Akre Cut Mastercard to Buy a Junkyard Stock Down 50%. That Stock Is Copart (CPRT).
One of the greatest compounders alive is sitting on $107 million of losses and buying more. The company just spent $1.6 billion eating itself. The incoming CEO works for $1 a year.
Northern California. The mid 1960s.
A wrecking yard with two thousand dead cars on it. The state is putting a highway through, so everything has to be gone in ninety days. The whole lot goes up for sealed bid.
A farmer sees the ad in the paper. He drives out with his fourteen year old son.
They spend the whole weekend crawling through the trees. The boy marks every car with an X. Complete cars in one count. Stripped ones in another. Two thousand cars. They count them all.
Monday morning. The bidding room.
The other men arrive in business suits. They spent the weekend at home. The farmer arrives in overalls with a filthy kid beside him.
Everyone drops a sealed envelope into a hat in the middle of the room.
The farmer wins at fifteen thousand dollars. A brand new house cost twelve thousand that year. The men in suits stare at him.
Before he can leave the room, one of them walks over and offers him quick cash to hand over the deal. Real money, for a weekend of walking through a junkyard. The farmer says no.
Outside, the boy asks his father why he turned down easy profit.
He’ll come back tomorrow, the father says. And he’ll pay more.
The man came back the next day. He paid more.
The boy never forgot what he saw in that room. The men in suits were not stupid. They were rich, connected, experienced. They lost because they decided a yard full of wrecks was not worth a weekend of their time. They bid on a hunch and assumed nobody would outwork them.
The boy’s name was Willis Johnson.
He would spend the next sixty years doing the exact same thing, on an exponentially larger scale, until his junkyard covered more land than Manhattan and was worth twenty five billion dollars.
That company is Copart. And right now, the market is bidding on it.
The stock is down 50%. Wall Street has decided that self driving cars will end car crashes, that salvage is a dying industry, and that a debt free business with 36% operating margins should trade at the same multiple somebody paid to take out its weaker competitor.
The market is bidding by hunch.
But a few people counted the cars.
Chuck Akre built one of the great compounding records in American investing. An average holding period of eight years. A philosophy that has not moved an inch since 1989. In the second half of 2025, his firm started selling the positions that made its name. Mastercard. Moody’s. Visa. O’Reilly.
It used the money to buy 8 million shares of a junkyard, at an average cost of $41.42.
The stock trades at $28 today. Akre is sitting on roughly $107 million of paper losses.
In the first quarter of 2026, the firm bought more.
At the same time, the company itself spent $1.6 billion devouring its own stock. The largest buyback in its 43 year history. And on July 31, a man who has worked for a salary of one dollar since 2020 returns as chief executive.
Three buyers who counted. One market bidding by hunch.
What did they count? A fee structure, written in the 1980s, that quietly manufactures this company’s own supply. A land bank assembled before the cities arrived, at prices that no longer exist anywhere on earth. And a twenty year trend that Wall Street believes is weather, but that one man built by hand.
Let me show you the count.
