP. At the beginning of the year, Ken Nicholson, the CEO, said there were four things he wanted to accomplish this year.

One was we wanted to redo recapitalize the Long Ridge facility, and we did that. About $1,000,000,000 just a little over $1,000,000,000 worth of debt, refinanced that. That’s done. Second thing we wanted to do was to do the financing for the Phase two construction at the Repono facility in Philadelphia, the natural gas liquid port. We wanted to get the municipal financing done, which is $300,000,000 to $100,000,000 of taxable debt, that’s all done.

Third thing you wanted to do was to do a refinancing of the holdco debt, which is about 1,000,000,000 point dollars There was some very ugly Ares preferred in there, 16% coupon, 18% pick and $600,000,000 worth of 10.5% capital. That was done. That was completely done about a week ago. That basically was 14% money. We just took that out with currently this is bridge money, 8.25%.

So we saved so our interest expense went from $130,000,000 to $100,000,000 at the HoldCo level. The fourth thing we wanted to do this year was to do a major acquisition in the short line railroad space, which we did. We just announced about ten days ago the acquisition of the Wheeling in West Virginia, paid $1.5 for that entity. You put all that into a blender, it’s been a very it’s a very impactful, very important first six months of the year. Now let me make your jobs more difficult.

The next eighteen to twenty four months, this company isn’t going to look anything the way it looks today. Currently, are four main assets. There’s Transtar and now the Wheeling and West Virginia, which is the short line railroad business. That will be doing by the end of next year, 200,000,000 in EBITDA if we do nothing to it, okay? There is the Long Ridge facility, which is a four eighty five megawatt about to go to five zero five megawatt power plant in Hannibal, Ohio.

It’s about an hour and a half down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh. That will probably be sold sometime in the next six to nine months. That deal, if it goes at current rates, okay, we’ll probably sell that for $1.5 $1.6 take out $500,000,000 in equity, get rid of all the debt. The Repauno facility, which is a natural gas liquid port that we’re building, and it just began to build out in near the Philadelphia Airport. There’s something very important that’s about to happen there.

And what’s very important that’s about to happen there is that we’re going to get a permit from New Jersey Department New Jersey EEP, the Department of Energy Protection Environmental Protection, sorry, to build underground caverns at that facility. Now this was dumb luck here. When we bought this, we knew that there was an underground cavern in granite down there, but subsequently we found out that we had the ability to put in 6,000,000 barrels of underground storage. Now, why is that important? If you build a million barrels of above ground storage for natural gas liquids, those tanks, they’re huge.

They have to be pressurized and insulated. So for 1,000,000 barrels of above ground storage for natural gas liquids, you’re going to spend between $350,000,000 and $400,000,000 to build 1,000,000 barrels of above ground storage. It generates around $60,000,000 in EBITDA, which is fine. That’s a good investment, not crazy good, but a good investment. If on the other hand, you’re sitting on one of the largest, purest granite formations in the world, you can go down 800 feet, you know, carve it out and put in underground storage, you can build where it is naturally pressurized, naturally insulated.

You can build it for a half to a third the price of above ground storage and still make your $60,000,000 per EBITDA. So you build it for $120,000,000 and you get $60,000,000 in EBITDA. Now why is that important? It’s important just because of the math, but it’s also important because our neighbors across the street, across the river at Marcus Hook are full. Those are the guys that are owned and Marcus Hook is owned by Energy Transfer.

Now, it could be interesting. It could be an interesting situation. They’re full. They have no more capacity over there. We are growing and becoming a big competitor of theirs.

We get the New Jersey DEP approval for underground caverns in September, could be an interesting situation. I think one way or the other, that asset is going to be gone. Long Ridge is going to be gone. Jefferson, the third asset, which is the facility in Beaumont, Texas, which is about three wood away from Exxon and 10 miles away from Saudi Aramco, Motiva. That’s the perfect location for down there because one, you’re across the river and we have six pipeline connections to the largest refinery in The United States and we’re 10 miles away and pipeline connected to the second largest refinery in The United States.

You could not ask for a better position in the hydrocarbon business. So what I think is going to happen, and Ken Nicholson, the CEO has been pretty clear about this, our goal over the next eighteen to twenty four months is to sell those three assets, get rid of all the debt on the balance sheet, take out $1,000,000,000 to $1.2 buy more short line railroads such that two years from now, you’re going to have you’re going to be doing 400,000,000 to $500,000,000 in EBITDA, trading at a 15 multiple with very little debt. That’s where this is going. Now here’s the caveat. Let me show you a couple pages here.

This is the acquisition that we just did, the Wheeling and West Virginia. You can see the diversification that we’re getting. When we bought TranStar, we were 95% U. S. Steel.

It’s now 85% U. S. Steel. And with this acquisition, we’re going to go down into the 30s with U. S.

Steel. Highly accretive acquisition. As I said, these two combined entities will be doing $200,000,000 in EBITDA by the end of the year. This is a recap of the balance sheet. You can read that.

There are decks in the back. Here is the page. Here is the page that makes all the difference. I remember one time we were doing a presentation, we’d worked on a very large like a 30 page presentation for Pete Brigher who was running the private credit side of Fortress and we started the presentation and Pete said, go to page 17, the rest of this stuff is BS. So we went to page 17.

Well, this is the equivalent of Pete’s, this is the page that you want to focus on. This company is currently doing $184,000,000 in EBITDA annualized based upon the Q2 numbers. If you look at the builds here, when you look at what’s happened from the Wheeling Long Ridge deals that are these deals, by the way, Long Ridge, Jefferson and Rubano, these are locked in. These aren’t if things go well in the future or if we get new business, we’re going to have these assets. These are locked in.

These are contracts. Construction is almost completed in these things. And so these things are locked in. What you’re going to see twenty months or two years from now you’re going to see this company and you’re going to see those three assets are going to be gone that we talked about and you’re going to have 400,000,000 to $500,000,000 in EBITDA coming from the short line railroad business trading at a 15 multiple. That’s the way it’s going.

Now the caveat that I’ve said when I’ve spoken at this conference before is going to be the same one I’m going to give you right now, and that is this, Don’t put in money that’s got a one quarter or six month duration to it. These are development projects. These aren’t this isn’t Spotify. This isn’t how many new Spotify customers did you get this quarter. This is not that business.

These are development projects, which means you’re two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. But if we get done what we say we’re going to get done, as I said, this thing is a double, triple, quadruple, but we’ve got to execute. But as I said, you want patient money in here. The other things that I think are interesting is that we did this bridge financing. When we announced the Jefferson when we announced the Wheeling deal, we announced the acquisition of the Wheeling at $1.5 and we announced the refi of the balance sheet, as I said, going from around a 14% cost of capital to around 8.25%.

So our interest expense went from at the HoldCo level, went from $130,000,000 a year to $100,000,000 a year, a big drop. So where it is a dynamic situation, I think it’s important to note that Ken is doing exactly what he said he was going to do in terms of things that he wanted to accomplish this year. And the speculation is that these three assets where we will take out $1,000,000,000 to $1.2 in equity, delever further and put it all into the short line railroad space is something that is going to happen. Probably worth mentioning Ken’s background in the short line business. He has been doing short line acquisitions for probably twenty years.

There are three major players in the short line business. One is Genesee in Wyoming, which is owned by Brookfield. One is WATCO, which is a private company and us. Ken is his I think his worst acquisition in the short line railroad space was a triple on our money and the best was a 10 to one. We bought the Central Maine Quebec Railroad out of bankruptcy for $14,500,000 sold it four years later to Canadian Pacific for $140,000,000 So Ken and Joe Adams is the CEO he is the Chairman of both companies.

He is the Chairman and CEO of Eftai Aviation, which a lot of you know, and he is also the Chairman of Eftai Infrastructure. Those guys have been the best buyers of short line railroads in the world. They know what they are doing and they know how to grow them. And the other thing that I think is important to note about this company is that John Giles who was the guy that helped us build Rail America, which we eventually sold to Genesee Wyoming is the guy who’s going to be in charge. He’s the chairman of the combined rail entities.

So that is going to be we’ve got the right person in that position. As I said, it’s an evolving situation. It’s one that you’re going to see develop over the next eighteen to twenty four months. Let me see if there’s anything else here that’s worth your time. This is just a break ground a background of the four major assets.

As I said, the surviving asset is going to be the Transtar Wheeling combination. You’ll see these bottom three gone and this is and you can see these in the decks. This is just a recap of the four segments. That’s the page you want to focus on. That’s the direction that we’re going.

And again, I think that the approach that we’re going to be taking going forward from a street standpoint is that we are going to we will under promise and over deliver. The game plan will be that every research report starts with they beat our numbers and they beat the street numbers. As an orphan, when we were spun out, the stock was at $2 and orphans are everybody hated it and they took they sold their a lot of guys sold their FIP, kept their F tie, that obviously worked out extremely well. As I said, on a percentage basis, I think this is going to be as between the two is going to be the outperformer vis a vis EFTAI aviation. Let me open the Q and A, if I may.

Yes?

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: So you said Ken has been on short line railroads for twenty years now. Yep. I don’t know enough about the railroad industry, but I’m speculating that there aren’t a lot of new short line railroads being created each year. So at what point is there consolidation enough that

Unidentified speaker: Here’s something that it’s a great question. Here’s something that blew my mind. There are this number blew me away. There are 500 short line railroads in this country. 500.

Most of them are family owned. Okay? Wheeling was kind of a one off. It was one of the largest and we were able to buy it. Now if you have a short line railroad that is large and is diversified as the Wheeling is, you’ll have 12 guys show up for that.

Literally, 12 guys show up to try to buy it, including us, WATCO and Genesee and Wyoming. If on the other hand, you’ve got a short line railroad that’s doing $10,000,000 to $15,000,000 in annual EBITDA and it only does agriculture or it only does coal or it only does aggregates, you may have two people show up for that because it’s too dangerous. It’s too dangerous to have that kind of concentration in one business. It’s perfect for us because when we bought Transtar, it was 95% U. S.

Deal, now 85% U. S. Deal. As you can see from in here, it’s going to be like a third U. S.

Deal now. So we can take something that is doing only ag, let’s say, and it’s a diversifier for us. So but what you’re going to see, you’re going to see more of the consolidation take place in the majors, Tier 1s like the Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern. We did exactly that with Rail America. Rail America was a roll up of short line railroads, then we sold it to Genesee and Wyoming.

Now, look, one could speculate that once we effectuate these roll ups that we’re going to do and we’re pure play doing 400,000,000 to $500,000,000 would we be on the radar screen for Genesee and Wyoming and Brookfield? Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s an interesting business. And the reason why it trades at 15 times is it’s a monopoly.

Monopolies are, you know, they are good things. Monopolies do what monopolists do every year what monopolists can do, which is raise prices. And for those of you that yes, those of you that own Eftah Aviation, you understand that concept because you have seen GE raise the prices on the aerospace side consistently on parts six to 8% every year. They do it, why? Because they can.

Your option is pay GE what they charge or keep your plane parked, bad option. Yes, sir. Yes, it’s doing $67,000,000 right now at the moment, okay. But it’s a family owned business. And just like every other family owned business in America, it is dripping with expenses.

Know, there the 18 year old grandson who is on the payroll for $1,000,000 a year and he plays golf, you know, never shows up the office. There are five of those guys and there are multiple private jets and all the other things that you would expect to find in a private company. Now, we own the company as of Monday in a trust, that’s the way you effectuate acquisitions in this business. So we can’t touch any of that for probably another two or three months until the Transportation Board approves the deal. It just takes time because it’s got to go through a federal agency and federal agencies like all federal agencies are populated by C students who want to be out of there at 05:01 every day.

And so that’s what we’re dealing with, but we’ll get that done. Once we get it done, then we can go in and make the cuts. One of the huge advantages that we had here was that we knew that the wheeling was going to get we think there’s $20,000,000 in cuts, that’s one, okay? The other thing that we knew that the seller didn’t know was that Repauno, there is a deal you’ll see in here that Repauno is going to make an incremental $80,000,000 in EBITDA starting fourth quarter of next year. Repauno is our natural gas liquid facility.

We’ve got firm contracts that will generate that. All that natural gas liquid is going to be coming from Hopewell, a facility out in the out in Ohio. Okay? All the guys who are gonna ship that natural gas liquid to Repauno have to ship it on the wheeling because the wheeling is the railroad that services Hopewell. That’s $20,000,000 that has to come through the wheeling.

And the guys who we did the contract with have indicated that they’re going to be doing the business with Wheeling. We knew that, the Wheeling didn’t know that. So you put those two together, it’s 40,000,000 on the 67,000,000. That’s how you get to the 107.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: Preferred stock that Harris took, what dividend are they getting?

Unidentified speaker: 10% dividend. It’s all PIK, okay? And they’re getting a warrant position in the in just the rail business, the combined rail business. And it will work out they’ll end up with around 10% or 12% of because they it’s not these aren’t penny warrants, they have to pay for them. They have to pay for them at our price.

So they’ll end up with like 10% or 12% of the combined rail business. And naturally, what we hope is that they make a fortune on that because we own 90%. They’ll own the, let’s say, 10%.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: And I’m not 100% clear. When you buy the rail, you actually have to operate or you’re basically just buying the

Unidentified speaker: No. We’re going to operate it. We will operate it.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: So you have to take care of getting locomotives and cleaning?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. We we operate it just the way we operate Transstar. The CEO of Transstar, John Karnes, is going to be the CEO of the combined companies. He’ll effectuate all the cost savings and the guy who built Rail America for us, who tripled the EBITDA at Rail America, John Karnes, is going be the chairman of that entity. We hand off to them.

They don’t run on our lines, we hand off to them. That’s the way that the short line business the way the short line business works. It’s a cool business. Most people don’t you know, they don’t even know that it exists. These little you know, five mile, 10 mile, 20 mile railroads that are owned by families.

And they’re just cash cows. They’re not cool. They’re not sexy. They’re not, you know, things that would attract the average stock buyer. Yes?

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: Looking at your most recent filing cap structures, the 27 bonds have been taken out now?

Unidentified speaker: Yes. Okay. The 32

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: bonds, are they at the parent or at the longer?

Unidentified speaker: They’re at the parent. They’re at the parent. Now we took out all the 10.5, okay, those are gone. And the Ares preferred, the very ugly Ares preferred was gone too. Now Ares loves the asset, that’s the reason why they want to, you know, so they’re out of the holdco position.

They’re in they’re now down at rail company level.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: And what’s is there a plan for the 32s with the sales that are coming up or is

Unidentified speaker: that Yes. You’re going to see this thing delever very, very quickly. So don’t get too careful with your bonds. Going lose them. Yes?

Will the

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: tax consequences of these various sales be?

Unidentified speaker: Yes. We think there’s going be very little tax leakage just because the fact we’ve had a lot of you know, we’ve done a lot of construction and we’ve got a lot of NOLs. So we don’t see any tax leakage of any consequence. It’s a good question. I think it’s a good question because I asked it about a week ago to my finance guys.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: Again, a question of ignorance for one who doesn’t know this industry. Why do the major railroads not participate in buying that one?

Unidentified speaker: Short lines? You know, don’t know. They are sellers of them. I think I don’t know if it’s the operational nuances. You know, I don’t I don’t know the answer.

I don’t have a good crisp answer to that. What I would love you to do is just email me and and and and ask let me ask the question of Ken and the other guys to to to find out why these guys have stayed away from that that business. They want the long haul business. They don’t want the last five miles or 20 miles or 50 miles. They don’t want that business.

They just want to they want take stuff that we deliver to them and run it across the country and then drop it off to another short line that might deliver it, you know, locally. But it’s a good question. Don’t know. Yes, sir?

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: How many buyers showed up for the Wheeling and Lake Erie deal?

Unidentified speaker: It’s a great story. Great story. Normally, normally if if you have a short line railroad that is very, very diversified like Wheeling was, you’ll have 10 guys show up for that. If you have something that is not diversified, you may have two guys show up for that. Your first day in business school gets, you know, economics one one on one, supply and demand.

The other is too too heavy a concentration, it’s too risky. There was no investment banker, there was no beauty contest. Larry Parsons, the guy who sold it, built this business for fifty years. He wanted to turn it over. Now look, if it’s one public company to another public company, you’ll sell to a guy if you think he’s a serial killer.

Okay? But not in this business. You care Larry cared about who the owner was. He knew Ken. These negotiations took over a year, and he wanted to make certain that he was turning his company over even though he was 90 and in very infirmed.

And he knew that the kids were gonna come off the, you know, the the kids were coming off the payroll no matter what. Okay? But he wanted to turn over to somebody he knew, liked and trusted, and he knows, likes and trusted Ken. As I said, there were no bankers and there was nobody else. It was a one year negotiation.

It was a fair fight, you know, and he got a fair price, but it wasn’t, you know, we weren’t in there competing with Watco and with Genesee and Wyoming. Probably worth noting that that the the day that the deal was announced, and I’m not going to tell you who, but two major players went to the Wheeling and said, we would like to top the bid. And Wheeling said, deal is done. And now as it turns out, we had Gadden tied them up 80 ways from Sunday so that they couldn’t do that because we knew that that was a possibility. But they were immediately, you know, people want to pay more for the willing.

It’s a great railroad. And the beauty for us is that we touch it in five different places. So the synergies look, we’ll we bid on a short line railroad in Panama, the country of Panama, because it was a special situation, it had to do with the canal and all that good stuff. We bid on railroads in the state of Washington. And you look at those differently than you look at a short line railroad that is literally you touch five different places, you hand off to each other, that’s where you can get the real big savings.

But this particular deal, there was no other competition. Believe me, we didn’t it wasn’t a gift. Larry is not in the gift giving business, but it situation where we had 10 other guys to compete with.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: Thank you. You talked about selling all the other assets. What if you don’t get the price? What let’s look at the scenario where one of these assets stays. I mean, can you still make it?

Unidentified speaker: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. I mean, we’ll just develop them and, you know, get them further along in their in development stage. And we would have this company that looks like the one on the right here, the $461,000,000 in EBITDA. But again, I think when you have a company like that, is that going to trade at 15 times?

Probably not. Because some of those assets when they’re fully developed trade ten, eleven times, okay. So we would be burdened with that. But what we’re hoping is that we’re going to be able to effectuate these sales. Now as I said, we’ve already gotten some interesting reverse inquiry on two of these three assets.

Yeah, I mean what there are I mean that is one obvious acquisition candidate. We would send it to we would show it to Stone Peak, we would show it to Kinder Morgan, we would show it to Enterprise. I mean we would retain a banker and we would have the classic beauty contest and let them all you know fall over themselves to you know to outbid each other, we would do and make certain that we had an investment maker there who would lie to all of them in the same respectful way, but which is, you know, that’s the game that’s played. Yes, sir. Well, you know, it’s interesting.

The short reports the way these short reports work today is kind of like the reverse of pump and dump, you know, in the 80s. It’s just it’s going the other direction. And I was I had dinner last night with a guy who runs a runs a multi billion dollar fund here in Chicago and who happens to be building a position in FIP and he said, we love the short reports, we love these guys. I said, help me here, help me understand that. And he said, well, they’re wrong 95% of the time, they state right front in page, we’re short the stock and we want the stock to go down, okay, and we know that 95% of the time what they put in there is BS.

So what we do is we the minute there’s a short report, we buy the stock, then we figure out later what the company does. Because 95% of the time, the stock is, you know, Eftah Aviation, if those of you own it, you know, when Muddy Waters report came out, stock traded at 78, okay. It’s currently at one hundred fifty four months later. I mean, that’s what you know, that’s the now listen, you talk to the the, you know, you talk to the SEC and you say, guys, why are you doing this? Why are you permitting this to go on?

Because they make $25,000,000, they then pay Sullivan and Cromwell $3,000,000 to defend them. That’s pretty good business. Okay. Why do you let it go on? He says, well, because 5% of the time they’re right.

I said, but 95% of the time, the people that get hurt are not the Capitals, the Wellingtons, the T. Rowes, those guys come in and buy the stocks with both hands when these short reports come out because they know that 95% of the time it’s BS. Okay? The guys who get hurt are the small family offices, the individuals, people that have leverage who don’t know the game, who this is one of five stocks that they own. And you know, but the SEC takes a different view.

Now look, we’ve heard that you know guys like Hindenburg who’ve left the business and some of the other short guys are backing away from the business to quote spend more time with the family. You know, you buy that one. I think they’re they’re seeing the writing on the wall. Trump or what’s his name? Musk, for example, said these guys are all crooks and, you know, he’s going to do what what he can.

Now Trump or Musk is now, you know, moving away from government, so but we’ll see. But it’s it’s an interesting business. And look, these guys have got nannies to pay and they’ve got, you know, summer schools to pay for and colleges pay for. And so they’re doing what makes them money. I I just think it’s a curious way to live to stuff write stuff that you know.

I mean, EFTAI, for example, we spent four months, spent 3 and a half million bucks, there were 10 allegations in there, everyone was disproven, everyone. But, you know, those those guys made a fortune. But as I said, it’s an interesting way to live your life.

Unidentified speaker, Audience Member: At this point, is there any connection between the entire and the

Unidentified speaker: No. The only connection is that Joe Adams is the chairman of both companies. And Ken and And are the IR. And IR for both companies. Ken and Joe have worked together for twenty five years.

Ken is the CEO of FIP. Joe is the CEO of Eftai Aviation, and Joe is the Chairman of both. Eftai Aviation is completely out of the Fortress family. We bought them out for $300,000,000, $301,150,000,000 in cash and 150,000,000 in stock, which we told them, we said don’t sell it. I mean, the things that are coming in aviation are going to be amazing.

And they sold it at 82. They sold it at 82. You know, my as I was telling one of the other guys in one of our meetings, my two favorite bets in life are gravity and human nature. I’ve never lost with either one of those bets. Okay?

And the guys who made the decision to sell the stock, their incentive plan incented them to make the sale. So what did they do? Shockingly, they made the sale. So but as I said, it was a bad decision on their part. Thank you all for coming.

I’m getting the I’m getting the high sign here.

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