Who Really Runs Copart (CPRT)? I Put Both CEOs Through Five Tests.
The successor is out after 27 months. He sold stock three days before leaving. The man replacing him works for one dollar and once retired 15% of the company in a single strike.
“You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.” — Warren Buffett
In 1989, a nineteen year old walked into Willis Johnson’s office with a proposal.
He was dating Willis’s daughter. He wanted to drop out of college and learn the business instead.
Understand who he was asking. Willis Johnson had crawled through junkyards since he was fourteen. He had survived a year in Vietnam walking point ahead of an entire company. He had sold his house and moved his family into a trailer to buy his first yard. Nothing in his life had ever been handed to him, and nothing would be handed over now.
Willis said fine.
Then he handed him a broom. The kid swept floors, drove forklifts, untangled DMV paperwork, the least glamorous job in the least glamorous industry in America.
His name is Jay Adair.
On July 31, 2026, thirty seven years after the broom, he became chief executive of Copart for the second time. The company is worth $28 billion. He will run it for a salary of one dollar a year.
He replaces Jeff Liaw, the polished Harvard MBA the board spent a decade grooming. Liaw lasted 27 months as sole CEO. The stock fell 38% in his final year. Three days before walking out, he sold another $845,945 of stock.
Two men held the same wheel, at the same company, in the same decade. That means I can run both through the identical five tests I use on every management team I own, and nothing can hide behind different industries or different eras.
I wrote a piece on why Copart is one of the greatest businesses ever built.
This post grades the men driving it. There is a full scorecard at the bottom, four names, five tests, no mercy.
