The quarterly conference call with Wall Street is a subtle art — practiced by only a few and tailored to analysts and investors who care more about company performance than how the picture of that performance was painted. 

Even so, retail just lost a master. 

David Simon, who died at age 64 on Sunday, was more than just fashion’s most prominent landlord and chairman and chief executive officer of Simon Property Group. 

He was one of brick-and-mortar’s biggest boosters and one of the few industry leaders with broad enough exposure to the retail industry to speak with depth and conviction to trends at large.  

As he did so each quarter, Simon cultivated a tell-it-like-it-is persona that was part hard-nosed businessman, part cheerleader for the IRL store experience and always defender of the mall. 

Simon rarely gave interviews, but was quick — almost eager — to get down to brass tacks and parry with analysts on the calls.

And, unusually for a big CEO, he was able to acknowledge missteps with candor. 

A favorite topic, of course, was the continuing importance of brick-and-mortar retail as digital-everything came to the fore. But there were others, like how the media talks about retail and whether his malls should have been deemed “essential” during the early days of COVID-19. 

Simon did a little bit of everything over the years, from owning high-end malls and massive outlet centers to investing in retailers themselves. 

And he talked about all of it along the way. Here, a look back at what Simon said as retail and the mall giant navigated the Great Recession, the rise of e-commerce, COVID and more: 

“The new development business is dead for a decade. Maybe it’s eight years, maybe it’s not really completely dead. Maybe I’m over-dramatizing it for effect, but the odds are that there’s going to be very, very little new stuff for quite some time and the best of the breed, the guys that we want to do business and that want to do business with us, we’re going to have our opportunities.” — January 2009

“My longer term goal is to make money. It sounds silly but the fact is we’re pleased with what happened in [the sale of the] Simon Ivanhoe, that we got what we thought was a good offer and we took advantage of it… The fact of the matter is, we like to recycle capital and we like to make money. Our greatest franchise here is in the U.S.” — February 2010

“There’s an undeniable link, I think the movement from your desktop to mobile is a great opportunity for the physical-based environment to take that mobile and enhance it when they’re walking the physical or adjacent or near the physical environment. The fact that they’ve gone mobile and move toward mobile, if we can bridge that to the physical world, I think it’s got a lot of benefits for us. As an industry, it’s not just us, but we’re going to be pushing it hard.” — February 2011

“You know we’re trying to keep our overhead reasonably sane as the company gets bigger and bigger. You know all that, and we’re not going to change. We just don’t think, given our track record, we need to give you each and every little detail. We’re happy to get our arm twisted, yelled at.” — February 2013 

“But instead of looking at [department store closures] as a concern, given that they pay no rent, we actually think that’s a great opportunity for our redeveloping the mall to the next level.” — April 2017

“We do think private equity has been more of a detriment. And, by the way, most of these guys are my buddies, OK? But when you lever up any business, whether it’s a mall business, the retail business and you can’t invest in your product, you’ve got a problem. We’ve seen a lot of that.” — April 2017

“I continue to tour properties each and every week…the traffic is there. It’s so funny, when all the malls go out of business, what are these poor people going to do instead of going to the mall? I don’t know.” — April 2017

“The two big bankruptcies this year — Claire’s had nothing to do with its operation. It’s all about too much leverage. And Toys ‘R’ Us, it was about the fact that it was so levered to begin with that they could never invest in the product, whether that’s online or in the stores or anything. And the natural media narrative is, ‘Well, it’s the mall.’ Well, it’s not. Peel the onion, figure it out.” — April 2018

“We have a long list of retailers that have struggled. Eighty percent to 90 percent of that list have been over [leveraged with debt]. So they couldn’t turn left or right. And you just can’t have too much leverage … you run into an economic difficulty or you need to make investments, you have nowhere to go.” — February 2019

On investing in retailers: “We’re certainly as good as the private equity guys when it comes to retail investment…We love being partners with Authentic Brands Group and we’ll work together on other distressed situations. We’re only going to buy into companies that, we think, have brands and the volume that is worth doing it.” — July 2019

On the COVID closure mandates: “There’s not a lot of difference, frankly, between a Costco store and a Simon mall when it comes to protocols and cleanliness and air quality.  By and large, man, let us compete. We suffered two months, 10,500 days where we could not compete. And that’s just not fair. So I don’t want anything other than the ability to compete.” — August 2020

“Our SPARC operations employ thousands of people. And then when you add Penney’s, you’ve got well over 50,000, 60,000 people. So, don’t underestimate what we’ve done. I mean, these were companies that were, frankly, roadkill and we saved them.” — August 2021

“Physical retail, when I listen to the pundits…they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Read my lips: Physical retail is here to stay. And people really like to shop in the physical world. So don’t believe everything you hear on TV. We’ve got the evidence.” — August 2021

“A little mea culpa” on the performance of the SPARC joint venture in 2022: “We made the mistake that … we budgeted basically flat to ‘21 and ‘21 was for a couple of the brands there [was] just extraordinarily profitable. We made some tactical mistakes at Forever 21. We brought in a new CEO [Winnie Park] to rectify those mistakes. She’s doing a terrific job. So we’re very pleased there. We also are very pleased with J.C. Penney. It’s unbelievably profitable. But we did make the mistake of thinking ‘21 would repeat.” — February 2023

“There used to be 40 million square feet of retail real estate built every year. Now there’s essentially less than a few million here and there. And then there’s been obsolescence, too, which makes the supply shrink as well. The importance of brick-and-mortar has never been higher. Don’t get me wrong, e-commerce is critically important, but all of this stuff about e-commerce, cost of customer acquisition, returns, stickiness, etc., it all continues to be a challenge.” — February 2024