Entrepreneur, chairman and CEO of QXO, serial founder of billion-dollar roll-ups.
1956–present · Greenwich, Connecticut
Install Brad's frameworks in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install brad-jacobsInstalls 4 skills from Brad, plus the rest of summon.guide. Source on GitHub.
Bradley S. Jacobs was born August 3, 1956, in Providence, Rhode Island, to Albert Jordan Jacobs, a fashion jewelry importer, and Charlotte Sybil Bander Jacobs. He attended Northfield Mount Hermon School and Bennington College before enrolling at Brown University, where he studied mathematics and music, including classical piano, and left in 1976 without completing a degree. In 1979, at age 23, he co-founded Amerex Oil Associates, an oil brokerage, and served as its CEO until the firm was sold in 1983; within four years it was doing close to $4.7 billion a year in brokerage volume. In 1984 he moved to London and founded Hamilton Resources, an oil-trading firm generating roughly $1 billion a year, where he met his future wife, Lamia. They have four children and live in Greenwich, Connecticut.
In August 1989 Jacobs founded United Waste Systems in Greenwich, Connecticut, applying a roll-up strategy to small, family-owned rural waste-hauling companies with overlapping routes. He took the company public in 1992 and sold it to USA Waste Services for $2.5 billion in August 1997. That same September he founded United Rentals and applied the identical consolidation playbook to equipment-rental dealers, building it, by his own account, into the world's largest equipment-rental company within roughly 13 months; United Rentals still holds that position. In June 2011 he invested about $150 million to take control of Express-1 Expedited Solutions, renamed it XPO Logistics, and grew it through acquisition into a major freight and logistics company, later spinning off GXO Logistics (valued around $7 billion, 2021) and RXO (valued around $5 billion, 2022) as independent public companies.
In June 2024 Jacobs founded QXO to consolidate the roughly $800 billion North American building-products distribution industry, personally investing close to $1 billion of his own capital and raising more than $5 billion in equity, which Bloomberg called the largest building-products-sector offering and the largest PIPE ever completed for an industrial company. QXO acquired Beacon Building Products for roughly $11 billion in April 2025. In June 2025 QXO made a roughly $5 billion all-cash bid for GMS Inc. and lost it to Home Depot's SRS Distribution subsidiary, which closed its own, higher acquisition of GMS on September 4, 2025. QXO went on to acquire Kodiak Building Partners for about $2.25 billion in April 2026 and agreed to acquire TopBuild, the largest insulation distributor in North America, for about $17 billion later that same month, a deal expected to close around mid-2026, bringing QXO's total deployed capital since founding to roughly $30 billion in under two years. Analysts covering QXO have described Jacobs as a genuine 'key man': as of August 2026, at age 70, no successor has been publicly named, and a meaningful share of the market's confidence in QXO's acquisition pace rides on his personal track record and capital rather than an institutional bench proven to survive his departure. Jacobs has written two books distilling his approach, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars (2024) and How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars (2025), and has spoken publicly, including on Shane Parrish's The Knowledge Project, about using therapy and cognitive behavioral techniques as working tools in business decision-making.
Frameworks distilled from Brad’s life, packaged as Claude Code skills. Each skill is invoked with a slash command and grounded in the primary biographies listed under References.
/brad-jacobs:brad-jacobsPick a big, fragmented, growing industry. Find the bingo quadrant. Hire for intelligence, hunger, integrity, and kindness. Integrate fast and radically accept what goes wrong.
Source: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs (2024)
/brad-jacobs:bingo-quadrantScreen a fragmented industry the way Jacobs screens one before committing a dollar: big enough, growing faster than GDP, and a real technology or data lever the incumbents don't have.
Source: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs (2024), The industry-research method behind United Waste Systems, United Rentals, XPO, and QXO
/brad-jacobs:hundred-day-integrationAssign individual ownership, not committees. Ask the frontline two blunt questions. Push good practices out fast. Integration, not the signing, is where the value is won or lost.
Source: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs (2024), The post-acquisition integration playbook behind United Rentals and XPO
/brad-jacobs:resignation-testScreen for intelligence, hunger, integrity, and kindness. Run 7-8 real interviews. Then imagine they just quit: panic means an A-player, relief means you already know the answer.
Source: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs (2024), The four-quality hiring filter and the resignation test
Install in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install brad-jacobsBring Brad’s frameworks into your terminal. One install registers every guide’s skills.
“If you can find a big, hairy deal with solvable problems, that's where the real money is.”
“If you resist embracing an imperfect situation today, you might lose the opportunity to capitalize on it tomorrow.”
“A healthy fear of failure has kept me sharp.”
“The question, 'What was the happiest part of your day?' has a more uplifting effect than 'How was your day?'”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Jacobs_(businessman)
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