Biglari Café - Sadars yellow Lambo...

Original menu 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. In 2008, still in his early thirties, he won control of a tired burger chain, Steak ’n Shake, which by his own account was then losing more than $100,000 a day. He fixed the bleeding, turned the company into a holding vehicle, 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 his own investment partnerships, The Lion Fund. Biglari Holdings put company money into the Lion Fund – more than $300 million in 2013 alone. The Lion Fund bought Biglari Holdings shares – 16% of the company by early 2015. Biglari does not retire those shares – he votes them. And on top, the partnerships pay him a 25% incentive allocation above a 6% hurdle. 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 pushed 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. Shareholder lawsuits followed, as did a 2015 proxy fight by Groveland Capital, during which the proxy adviser ISS urged investors to withhold votes from the entire board, citing “persistent and pervasive problematic governance practices.” The incumbents were re-elected anyway. Of course they were.

The capital allocation is where the homage turns experimental. In 2014 he bought Maxim – the lads’ magazine – and in 2016 installed himself as editor-in-chief, because nothing says “disciplined long-term compounder” like personally art-directing swimwear shoots. From October 2017 shareholders paid a fixed $700,000 a month – $8.4 million a year – to Biglari-owned entities for business and administrative services. The dual-class structure adopted in April 2018 left Biglari with some 57% of the voting shares, ensuring that nobody could do much about any of it.

Meanwhile the actual business – flat-top burgers and milkshakes – quietly wilted. After years of growth, same-store sales slid from 2017; dozens of Steak ’n Shakes went dark (57 closed permanently in the first pandemic quarter of 2020 alone); and 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, and the conglomerate has since added insurers (First Guard, Southern Pioneer) and oil and gas interests (Southern Oil, Abraxas). He also has staying power: his campaign against Cracker Barrel, where he once owned nearly 20%, has run for some fourteen years and, by 2025, eight proxy fights – two of his nominees elected, never the man himself. 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.

Museum note: Berkshire Hathaway, for the record, is named after two textile mills. Not one of them was called Warren.

(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.)

Further reading

• Wikipedia – Biglari Holdings (ongoing)
• Indianapolis Business Journal – Biglari’s Steak n Shake licensing deal stirs up critics (2013)
• Nation’s Restaurant News – Activist investor calls for change at Biglari Holdings (2015)
• GlobeNewswire – Groveland on ISS recommendation to withhold votes on the Biglari board (2015)
• SEC – Biglari Holdings Form 10-K for 2018 (dual-class reorganisation) (2019)
• Nation’s Restaurant News – Biglari closes 57 Steak ’n Shake units permanently (2020)
• Fortune – Biglari’s long war with Cracker Barrel (2025)