Book Review: How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars

How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars" by Brad Jacobs
Narrated by Brett Barry
Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5) Reading time: ~4 minutes

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an advance audiobook copy for review.

Most business books teach you how to build one company. Brad Jacobs has built eight — and this one is the playbook for what happens after you already know how to win.

That's the promise of "How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars," the follow-up to Jacobs' bestselling "How to Make a Few Billion Dollars." Where the first book was about the mindset that gets a builder off the ground, this one is about what it takes to operate at scale — and having spent years on the receiving end of that exact challenge, I can say it delivers.

Why it matters
A lot of M&A guidance is either too theoretical to use on a Monday morning or too narrow to apply outside one industry. Jacobs — who's completed roughly 500 acquisitions across eight companies, several of them multibillion-dollar — writes from the trenches, not the sidelines. For anyone who has ever sat in an integration meeting wondering which parts of two cultures actually merge and which parts just collide, this book speaks a language you already know.

The big picture
This is a direct sequel, and it wears that well. The first book laid the mindset groundwork — rewiring how you think about risk, opportunity, and failure. This one picks up where scale becomes the challenge: partnering with top-tier global investors, turning a string of acquisitions into one coherent, profitable engine rather than a patchwork of loosely related businesses, and building the organizational backbone — culture, compensation, talent — that keeps it all from coming apart under its own weight. Jacobs also extends the first book's interest in mindset into full psychological terrain here, detailing the meditation practices and cognitive reframing techniques he actually uses to stay level-headed through chaotic deals. He closes by widening the lens entirely, tracing technological evolution across 2.6 million years to frame the responsibility leaders now carry with AI — landing on four possible futures for humanity, from collapse to something close to utopia.

Key takeaways every leader should bookmark
If I'd had this book during my own years running M&A integrations, I'd have dog-eared these points early:

• Shed before you build. Cutting costly, redundant operations early clears the runway for the synergies that actually justify the deal.
• Culture and compensation aren't separate conversations. Jacobs treats them as one aligned system — misalign either, and the best-laid integration plan stalls.
• Employee engagement is a deal term, not an afterthought. The businesses that hold together post-acquisition are the ones where people were brought into the "why," not just informed of the "what."
• Mindset is infrastructure. The meditation and reframing tools aren't soft-skill garnish here — Jacobs positions them as load-bearing, the thing that keeps a leader clear-headed when a deal (or ten) is going sideways at once.
• Treat AI as a leadership responsibility, not just a tool. Jacobs' framing — four possible outcomes ranging from collapse to abundance — is a reminder that how leaders deploy this technology now will shape which future actually shows up.

What works
The advance praise packed into this release — a wall of CEOs and fund managers, from Henry Kravis to Masayoshi Son — could easily read as noise. It doesn't, because the book backs it up: Jacobs writes in plain English about genuinely hard problems, and he doesn't dress up the mechanics of integration to sound more glamorous than they are. For anyone who has lived the acquisition side of a career — I've been through more than eight myself — that plainness is the whole point. This isn't theory. It's a debrief from someone who's run the play dozens of times.

The audio experience
Narrator Brett Barry earns real credit here. The material could easily have landed as a lecture — dense with deal mechanics and business philosophy in the same breath — but Barry's delivery keeps it conversational throughout. At its best, it stops sounding like narration altogether and starts sounding like Jacobs sitting across the table, talking you through it directly. For a book this heavy on both hard tactics and personal philosophy, that's exactly the tone it needed.

The bottom line
"How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars" is a worthy, more advanced sequel — less about finding the will to build and more about the discipline to build well at scale. For anyone who has lived through the acquisition grind, this reads like the manual you wish someone had handed you on day one.

C.Francis 8/20/2026