Teledyne

Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky founded Teledyne in 1960 and acquired about 130 companies through the 1960s, paying with stock while it traded at high multiples. Singleton then stopped buying, and across eight tender offers in the 1970s and 1980s he repurchased roughly 90 percent of the shares outstanding, paid no dividend and gave Wall Street no earnings guidance; earnings per share compounded at around 20 percent for two decades. Investors read Teledyne as the reference case in capital allocation, where the same executive issued equity when it was dear and retired it when it was cheap. George Roberts wrote the insider memoir of the operating company, and William Thorndike's chapter is what returned Singleton to general circulation among investors.

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