IBKR - Baron Funds Q4 2024 Letter From Ron Baron

2025-03-06 04:50:00 ET

Summary

• SpaceX’s competitive advantage is that it can refly rockets over and over like an airplane. SpaceX is now Baron Capital’s second-largest holding.
• Starlink subscribers more than doubled to 4.6 million in 2024. They could double again in 2025.
• Baron has been an important investor in MSCI since that company’s initial public offering in November 2007 at $18 per share.
• Since their respective inceptions, 16 of 19 Baron mutual funds, representing 96.4% of Baron Funds’ AUM, have outperformed their primary benchmarks and 14 Funds representing 95.9% of Baron Funds’ AUM.

Baron’s 2024 Investment Conference theme was “Building Legacy.” More than 5,000 Baron Capital clients and shareholders of Baron Funds attended that meeting. This was the second time I interviewed Gwynne at a Baron Conference on stage at The Met. Our first interview was five years ago on October 25, 2019. The conference theme that fall, a few months before COVID-19 changed all our lives, was shockingly, “What’s Next?” Fleetwood Mac performed at day’s end under an iconic otherworldly Andy Warhol style banner, “First Person on Mars!” Last year, in November 2024, Michael Bublé, Carrie Underwood, “Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo, the Broadway cast of “Suffs the Musical,” Broadway star Kelli O’Hara, and Israeli pop superstar Noa Kirel entertained us during lunch and at the end of the day.

All expenses of the Annual Baron Investment Conferences, including venue, entertainers, three Tesla Model Y “door prizes,” Baron “Building Legacy” t-shirts, chocolate chip cookies, miscellaneous swag… like viewing of Optimus robots up close and personal, and six Scream Ice Cream trucks serving incredibly delicious ice cream cones at 4 PM...(I personally own 5% of Internet based Scream ice cream trucks returning to my “roots” one college summer as an ice cream man)...are expenses of Baron Capital. Not of our clients or of Baron mutual fund shareholders. It’s our way of saying “Thanks” for believing in and trusting us all these years. One of our investors remarked that it seems “the only thing Ron is willing to sell is ice cream!” That individual obviously saw through the glitz....

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