>Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.
>I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.
>I wish all who read this a very happy Thanksgiving. Yes, even the jerks; it’s never too late to change. Remember to thank America for maximizing your opportunities. But it is – inevitably – capricious and sometimes venal in distributing its rewards.
>Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better.
Warren Buffett is a great investor but nobody in finance buys his folksy image. Everybody knows he's an animal.
I heard from folks in the room that the way 3G and Buffett came in to do layoffs at Tim Hortons was one of the most cold blooded things they've ever seen.
It's funny - having followed Buffett for a while I was going to dispute the everyone knows he's an animal bit but wasn't sure of the definition of an animal in that context so googled it and google's AI came back referencing your HN post(!):
>The specific phrase was noted in a recent online discussion related to Warren Buffett, where a user commented, "Warren Buffett is a great investor but nobody in finance buys his folksy image. Everybody knows he's an animal," to suggest he is a ruthless, cold-blooded businessman, likely in reference to aggressive business tactics like mass layoffs.
Anyway I don't think he's a ruthless cold-blooded type, although he is educated and very hard working. Also sometimes layoffs happen in business.
Warren Buffet is the definition of oligarchy. Dude runs a rail and insurance monopoly while buying large top stocks for yield. He maintains a persona of this traditional and nice family dude who is old and wise. But this is the US, and people are ranked/valued by how rich they are regardless of how it is acquired.
Still, he avoided political scrutiny (say comparing to Musk or Bezos) by maintaining this image. That was wise.
Buffet is a bigamist. By all intents and purposes he lived with two wives. The legal status was not that of bigamy, to be clear. He married his other wife after his first wife died.
The personal section here is not exactly false, but is a great example of how one should not trust Wikipedia outright. A careful reading of it shows his lifelong relationships/marriage with two women at the same time.
Look, I'm not going to yuck his yum. Do whatever you want man. But the homely aww shucks image is very intentional. And very much against his actual life choices. Homespun he ain't.
He's donated, already, the equivalent of 200+ billions USD (give or take 420M class B shares).
Say what you want, but the list of billionaires who have donated such large amounts of money while still alive (or dead) is small.
Cherry picking events like layoffs, without truly knowing how much was he involved (Berkshire directors notoriously enjoy lots of autonomy) or if the layoffs made sense, etc, seems a stretch when we're drowned with sociopath world-ruling-ambitious CEOs, from Musk to Altman, through Thiele.
You really fighting on the wrong side of the hill, Buffett has advocated for higher taxes for ages. He's neve made it a secret and he's always said that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.
In any case, what am I looking at here? There's no tax dodging. He gets paid 100Mish per year and pays taxes on those amounts.
You don't get taxes on your stock appreciation until you sell.
Benchmarking against a single person doesn't make sense. Consider how philanthropic someone is vs. how philanthropic they could be with their means. This list helps give perspective.
It is logically consistent to play the game by the rules that exist, and simultaneously advocate for changing the rules. There is no reason to fall on the sword alone.
To whom? To "charities" owned by other billionaires such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and those owned by his children.
I don't want billionaires to donate anything, I don't want them to use their money to shape the world to their liking. I want them to pay their fair share of taxes and a functional government that properly allocates those extra funds instead of funding the bare minimum.
We shouldn't tax production but what people take, like land, or polluting our environment, or monopoly privileges granted by government.
Which all coincidentally tax billionaires a lot to the point there might not be billionaire, but it's not the 'fair share' that people thought of. It's not asking the rich people to pay more because they make more, but because they owned non-reproducible privileges or because they imposed a cost on our shared environment such as CO2 emission.
Don't tax what people produce, but what they took.
The tax revenue collected would be then be invested by government to boost the economy or else return to the people via the Citizen's Dividend.
> Billionaires are simply people who play the money game best.
False in the general case - with inherited wealth, someone who starts with a lot but grows more slowly will beat a fast grower who started with nothing, at least on short time scales.
In other words, you can build a better OS than Windows today, and have better business sense than Bill Gates, but it'll still take you years to catch up to him wealth wise if you're starting at zero.
> I’m not the best basketball player, but I can admire the game of the best players without being jealous of them.
I agree with that - with any art/practice (business, programming, music, sports, etc), it's always inspiring to see the best play.
However, I'd argue that in our current business culture, many players will
1) do things I'm not comfortable doing morally - the sports equivalent of Maradonna's Mano de Dios [0] - so I'm not really comfortable using them as role models (I just tell myself I can do better by playing fair). Examples include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, so-called libertarians with entire business that consist of "use your friends in government to get juicy government contracts and grow rich off that sweet, sweet taxpayer money" (SpaceX, Palantir), Jobs, Zuckerberg and Gates ripping off their friends and co-founders, products that are intentionally addictive (cigarette companies), etc.
2) not actually be that good but just be in a good position - many rich people are honestly just lucky. Yes, you have the serial entrepreneurs that make _several_ billion dollar fortunes like Jim Clark, you have the wise investors like Warren Buffet, but you also have people like Adam Neumann [1]or any New York real estate tycoon who got started with a small million-dollar loan from their millionaire parents/Saudi oil princes who just got lucky.
In particular, I firmly believe I've got more money-making talent than a random Saudi oil prince, even if my bank account doesn't reflect that.
Or to use the sports metaphor, I believe I'm a better player than a lot of people currently in the big leagues, even if it's taking a while for the rest of the world to realize that :)
> Examples include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, so-called libertarians with entire business that consist of "use your friends in government to get juicy government contracts and grow rich off that sweet, sweet taxpayer money" (SpaceX, Palantir)
Not true regarding SpaceX, they were just cheaper and better than the competitors. They had to sue the government to even be able to compete against Boeing/Lockheed for military contracts. Who had more friends in the government in the 2010s, SpaceX or Boeing/Lockheed? In 2014, NASA awarded two contracts to develop spacecrafts for transporting astronauts to the ISS (at the time, American astronauts flew to the ISS only on Russian Soyuz). SpaceX received $2.6B (for Dragon), Boeing received $4.2B (for Starliner). Since that time, SpaceX has made 11 operational flights with astronauts to the ISS, while Boeing has made 0 (they're still working on it). It's not friends in the government, it's delivering services faster and for a lower price.
Yeah, I know about that, but I was specifically talking about SpaceX winning contracts by simply being a better option than other competitors, not because of any "friends in the government". Musk wasn't even a billionaire yet, and I doubt he had government friends at the time who did him any personal favors. And in the end the government got what it wanted, Tesla did make a lot of electric cars and repaid the loan much earlier than required. While the current government that Musk helped get elected ended all subsidies for electric cars.
yeah true, we shouldn't negate how superior spaceX was compared to competitors.
however what made him a billionaire was gvt contracts. I guess all i'm tryna say if you wanna be a fat cat (rich) gvt contracts is a lucrative way to do it.
Who do you think is responsible for such a dysfunctional government? Is it your average working class person earning about $65k/year or is it billionaires that can throw unfathomable amounts of money at any topic of their interest without it even making a dent in their pocket?
To take a recent example, the median income in New York City is about $79k/year (before taxes), while Bill Ackman alone essentially threw away 21.5x that in his failed attempt to influence the mayoral election.
Gee golly, really!? Thanks for letting me know, I had no idea!
I could've also mentioned Ackman personally calling Trump in 2020 to beg him to shut down the economy for a month and my argument would be just the same: I don't want billionaires using their money to shape the world to their liking.
Not surprised, but the best solution is not to let billionaires control, tax free, major parts of society instead. The best solution is building a more functional democracy which is in charge of redistribution.
Politicians are more ethical than billionaires. They’re even more ethical when billionaires can’t buy them by spending an exorbitant amount “supporting” a candidate.
No matter where you are on the political spectrum, you almost certainly believe that at least some billionaires carry a disproportionate responsibility for that dysfunction. Whatever they are, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, George Soros or indeed Warren Buffett aren't just passive observers of government.
The government already has way more money every year to spend. It wastes a lot of it.
A world where all surpluses are distributed by a committee of politicians and their buddies would a be a terrible one.
> To "charities" owned by other billionaires such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Which are responsible among other things for the quasi-total eradication of polio from this planet, provided vaccines for billions (literally) people across the globe in poor countries and have been major contributors in malaria and hiv treatment, prevention and research.
Also, they provided funds to millions of small rural farmers in third world countries to improve productivity and yields.
When I traveled Madagascar, plenty of villages had water and waste infrastructure built with the aid of that foundation too.
By the way, their balance sheets are public, and audited every year.
I'm baffled by the low-level conspirationism encountered on HN, it feels more and more like reading boomer's facebook everyday.
> Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.
Considering the Warren Buffett wisdom-industrial complex this might be the best place to share these nuggets. And I know his heart is in the right place, but the fact that you need to spell this kind of thing out is somehow extremely depressing.
The fact that he spelled it out does not imply that it needed to be said. There is no idea in that letter, that is not personal history, that hasn't been said before.
"Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman."
Keep also in mind that the cleaning lady and the receptionist usually know way way more about the insides of a company than an entire board of directors and managers ever will.
It is also extremely beneficial to your own health to be nice and friendly to the people who clean, prepare your food and aid your medical well being. They will remember. They will decide how to help you when you absolutely need it.
//Keep also in mind that the cleaning lady and the receptionist usually know way way more about the insides of a company than an entire board of directors and managers ever will.
In Buffet's time maybe. Nowadays the sanitation staff more likely to be a contractor from some form of MSP on an exploitative contract with a 3-6 month lifespan. All the more reason to be nice, but don't expect an 'Inside Baseball' level of insight. That sort of thing is generally the realm of Executive Assistants in contemporary offices.
Oh i was not referring to corporate or investments strategies here. I was talking about what is actually going on inside the building and who hates who. Always assume the highest-ups hate everything and each other, it is all fake, ever.
But that’s what people do - they would wine and dine some low level employees to get inside info.
You want to know when how much shit new GTA developers take by managers pressing them on deadlines - guy doesn’t have to spell it out he just needs to nag a bit here and there while having a beer.
Then you can know if they are not pressing them all goes smooth and they really will release when they want - if they are pressed much most likely product is in shambles and they most likely will not hit any targets or promises.
You should absolutely be a good human to people, but I don't think it is at all true to say "the cleaning lady and the receptionist usually know way way more about the insides of a company"
Truth is they generally don't and they also don't care. Why would they? They literally are not paid enough to care.
1. CEOs have become very greedy. (Elon's pay package)
2. America will experience a downturn and the market could go down > 50%.
3. He's not giving a penny more to The Gates' foundation.
> Our stock price will move capriciously, occasionally falling 50% or so as has happened three times in 60 years under present management. Don’t despair; America will come back and so will Berkshire shares.
He definitely wants us to think that about his integrity, his fans even more so and in fairness, he's pretty good. Not quite the sunday-school capitalism perfection that some would have us believe. Which can grate a bit if you've looked in detail at his career.
Maybe, but I’m not perfect either. The scale is just different. It’s clear that the standard for rich people isn’t all that high, so in the company of the remaining 1B+ crowd he looks pretty decent.
I’ve never quite understood the meme about Warren Buffett being a More Ethical Billionaire™. The defenses are always like “It’s not fair to judge him solely for BNSF giving rail workers one paid sick day per year because he also owns GEICO, which settled a suit last year about (among other things) illegally surveilling and telling employees to call the police on people that approached them about unionizing”
The "white knight" purchase of Salomon Bros stake to "save" them from a hostile takeover was a redistribution of wealth from the existing shareholders who would have accepted the deal to him & his fund. Is that evil? No, I don't think so. Is it perfect ethics, that's a personal ethical call. Colluding with management to redistribute wealth from the shareholders professional managers are meant to serve to yourself? Certainly profitable. Salomon managers kept their jobs and bonuses too. Buffet spoke about how impressed with their ethics he was and that being his motivation. Ok.
The purchase of the Goldman's stake during the GFC at what was it a 20% discount to market? Evil? Again no. Did he insist instead of just taking a huge windfall, on underwriting an offer at that price and throwing it open to small investors so anyone who would back the bank in the crisis collects 20% on top of buying on market? That would be hugely admirable, democratic and patriotic but less profitable.
Going to the start, moving Berkshire's pension fund from debt to equity. Did he get the approval of all the pension plan's beneficiaries for that change in risk? He was right, fine, sure. Was that his risk to take on their behalf? Worked out great. Do you want your pension fund manager going against the accepted wisdom on risk? Well you do if it works, but you can't take on the risk in hindsight. There are no shortage of managers who /know/ they're right and the market is wrong, like he did then. Do you want them to act on that with your assets without your full and informed consent? You (and I) do if it's Warren Buffet but he was not Warren Buffet yet.
On the standards of investment managers he is pretty good, as I said. Is he this perfect paragon of ethics. Well his fans seem to think so (and loudly) and they are allowed to. As am I to differ with that assessment. This is worlds away from declaring that Buffet is in league with both Darth Vader and Sauron to torture innocent babies to an early death and a fate of never having heard of Benjamin Graham. I would say he is far more on the right side of things than wrong and has been largely a force for good in the investment industry. "Which of his perfections impresses you the most?" Give me a break. Critical faculties are worth keeping.
Yeah he’s not quite Jack Welch level of dissonance between reality and his fanboys, but he’s hardly some superhero for profiting from the great financialization of the US economy. He made sure his book got bailed out during the GFC. He cheered on Wells Fargo while they opened up a bunch of fraudulent accounts. And so on.
Well yeah, if he wouldn't have profited from the great financialization of the US economy, he couldn't have amassed nearly the wealth that he has amassed, and we wouldn't be talking about him now, so the point is kind of moot. Let's say that, in the cut-throat world of big money, he is (or, at this point, was), one of the nicer guys...
And when he found out about Wells Fargo's behavior, he liquidated the position and has remained out of it. I fail to see the problem with what he did in that case. As a ~5% holder he (Berkshire) had no special control over the company in terms of micro-audits to surface such fraudulent behavior promptly as it was happening.
> As a ~5% holder he (Berkshire) had no special control over the company in terms of micro-audits to surface such fraudulent behavior promptly as it was happening.
Apropos of this particular scenario, acting like an individual shareholder with your 5% of a company's stock is helpless to exert influence on the board is not at all accurate. Realistically, at that scale, anyone who holds even 1% is someone you better listen to (not necessarily follow, to be clear) when they pick up the phone.
And that's when its someone who is also not someone who opens their mouth and has millions of followers who also hold stock, like Buffett.
Ask the railroad workers of BNSF about Buffet’s “integrity”. He’s responsible for them being rampantly abused. If you’re not familiar look up interviews with actual workers. They are asked to work insane hours and with little scheduling, and are unpaid when they’re waiting around. The (local) monopolization of the rail industry and constant lobbying against regulations by Buffet’s minions have let this continue to this day.
Let’s not forget Buffet also funded BYD significantly and is responsible for their growth, which basically is undermining his own country and European industry as well. Ultimately it’ll be responsible for putting masses of auto industry workers out of a job. I don’t see integrity as much as just basic private equity style capitalism.
> Let’s not forget Buffet also funded BYD significantly and is responsible for their growth,
What is this weird nationalism? Investing in a company from a foreign country does not make you a bad (or good) person. There is no moral duty to make your own country the most economically powerful one.
I don't like Chinese companies that much either, but if you look at the current US administration's stance on electric cars (and related topics like renewables, battery storage etc.), investing in BYD was actually a smart move...
Care to elaborate? In most developed countries, participation in the armed forces is a volunteer position and considered a form of employment. Even in countries with mandatory military service, the term is finite and the bulk of it is spent in training. As such, soldiers on the front line are typically active-duty veterans that are effectively employees. They can quit if they want to.
> Investing in a company from a foreign country does not make you a bad (or good) person. There is no moral duty to make your own country the most economically powerful one.
Maybe you don’t agree, but I think there is a moral duty to not make the literal enemies of the free world into a superpower. Do you think the Chinese government believes in basic human rights like free speech? No. Buffet could have invested in many other countries. He chose China because he doesn’t have the moral compass he pretends to have.
The BNSF people I’ve talked to have all told me about how much they’ve loved their jobs and what their jobs allowed them to do, including adopting children from Ukraine and get them out of a war zone. Maybe you should talk to more people.
The people to blame for the predicament of the US auto industry are the.. US auto industry.
Perhaps turning every vehicle into a luxury car and getting rid of affordable vehicles is not a good long term solution.
BYD is a fantastic investment, they are not undermining us, we are undermining ourselves and we need to stop being victims.
The people I know from BNSF will tell you that name stands for Better Not Start a Family.
I’ve worked with and known former engineers who left, took lower paying jobs in other industries and not one has ever said I miss it there.
Let’s not even get started on what that industry has evolved into with precision scheduled railroading and the dramatic increase in risk and real derailments that have followed.
> BYD is a fantastic investment, they are not undermining us
My point is that Buffet spent his fortune earned in America, on undermining America and its allies. He has effectively given a strategic boost to the CCP and its past and future abuses.
> including adopting children from Ukraine and get them out of a war zone. Maybe you should talk to more people.
Very few billionaires earn their fortune just "in America". Buffet definitely didn't.I live outside the US and pay thousands of dollars a year to American companies for goods and services, as do many of my friends. The insular separationist view of the global economy is daft and short-sighted.
Not all of us care about certain in-groups over others. Like caring about humanity as a whole.
Nothing wrong with any one investing in BYD or similar tech (vs any other investing). If anything, investing in non-“imperial core” companies seems to be a good thing to balance out unequal exchange and the global north and global south divide.
Investing in BYD is propping up the CCP and their dystopian authoritarian regime. Your phrasing of “imperial core” is meaningless. But the CCP is literally authoritarian in its political system.
To be washed in an addiction, in his case, money, is to give up so much of life.
I hope that his end is free of regret, and that his passing is memory of the wonderful things that he was able to build for so many people that he didn't even know he touched.
I'm sure that the way will be found to do this, as it will be for us all.
What a non story. God forbid people build homes in this country. Manufactured homes, no less, that are extra affordable, but the actuaries require higher interest to make the business work because the buyers are higher risk
If only more billionaires would start sounding as aware as this 95 year-old one:
> But Lady Luck is fickle and – no other term fits – wildly unfair. In many cases, our leaders and the rich have received far more than their share of luck – which, too often, the recipients prefer not to acknowledge. Dynastic inheritors have achieved lifetime financial independence the moment they emerged from the womb, while others have arrived, facing a hell-hole during their early life or, worse, disabling physical or mental infirmities that rob them of what I have taken for granted. In many heavily-populated parts of the world, I would likely have had a miserable life and my sisters would have had one even worse.
> I was born in 1930 healthy, reasonably intelligent, white, male and in America. Wow! Thank you, Lady Luck. My sisters had equal intelligence and better personalities than I but faced a much different outlook.
> [...] A Few Final Thoughts [remaining 7 paragraphs possibly directed at current events]
I have found that it's incredibly hard to get successful entrepreneurs to acknowledge that a lot of their success is down to luck. I think it's got something to do with the Protestant Work Ethic - that if they were smart and worked hard then they "deserve" their wealth , but if they just got lucky they don't "deserve" it. So acknowledging that luck played an important part in their success gives them bad feelings, and they don't want to feel bad.
Conversely there's a lot of unsuccessful entrepreneurs who blame bad luck entirely for their failures. There's a lot of "I didn't deserve that. I worked hard, I made smart decisions. I should have succeeded".
It's hard because while for a 1 in 10,000,000 achievement, even if they're lucky to get 1 in 1,000 just by being born at the right place/time, they still need to fought hard for the rest of 1 in 10,000.
I've seen people attributing Taylor Swift' success entirely to luck. But eventhough of course she has inherent advantage, she still has to defeat tons of people who also has the same or even more inherent advantage as her. The numbers are arbitrary and a spectrum, and I've seen too many people treating it as black and white.
I think your comparison with Taylor Swift is not good, a distraction even.
Billionaires optimize for very different goals than most other people. You don't become one by accident, while you are actually focused solely on your work. That will at most get you to a few million, maybe tens of millions. At higher wealth, you need to focus on the wealth itself. I don't think that that is something good if (even) more people tried to do.
People getting better like Taylor Swift is IMHO much better than people trying to be like a billionaire. The latter is all about controlling more and more important aspects of important parts of society, from production to sales, and in the end politics in general.
Taylor Swift getting really good does not negatively influence others, or force them how to live. Billionaires controlling more and more does. It's a tradeoff. Having more centralized control, like creating a Walmart or an Amazon, has advantages, but it also has disadvantages.
Also, the reason there even is the option of becoming that wealthy, controlling so much value, is almost entirely outside the hands of the individual. Like every human, billionaires too rely almost entirely on the context they live in. The vast majority of what we have was created by the dead, knowledge, infrastructure, culture. Even the most capable human only adds a very tiny amount. Mostly billionaires are good at gaining control over already existing things and other people.
Not necessarily a negative, a central control is essential for anything higher level. The point is that one, they did NOT create most of the things they use, second, there are only so many "chief" positions available in the human network to begin with (even if that number is somewhat flexible).
However, I think the laws of competition don't work for those positions of central power like they do in other "markets". I doubt billionaires are so rich (meaning just the resources they use for themselves) because there is little supply and competition for those positions (you may have trouble finding another Warren Buffett, but many billionaire positions are about the right time and place, especially when it's about resource control and not about innovation). I think there is plenty, and many would be just as capable as many currently holding those spots, but that does not cause their "wages" to fall.
Humanity is all about specialization, but those of us close to or inside of the controlling system - i.e. closer to the money - use their positions to get a much larger share. We also have a lot of circular reasoning and justifications: It's just, otherwise the (finance) system would not have created that outcome! Which makes questioning that very system impossible, because it tautologically justifies itself no matter what.
This is very true in my limited experience. The two very rich people I've known relentlessly pursued getting rich, even while the rest of us were working hard on technical things at their companies. It's quite tiring how much they think about money / company structures / shareholdings.
Yeah I've noticed it even in games. It's an industry known for being high risk and very fickle in success, but you'll still see so many devs profess that "you just have to make a good game the audience wants!" If only it was that straightforward.
Luck is the crossroad of opportunity and preparation. The "opportunity" here is basically "luck" with a tiny bit of sway. Sometimes opportunity is missed or never comes from no fault of your own. If more people saw it this way they may not cast it off purely as happenstance.
I think this is because of the protestant work ethic + probability/statistics instead of deterministic chaos.
Deterministic chaos in the sense of "fixed, non-random rules producing outcomes that are unpredictable in the long term due to extreme sensitivity to initial conditions".
A life lottery of initial conditions and then it plays out via deterministic chaos is just such an unacceptable idea to the modern protestant self conception.
Instead we will continue to pretend the harder you work the luckier you get because at least then we have some free will in the situation.
Buffet is a great example and has made this point practically. Won the life lottery to not have been born in the year 1400 and the idea of buying 6 packs of coke to sell to my friends for a profit as a little boy is just not in my nature, again because of my initial conditions.
You can't be successful without luck, but neither can you be successful with only luck. Most people squander their luck, so those who know how to capture it are probably smart or hard working, or both.
If modern society is inherently unfair and unequal. Then the best thing the powers to be/people at the top of the hierarchy can do is have culture dictate there is meritocracy to justify the status quo and current hierarchies.
The reason they don't believe in the luck part is because the person suggesting it is just saying, "in addition to everything else you did, luck played a critical part". But the successful person hears, "you are only successful because of good luck alone".
At the same time i dont think luck is something prople really want to hear about. It makes a terrible story.
You can't emulate luck, you can't control luck, you can't explain luck.
I suspect luck has less to do with Buffet's fortune than most billionaires since he's in investments, so he gets compared to other hedge funds with similar starting resources. He seems to have made it work over the long term and not just had one lucky break.
Compounding is great, but so is return to the mean. The comparision should be his rate of return. If its continously above the average over a long period, its not luck.
Compounding ensures that he will probably have a lot of money either way, which is why total $$ is a bad proxy for luck vs skill.
> Dynastic inheritors have achieved lifetime financial independence the moment they emerged from the womb, while others have arrived, facing a hell-hole during their early life or, worse, disabling physical or mental infirmities that rob them of what I have taken for granted. In many heavily-populated parts of the world, I would likely have had a miserable life and my sisters would have had one even worse.
Yes, this sounds unfair to our individualist ear. However, I am also cognizant that there could be another lens that is more top down, not acknowledging our sense of individuality, but rather a layer at the species level with crests and troughs distributed and fluctuating across the individuals that come into existence and whose offspring HAS to be affected by the uneven environment in which they find themselves.
Squirrels don't really hoard in the sense trillionaires do ("gathering a great quantity for one's own private collection"), they take seeds and bury them all over the place, which is meaning #2 in the dictionary ("save in one's mind for a future need or use"). The squirrel and other animals eat them later, the 50+% nobody finds to eat can take root. That way, squirrels play an important role in seed dispersal for many species of tree.
I suppose the trillionaire analogy would be they themselves investing money.
I remember reading recently that it had been disproved that squirrels can actually remember where they bury all their nuts and seeds. Maybe some, but quite a lot they cannot.
They end up eating food buried by other squirrels as well as their own.
No, you're ascribing will to a blind and undirected process. Squirrels that survive in recent years and decades bury more food than they ever eat, whether that specifically helped them against certain selection pressures or whether it vestigially remains as a non-impacting behavior.
And over the long term it compounds to more food for their descendants through the buy and forget investments (the trees that sprout out of the stashes).
I don't know how much of my image of him is his public facade. But the facts that he contently lived in the first house he bought in Omaha for his whole life and stayed together with his wife for many decades, working in the same office until old age, i find very admirable. It is such a contrast to the flashy, unhinged jet-setting lifestyle that many billionaires display nowadays.
On contrary, it's sad that he can't see how his "I Don't Buy What I Can't Understand" strategy wins again. Buffet thrives when bubbles burst.
More than third of Berkshire valuation is now cash.
Berkshire has $350 billion USD in cash and cash equivalents. They accumulate cash because they don't find enough things worth buying (all stocks seem too expensive for them). When the bubble bursts, there will be undershoot and Berkshire starts buying.
He's been through a few bubble bursts. He used to run basically a hedge fund but wound it up in 1969 at near the top of that bubble and switched to running Berkshire.
So it will be the Greg Abel show during the next meeting in Omaha? Unenviable task. The crowd will be very supportive but those are huge shoes to fill.
They'll sell off / spin-off the smaller businesses (which were held because of sentiment), simplify the business positions, and focus more on Abel's specializations. And Berkshire will lose some of the so-called Buffett premium. Impossible shoes to fill. They'll effectively break Berkshire up. A lot of that cash will go to stock buybacks as the Buffett premium vanishes.
I highly doubt that spin-offs will be a major part of Berkshire’s foreseeable future. Offering a permanent home for good businesses is one of Berkshire’s advantages when competing for acquisitions. Breaking up Berkshire would mean giving up on that competitive advantage.
> In 1958, I bought my first and only home. Of course, it was in Omaha, located about two miles from where I grew up (loosely defined), less than two blocks from my in-laws, about six blocks from the Buffett grocery store and a 6-7-minute drive from the office building where I have worked for 64 years.
He famously drives himself to work every day in a battered old car because he doesn't see the point in spending money where he can avoid it, so I'm sure he's timed it.
Nothing makes a joke stop being funny to kids faster than an adult trying too hard to get in on it! Some day when they're older they'll realize that was your goal and the cycle will continue.
It just gets stuck in your head and is something to laugh at. The kids who are into it are too young to remember the other catch phrases we got into. My four year old repeats it all the time, which keeps it stuck in my head.
I'm just waiting for Sesame Street to declare 6 and 7 the numbers of the day.
You not getting it is the main point of the saying: it's slang term that young folks (in-group) are using to differentiate themselves from the not-young folks (out-group).
It originated as a brag - a basketball player said it like "I am 6' 7", therefore I am a high quality male and women should reproduce with me". Then shorter people picked up on it
Studied a listed company for about a year, invested a very negligible amount not knowing the share price was at an all-time high. Mr. Market doubled my principal in about 16 months. I realize my intelligence had no role here. It's a defense company being controlled by a democratically elected, nationalistic government. Mr. Market is doubling my money, not me.
He does also own holiday homes and farms but for the most part he doesn't go in for the typical billionaire lifestyle. On the surface it seems less awful than Musk or Zuckerberg but to hoard that kind of wealth while people suffer is unethical. He may have pledged to give away his wealth, but now he's giving it to his children to give away. What's stopped him from giving it away for the last 30 years?
Excessive consumption isn't really the main problem with billionaires. It's the money they don't spend on consumption which is worst. The money spent on the pursuit of more money, buying up zero-sum goods that shouldn't even be for sale, like political power.
From my reading, GP is saying that, if one problem is the main one, it is the problem of billionaires spending money on not-consumption. There was no praise for "excessive consumption".
Maybe it just shows that opportunity is the most important aspect of (some measure of) success. It's not that these were one in a billion folks. Maybe buffett himself was one in a billion, and by just giving the normies around him opportunities, many of them made something massive out of it
Why should he stop caring about the things he spent his whole life building?! You don't stop caring about things you love just because you get old. Maybe you don't care about your business because your goal is to sell your idea to Big Tech and sip cocktails for the rest of your life, but that's not what this is about.
If you think world hunger and global warming can be solved purely with financial means, you live in a damn simple fantasy.
If you are younger than 95, you are richer than Warren. Time is our finite resource and I'm sure he would give anything to trade places with you. Spend your riches wisely.
Time is a finite resource and his billionaire class has spent billions making sure to get as little time to myself as possible. And now even that fell through as I can't even grab a job to cover rent.
A 25-30 year old man with all the accumulated wisdom and life experiences of a 95 year old highly successful man… would literally have opportunities worth many trillions of dollars?
Because they would literally be multiple times better than the next most competent person on Earth of a similar age, and literally dozens of times better than even the median unicorn founder.
So it seems like a given that the relatively paltry sum that Berskhire controls would be insignificant in comparison.
With all due respect, I think your analysis is wrong. He points out how much luck plays into everything and so even if someone younger with 95 year experience came out I think he'd point out that in the end there's an element of luck to everything. The world isn't deterministic.
If picking as a finishing poker position, I'd definitely to end up as the 95 year old with a trillion dollars. When you're 95, life is about reflecting and living more with the past - and I like reflecting about that outcome with its share of certainly many greats and bads it takes to accumulate that kind of fortune. 25 years old with a thousand dollar on the other hand, statistically speaking, is starting and will finish with mediocre chip stack. Just the laws of averages sorry.
If picking as a starting poker position, I'd definitely want to be the 25 year old with a thousand because you'll be able to play more hands and have more experiences and hopefully have more fun even if you'll most likely end up very average or lose your entire chip-stack. I guess what I'm saying is there's no virtue in poverty and no guarantee wealth will bring you ultimate satisfaction either. Your choice is a false mutual exclusivity imho (in that everyone is 25 AND 95 [assuming that that they in everyone lives to 95], someone wanting to be 25 again doesn't imply that their previous journey to 95 is somehow intrinsically worth less - like an adrenaline junkie wanting to ride again the rollercoaster he just got off from).
At 95 you're a lot closer to the end of everything than the start, your body is really giving up and it is exceedingly difficult to enjoy anything much.
The speculation is that buffet would likely give up his entire wealth and have his expertise wiped to wind back his biological clock 70 years. Would he? I don't know, ask him maybe.
What can you do with $100m at 95 you would actually enjoy? Again ask him. Or any elderly friend or relative. It is unlike to be a fun conversation, at least in my experience.
At 25 if you have a windfall of only $1000 you've likely got some ideas!
>What can you do with $100m at 95 you would actually enjoy?
At 95 with 100m, it's less about what I can do with that time left and more about how to make the world better off by the time I croak. I lived my life, as far as I'm concerned.
Putting it another way: I'm out the door in 2 weeks, some people would spend it relaxing. I'd make sure to document as much as I can and keep the transition as low friction as possible.
Note that Warren's personal wealth has been vastly more than he and three generations of his ancestors could ever possibly spend however frivolously for /decades/ now.
The only thin you can do with that money is give it away in charity or politics.
So what has he done with that time? He doesn't seem to be into frivolous spending much at all as far as is reported.
After a fulfilling and education-rich childhood, you awaken from a 70 year coma to discover that, as part of a complicated tax dodge, billionaires had been putting assets in your name, while maintaining control of them while you were in a coma.
You have a trillion dollars, but not the life experiences to look back upon, or any actual personal accomplishments.
But in all seriousness, if I had to choose, I think I'd rather be 25 with $1k.
I really don't need a trillion dollars, at any point in my life (and certainly not with too few years left to do anything with but the tiniest fraction of it). I don't need a billion dollars, even. I figure $20M would allow me to do anything I wanted to do, with a healthy cushion in case anything went wrong. (Well, with $20M, even if I were to triple my spending habits, I'd likely still die with more money than I started with.)
I'm not sure that I fear death, but I do recognize at middle age that time is finite, and there are so many things to do in this world. Even with close to nothing as a $1k-holding 25-year-old, I could strive to make things better for myself, and likely look forward to a lifetime of experiences. At 95 that would nearly all be behind me.
Put another way: if I was 95 and had a trillion dollars, and there was some highly advanced, crazy-expensive procedure I could undergo to reduce my biological age down to 25, even if I'd only have $1k left over afterward, I expect I'd do it.
Depends on who you ask. From my grandma (97), it apparently stops being as fun when you start losing autonomy and all your relatives your age are dead.
The thing is, when you're 95 years old with a trillion dollars, you have lived 70 years making a trillion dollars (which can be quite fun! Warren B certainly seems to have enjoyed it) and along the way you've - no doubt - spent a decent amount of time as a billionaire. Do not discount the part of life behind you... it's just as real as the part ahead.
This is actually a pretty hard question for me because you’re basically asking. Do you want the power to be able to change the world in radical ways by giving up your life? Suicidal Brewster’s millions..
I'm not sure I'm convinced a trillion dollars in one person's hand could radically change the world. Money is a big deal, to be sure, and money gives you a lot of power, but there's so much else when it comes to politics and power that I expect there would be many roadblocks in your way.
And on top of that, it's possible -- perhaps even easy -- to deploy vast sums of money in well-meaning ways that turn out to have disastrous unintended consequences. I don't think I'd want that kind of responsibility.
The world, no. An 9industry, yes. That's more money than many industries make in years. Of course injecting that into any stage can impact the fate of the sector.
Or you can waste it on a year of AI development. It's not ironclad.
>it's possible -- perhaps even easy -- to deploy vast sums of money in well-meaning ways that turn out to have disastrous unintended consequences. I don't think I'd want that kind of responsibility.
Given my current life, I'd rather try something different than have decades more of statis quo.
I mean, you could self fund any political candidate on the planet for the years you had left. That alone could radically change the world. I’m always impressed at the low cost of “lobbying” in politics. You could fund a moon base! A trillion dollars is bonkers money. It’s also different from “paper billionaires” who have resources tied up in stock.
This is the great tragedy of 21st century western life. When you are 25 with a thousand dollars in realized wealth it is so hard to understand the incredible value of the deep out of the money call option you hold on life.
While the 95 year old trillionaire is really just deeply in debt with the creditor about to collect any day now.
95. I'd spend what little time I have left un-screwimg the system I clearly helped break.
25 with a thousand is out on the streets unless you have good famili connections. I'll be long dead before that money starts making money for me anyway.
Depending on what you want to do in life, a trillion dollars will not help and it may even stop you from doing many things you would like to do otherwise.
It’s the end of an era. Buffett’s decision to “go quiet” marks a graceful handoff after decades of unmatched transparency and wisdom in business. Greg Abel stepping in feels right—steady, disciplined, and already trusted. Still, it’s hard to imagine a Berkshire meeting without Warren’s humor and plain talk. Thanksgiving letters sound like a fitting encore.
I always had the impression that the guy is playing a role. He is as amoral as the average capitalist can be, but for some reason he wants people to love him and consider him an ethical archetype.
>Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.
>I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.
>I wish all who read this a very happy Thanksgiving. Yes, even the jerks; it’s never too late to change. Remember to thank America for maximizing your opportunities. But it is – inevitably – capricious and sometimes venal in distributing its rewards.
>Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better.
God speed, dearest Oracle of Omaha.
Warren Buffett is a great investor but nobody in finance buys his folksy image. Everybody knows he's an animal.
I heard from folks in the room that the way 3G and Buffett came in to do layoffs at Tim Hortons was one of the most cold blooded things they've ever seen.
It's funny - having followed Buffett for a while I was going to dispute the everyone knows he's an animal bit but wasn't sure of the definition of an animal in that context so googled it and google's AI came back referencing your HN post(!):
>The specific phrase was noted in a recent online discussion related to Warren Buffett, where a user commented, "Warren Buffett is a great investor but nobody in finance buys his folksy image. Everybody knows he's an animal," to suggest he is a ruthless, cold-blooded businessman, likely in reference to aggressive business tactics like mass layoffs.
Anyway I don't think he's a ruthless cold-blooded type, although he is educated and very hard working. Also sometimes layoffs happen in business.
Just look at how he chopped up GEICO (his favorite company). The company imploded under Buffets hand picked snake of a CEO (Todd Combs).
Seems to be making decent profits though https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insight...
Warren Buffet is the definition of oligarchy. Dude runs a rail and insurance monopoly while buying large top stocks for yield. He maintains a persona of this traditional and nice family dude who is old and wise. But this is the US, and people are ranked/valued by how rich they are regardless of how it is acquired.
Still, he avoided political scrutiny (say comparing to Musk or Bezos) by maintaining this image. That was wise.
The image machine for him really is something.
Buffet is a bigamist. By all intents and purposes he lived with two wives. The legal status was not that of bigamy, to be clear. He married his other wife after his first wife died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
The personal section here is not exactly false, but is a great example of how one should not trust Wikipedia outright. A careful reading of it shows his lifelong relationships/marriage with two women at the same time.
Look, I'm not going to yuck his yum. Do whatever you want man. But the homely aww shucks image is very intentional. And very much against his actual life choices. Homespun he ain't.
To be clear, he had 1 wife and a mistress. I agree it's not in line with his traditional image, but it's not illegal.
Not even really a mistress. His first wife left him and then he got a girlfriend who he married after the first wife died.
In modern America peoples marriages breaking down and then them getting together with someone else is pretty common.
For someone with his wealth, having only one mistress shows some self-constraint.
Not a bigmaist,
Had a wife, they split up, but didn't get divorced because he had no prenup and he was one of the wealthiest people in the country.
After she died he married again.
> Warren Buffet is the definition of oligarchy.
Find a better dictionary.
He's donated, already, the equivalent of 200+ billions USD (give or take 420M class B shares).
Say what you want, but the list of billionaires who have donated such large amounts of money while still alive (or dead) is small.
Cherry picking events like layoffs, without truly knowing how much was he involved (Berkshire directors notoriously enjoy lots of autonomy) or if the layoffs made sense, etc, seems a stretch when we're drowned with sociopath world-ruling-ambitious CEOs, from Musk to Altman, through Thiele.
If somebody focuses on something negative, it's cherry-picking, but if you focus on something positive it isn't?
How much money has he saved dodging taxes over the years[1]?
[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
You really fighting on the wrong side of the hill, Buffett has advocated for higher taxes for ages. He's neve made it a secret and he's always said that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.
In any case, what am I looking at here? There's no tax dodging. He gets paid 100Mish per year and pays taxes on those amounts.
You don't get taxes on your stock appreciation until you sell.
Benchmarking against a single person doesn't make sense. Consider how philanthropic someone is vs. how philanthropic they could be with their means. This list helps give perspective.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2025/02/03/ame...
It is logically consistent to play the game by the rules that exist, and simultaneously advocate for changing the rules. There is no reason to fall on the sword alone.
You lose by not playing the game, it doesn't mean you "like" it.
To whom? To "charities" owned by other billionaires such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and those owned by his children.
I don't want billionaires to donate anything, I don't want them to use their money to shape the world to their liking. I want them to pay their fair share of taxes and a functional government that properly allocates those extra funds instead of funding the bare minimum.
We shouldn't tax production but what people take, like land, or polluting our environment, or monopoly privileges granted by government.
Which all coincidentally tax billionaires a lot to the point there might not be billionaire, but it's not the 'fair share' that people thought of. It's not asking the rich people to pay more because they make more, but because they owned non-reproducible privileges or because they imposed a cost on our shared environment such as CO2 emission.
Don't tax what people produce, but what they took.
The tax revenue collected would be then be invested by government to boost the economy or else return to the people via the Citizen's Dividend.
Billionaires are simply people who play the money game best.
I’m not the best basketball player, but I can admire the game of the best players without being jealous of them.
> Billionaires are simply people who play the money game best.
False in the general case - with inherited wealth, someone who starts with a lot but grows more slowly will beat a fast grower who started with nothing, at least on short time scales.
In other words, you can build a better OS than Windows today, and have better business sense than Bill Gates, but it'll still take you years to catch up to him wealth wise if you're starting at zero.
> I’m not the best basketball player, but I can admire the game of the best players without being jealous of them.
I agree with that - with any art/practice (business, programming, music, sports, etc), it's always inspiring to see the best play.
However, I'd argue that in our current business culture, many players will
1) do things I'm not comfortable doing morally - the sports equivalent of Maradonna's Mano de Dios [0] - so I'm not really comfortable using them as role models (I just tell myself I can do better by playing fair). Examples include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, so-called libertarians with entire business that consist of "use your friends in government to get juicy government contracts and grow rich off that sweet, sweet taxpayer money" (SpaceX, Palantir), Jobs, Zuckerberg and Gates ripping off their friends and co-founders, products that are intentionally addictive (cigarette companies), etc.
2) not actually be that good but just be in a good position - many rich people are honestly just lucky. Yes, you have the serial entrepreneurs that make _several_ billion dollar fortunes like Jim Clark, you have the wise investors like Warren Buffet, but you also have people like Adam Neumann [1]or any New York real estate tycoon who got started with a small million-dollar loan from their millionaire parents/Saudi oil princes who just got lucky.
In particular, I firmly believe I've got more money-making talent than a random Saudi oil prince, even if my bank account doesn't reflect that.
Or to use the sports metaphor, I believe I'm a better player than a lot of people currently in the big leagues, even if it's taking a while for the rest of the world to realize that :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_hand_of_God
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann
> Examples include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, so-called libertarians with entire business that consist of "use your friends in government to get juicy government contracts and grow rich off that sweet, sweet taxpayer money" (SpaceX, Palantir)
Not true regarding SpaceX, they were just cheaper and better than the competitors. They had to sue the government to even be able to compete against Boeing/Lockheed for military contracts. Who had more friends in the government in the 2010s, SpaceX or Boeing/Lockheed? In 2014, NASA awarded two contracts to develop spacecrafts for transporting astronauts to the ISS (at the time, American astronauts flew to the ISS only on Russian Soyuz). SpaceX received $2.6B (for Dragon), Boeing received $4.2B (for Starliner). Since that time, SpaceX has made 11 operational flights with astronauts to the ISS, while Boeing has made 0 (they're still working on it). It's not friends in the government, it's delivering services faster and for a lower price.
what about gvt loans that tesla got in 2008/9 for clean energy ? close to half a billion. EV subsidies ?
Elon Musk is a tenderprenuer, as we call them in africa.
Yeah, I know about that, but I was specifically talking about SpaceX winning contracts by simply being a better option than other competitors, not because of any "friends in the government". Musk wasn't even a billionaire yet, and I doubt he had government friends at the time who did him any personal favors. And in the end the government got what it wanted, Tesla did make a lot of electric cars and repaid the loan much earlier than required. While the current government that Musk helped get elected ended all subsidies for electric cars.
yeah true, we shouldn't negate how superior spaceX was compared to competitors.
however what made him a billionaire was gvt contracts. I guess all i'm tryna say if you wanna be a fat cat (rich) gvt contracts is a lucrative way to do it.
Not like it's free money.
Your government is pretty dysfunctional the way it is. I'm not surprised billionaires don't want to waste their taxes on that crap.
Who do you think is responsible for such a dysfunctional government? Is it your average working class person earning about $65k/year or is it billionaires that can throw unfathomable amounts of money at any topic of their interest without it even making a dent in their pocket?
To take a recent example, the median income in New York City is about $79k/year (before taxes), while Bill Ackman alone essentially threw away 21.5x that in his failed attempt to influence the mayoral election.
A majority of voters elected Trump, while Ackman failed to influence the mayoral election with his money.
And Trump did it with dramatically less campaign money than Hillary or Harris.
Gee golly, really!? Thanks for letting me know, I had no idea!
I could've also mentioned Ackman personally calling Trump in 2020 to beg him to shut down the economy for a month and my argument would be just the same: I don't want billionaires using their money to shape the world to their liking.
Good for you, I don't want bureaucrats wasting 50c on the dollar to give back what they take. You vote for what you think is right, I'll do the same.
Not surprised, but the best solution is not to let billionaires control, tax free, major parts of society instead. The best solution is building a more functional democracy which is in charge of redistribution.
Right, and who gets to decide that? People make it seem like the politicians are somehow more ethical than the billionaires.
Politicians are more ethical than billionaires. They’re even more ethical when billionaires can’t buy them by spending an exorbitant amount “supporting” a candidate.
No matter where you are on the political spectrum, you almost certainly believe that at least some billionaires carry a disproportionate responsibility for that dysfunction. Whatever they are, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, George Soros or indeed Warren Buffett aren't just passive observers of government.
Buffett has actively tried to raise taxes on the rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffett_Rule
The government already has way more money every year to spend. It wastes a lot of it. A world where all surpluses are distributed by a committee of politicians and their buddies would a be a terrible one.
> To "charities" owned by other billionaires such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Which are responsible among other things for the quasi-total eradication of polio from this planet, provided vaccines for billions (literally) people across the globe in poor countries and have been major contributors in malaria and hiv treatment, prevention and research.
Also, they provided funds to millions of small rural farmers in third world countries to improve productivity and yields.
When I traveled Madagascar, plenty of villages had water and waste infrastructure built with the aid of that foundation too.
By the way, their balance sheets are public, and audited every year.
I'm baffled by the low-level conspirationism encountered on HN, it feels more and more like reading boomer's facebook everyday.
We are saying different things.
You're saying that WB was not shy to give away money. I'm saying that he was not shy to make it.
> Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.
Considering the Warren Buffett wisdom-industrial complex this might be the best place to share these nuggets. And I know his heart is in the right place, but the fact that you need to spell this kind of thing out is somehow extremely depressing.
The fact that he spelled it out does not imply that it needed to be said. There is no idea in that letter, that is not personal history, that hasn't been said before.
"Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman."
Keep also in mind that the cleaning lady and the receptionist usually know way way more about the insides of a company than an entire board of directors and managers ever will.
It is also extremely beneficial to your own health to be nice and friendly to the people who clean, prepare your food and aid your medical well being. They will remember. They will decide how to help you when you absolutely need it.
In general please always follow Wheaton's Law.
//Keep also in mind that the cleaning lady and the receptionist usually know way way more about the insides of a company than an entire board of directors and managers ever will.
In Buffet's time maybe. Nowadays the sanitation staff more likely to be a contractor from some form of MSP on an exploitative contract with a 3-6 month lifespan. All the more reason to be nice, but don't expect an 'Inside Baseball' level of insight. That sort of thing is generally the realm of Executive Assistants in contemporary offices.
Oh i was not referring to corporate or investments strategies here. I was talking about what is actually going on inside the building and who hates who. Always assume the highest-ups hate everything and each other, it is all fake, ever.
That means they know way more about what's going on at many companies. Maybe listen to them for market tips.
But that’s what people do - they would wine and dine some low level employees to get inside info.
You want to know when how much shit new GTA developers take by managers pressing them on deadlines - guy doesn’t have to spell it out he just needs to nag a bit here and there while having a beer.
Then you can know if they are not pressing them all goes smooth and they really will release when they want - if they are pressed much most likely product is in shambles and they most likely will not hit any targets or promises.
You should absolutely be a good human to people, but I don't think it is at all true to say "the cleaning lady and the receptionist usually know way way more about the insides of a company"
Truth is they generally don't and they also don't care. Why would they? They literally are not paid enough to care.
I have never worked anywhere where the cleaning staff knew anything about what the company does or cares. They are cleaning a dozen other offices too.
This is lovely writing. I need to go back and read some of Buffett's other letters.
I took away 3 things:
1. CEOs have become very greedy. (Elon's pay package) 2. America will experience a downturn and the market could go down > 50%. 3. He's not giving a penny more to The Gates' foundation.
Only a temporary fall:
> Our stock price will move capriciously, occasionally falling 50% or so as has happened three times in 60 years under present management. Don’t despair; America will come back and so will Berkshire shares.
It doesn't take the Oracle of Omaha to come up with the bet the American economy will come back out of the next downturn.
I'd skip the Gates foundation at any wealth level.
Elon's pay package is not about getting paid. he just want to retain control of Tesla, since they're going to be producing vast numbers of robots.
Here's a person with integrity. They're very rare these days, especially amongst the wealthy.
He definitely wants us to think that about his integrity, his fans even more so and in fairness, he's pretty good. Not quite the sunday-school capitalism perfection that some would have us believe. Which can grate a bit if you've looked in detail at his career.
Maybe, but I’m not perfect either. The scale is just different. It’s clear that the standard for rich people isn’t all that high, so in the company of the remaining 1B+ crowd he looks pretty decent.
I’ve never quite understood the meme about Warren Buffett being a More Ethical Billionaire™. The defenses are always like “It’s not fair to judge him solely for BNSF giving rail workers one paid sick day per year because he also owns GEICO, which settled a suit last year about (among other things) illegally surveilling and telling employees to call the police on people that approached them about unionizing”
I've all shareholder letters, about 1500 pages. Please point to whatever you're insinuating.
Off the top of my head, a couple of examples.
The "white knight" purchase of Salomon Bros stake to "save" them from a hostile takeover was a redistribution of wealth from the existing shareholders who would have accepted the deal to him & his fund. Is that evil? No, I don't think so. Is it perfect ethics, that's a personal ethical call. Colluding with management to redistribute wealth from the shareholders professional managers are meant to serve to yourself? Certainly profitable. Salomon managers kept their jobs and bonuses too. Buffet spoke about how impressed with their ethics he was and that being his motivation. Ok.
The purchase of the Goldman's stake during the GFC at what was it a 20% discount to market? Evil? Again no. Did he insist instead of just taking a huge windfall, on underwriting an offer at that price and throwing it open to small investors so anyone who would back the bank in the crisis collects 20% on top of buying on market? That would be hugely admirable, democratic and patriotic but less profitable.
Going to the start, moving Berkshire's pension fund from debt to equity. Did he get the approval of all the pension plan's beneficiaries for that change in risk? He was right, fine, sure. Was that his risk to take on their behalf? Worked out great. Do you want your pension fund manager going against the accepted wisdom on risk? Well you do if it works, but you can't take on the risk in hindsight. There are no shortage of managers who /know/ they're right and the market is wrong, like he did then. Do you want them to act on that with your assets without your full and informed consent? You (and I) do if it's Warren Buffet but he was not Warren Buffet yet.
On the standards of investment managers he is pretty good, as I said. Is he this perfect paragon of ethics. Well his fans seem to think so (and loudly) and they are allowed to. As am I to differ with that assessment. This is worlds away from declaring that Buffet is in league with both Darth Vader and Sauron to torture innocent babies to an early death and a fate of never having heard of Benjamin Graham. I would say he is far more on the right side of things than wrong and has been largely a force for good in the investment industry. "Which of his perfections impresses you the most?" Give me a break. Critical faculties are worth keeping.
Yeah he’s not quite Jack Welch level of dissonance between reality and his fanboys, but he’s hardly some superhero for profiting from the great financialization of the US economy. He made sure his book got bailed out during the GFC. He cheered on Wells Fargo while they opened up a bunch of fraudulent accounts. And so on.
Well yeah, if he wouldn't have profited from the great financialization of the US economy, he couldn't have amassed nearly the wealth that he has amassed, and we wouldn't be talking about him now, so the point is kind of moot. Let's say that, in the cut-throat world of big money, he is (or, at this point, was), one of the nicer guys...
And when he found out about Wells Fargo's behavior, he liquidated the position and has remained out of it. I fail to see the problem with what he did in that case. As a ~5% holder he (Berkshire) had no special control over the company in terms of micro-audits to surface such fraudulent behavior promptly as it was happening.
That’s simply not true. The WSJ started reporting on it in 2011 [0]. Berkshire didn’t fully exit their position until 11 years later in 2022 [1].
[0]https://archive.ph/Gc88k
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/17/investing/berkshire-hathaway-...
> As a ~5% holder he (Berkshire) had no special control over the company in terms of micro-audits to surface such fraudulent behavior promptly as it was happening.
Apropos of this particular scenario, acting like an individual shareholder with your 5% of a company's stock is helpless to exert influence on the board is not at all accurate. Realistically, at that scale, anyone who holds even 1% is someone you better listen to (not necessarily follow, to be clear) when they pick up the phone.
And that's when its someone who is also not someone who opens their mouth and has millions of followers who also hold stock, like Buffett.
Ask the railroad workers of BNSF about Buffet’s “integrity”. He’s responsible for them being rampantly abused. If you’re not familiar look up interviews with actual workers. They are asked to work insane hours and with little scheduling, and are unpaid when they’re waiting around. The (local) monopolization of the rail industry and constant lobbying against regulations by Buffet’s minions have let this continue to this day.
Let’s not forget Buffet also funded BYD significantly and is responsible for their growth, which basically is undermining his own country and European industry as well. Ultimately it’ll be responsible for putting masses of auto industry workers out of a job. I don’t see integrity as much as just basic private equity style capitalism.
> Let’s not forget Buffet also funded BYD significantly and is responsible for their growth,
What is this weird nationalism? Investing in a company from a foreign country does not make you a bad (or good) person. There is no moral duty to make your own country the most economically powerful one.
I don't like Chinese companies that much either, but if you look at the current US administration's stance on electric cars (and related topics like renewables, battery storage etc.), investing in BYD was actually a smart move...
> There is no moral duty to make your own country the most economically powerful one.
No? Then why do we ask people to give their lives to make it a safe one?
Safe isn't the same as economically powerful.
Look at Bhutan with their Gross National Happiness as an alternative.
Are you in America? No one in the Us military is giving up lives to keep citizens safe.
For other countries, it’s because the nation state is the current agreed upon divider for certain things like borders.
To moralize nationalism is weird and anti-humanity.
What are they giving up their lives for? American soldiers die in duty every year.
Like the arbitrary bombing of Venezuelans, this isn't to make Americans safer but to make other countries more dangerous.
medals. they all like a medal.
That take says a lot about your perception of power.
Care to elaborate? In most developed countries, participation in the armed forces is a volunteer position and considered a form of employment. Even in countries with mandatory military service, the term is finite and the bulk of it is spent in training. As such, soldiers on the front line are typically active-duty veterans that are effectively employees. They can quit if they want to.
> Investing in a company from a foreign country does not make you a bad (or good) person. There is no moral duty to make your own country the most economically powerful one.
Maybe you don’t agree, but I think there is a moral duty to not make the literal enemies of the free world into a superpower. Do you think the Chinese government believes in basic human rights like free speech? No. Buffet could have invested in many other countries. He chose China because he doesn’t have the moral compass he pretends to have.
The BNSF people I’ve talked to have all told me about how much they’ve loved their jobs and what their jobs allowed them to do, including adopting children from Ukraine and get them out of a war zone. Maybe you should talk to more people.
The people to blame for the predicament of the US auto industry are the.. US auto industry.
Perhaps turning every vehicle into a luxury car and getting rid of affordable vehicles is not a good long term solution.
BYD is a fantastic investment, they are not undermining us, we are undermining ourselves and we need to stop being victims.
The people I know from BNSF will tell you that name stands for Better Not Start a Family.
I’ve worked with and known former engineers who left, took lower paying jobs in other industries and not one has ever said I miss it there.
Let’s not even get started on what that industry has evolved into with precision scheduled railroading and the dramatic increase in risk and real derailments that have followed.
> BYD is a fantastic investment, they are not undermining us
My point is that Buffet spent his fortune earned in America, on undermining America and its allies. He has effectively given a strategic boost to the CCP and its past and future abuses.
> including adopting children from Ukraine and get them out of a war zone. Maybe you should talk to more people.
Is this AI?
Very few billionaires earn their fortune just "in America". Buffet definitely didn't.I live outside the US and pay thousands of dollars a year to American companies for goods and services, as do many of my friends. The insular separationist view of the global economy is daft and short-sighted.
Not all of us care about certain in-groups over others. Like caring about humanity as a whole.
Nothing wrong with any one investing in BYD or similar tech (vs any other investing). If anything, investing in non-“imperial core” companies seems to be a good thing to balance out unequal exchange and the global north and global south divide.
That is interesting, because the chinese do care about in-groups
Investing in BYD is propping up the CCP and their dystopian authoritarian regime. Your phrasing of “imperial core” is meaningless. But the CCP is literally authoritarian in its political system.
Is this satire?
Alas, this is not his only foible.
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/02/warren-buffett-defends-clayt...
Still, some nostalgia and romance is called for.
"Moon River" is appropriate. I've seen him a few times in Omaha at the stadium. I guess that forgiveness is best for most everything.
After all, that's what I want for myself.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uirBWk-qd9A
I feel sorrow for him. I really do.
To be washed in an addiction, in his case, money, is to give up so much of life.
I hope that his end is free of regret, and that his passing is memory of the wonderful things that he was able to build for so many people that he didn't even know he touched.
I'm sure that the way will be found to do this, as it will be for us all.
What a non story. God forbid people build homes in this country. Manufactured homes, no less, that are extra affordable, but the actuaries require higher interest to make the business work because the buyers are higher risk
lined his own pockets carving out companies and making people unemployed. that americans worship a man who never worked a day in his life is telling
That you think Warren Buffett never worked a day in his life is telling.
[flagged]
If only more billionaires would start sounding as aware as this 95 year-old one:
> But Lady Luck is fickle and – no other term fits – wildly unfair. In many cases, our leaders and the rich have received far more than their share of luck – which, too often, the recipients prefer not to acknowledge. Dynastic inheritors have achieved lifetime financial independence the moment they emerged from the womb, while others have arrived, facing a hell-hole during their early life or, worse, disabling physical or mental infirmities that rob them of what I have taken for granted. In many heavily-populated parts of the world, I would likely have had a miserable life and my sisters would have had one even worse.
> I was born in 1930 healthy, reasonably intelligent, white, male and in America. Wow! Thank you, Lady Luck. My sisters had equal intelligence and better personalities than I but faced a much different outlook.
> [...] A Few Final Thoughts [remaining 7 paragraphs possibly directed at current events]
I have found that it's incredibly hard to get successful entrepreneurs to acknowledge that a lot of their success is down to luck. I think it's got something to do with the Protestant Work Ethic - that if they were smart and worked hard then they "deserve" their wealth , but if they just got lucky they don't "deserve" it. So acknowledging that luck played an important part in their success gives them bad feelings, and they don't want to feel bad.
Conversely there's a lot of unsuccessful entrepreneurs who blame bad luck entirely for their failures. There's a lot of "I didn't deserve that. I worked hard, I made smart decisions. I should have succeeded".
It's hard because while for a 1 in 10,000,000 achievement, even if they're lucky to get 1 in 1,000 just by being born at the right place/time, they still need to fought hard for the rest of 1 in 10,000.
I've seen people attributing Taylor Swift' success entirely to luck. But eventhough of course she has inherent advantage, she still has to defeat tons of people who also has the same or even more inherent advantage as her. The numbers are arbitrary and a spectrum, and I've seen too many people treating it as black and white.
I think your comparison with Taylor Swift is not good, a distraction even.
Billionaires optimize for very different goals than most other people. You don't become one by accident, while you are actually focused solely on your work. That will at most get you to a few million, maybe tens of millions. At higher wealth, you need to focus on the wealth itself. I don't think that that is something good if (even) more people tried to do.
People getting better like Taylor Swift is IMHO much better than people trying to be like a billionaire. The latter is all about controlling more and more important aspects of important parts of society, from production to sales, and in the end politics in general.
Taylor Swift getting really good does not negatively influence others, or force them how to live. Billionaires controlling more and more does. It's a tradeoff. Having more centralized control, like creating a Walmart or an Amazon, has advantages, but it also has disadvantages.
Also, the reason there even is the option of becoming that wealthy, controlling so much value, is almost entirely outside the hands of the individual. Like every human, billionaires too rely almost entirely on the context they live in. The vast majority of what we have was created by the dead, knowledge, infrastructure, culture. Even the most capable human only adds a very tiny amount. Mostly billionaires are good at gaining control over already existing things and other people.
Not necessarily a negative, a central control is essential for anything higher level. The point is that one, they did NOT create most of the things they use, second, there are only so many "chief" positions available in the human network to begin with (even if that number is somewhat flexible).
However, I think the laws of competition don't work for those positions of central power like they do in other "markets". I doubt billionaires are so rich (meaning just the resources they use for themselves) because there is little supply and competition for those positions (you may have trouble finding another Warren Buffett, but many billionaire positions are about the right time and place, especially when it's about resource control and not about innovation). I think there is plenty, and many would be just as capable as many currently holding those spots, but that does not cause their "wages" to fall.
Humanity is all about specialization, but those of us close to or inside of the controlling system - i.e. closer to the money - use their positions to get a much larger share. We also have a lot of circular reasoning and justifications: It's just, otherwise the (finance) system would not have created that outcome! Which makes questioning that very system impossible, because it tautologically justifies itself no matter what.
This is very true in my limited experience. The two very rich people I've known relentlessly pursued getting rich, even while the rest of us were working hard on technical things at their companies. It's quite tiring how much they think about money / company structures / shareholdings.
Yeah I've noticed it even in games. It's an industry known for being high risk and very fickle in success, but you'll still see so many devs profess that "you just have to make a good game the audience wants!" If only it was that straightforward.
Luck is the crossroad of opportunity and preparation. The "opportunity" here is basically "luck" with a tiny bit of sway. Sometimes opportunity is missed or never comes from no fault of your own. If more people saw it this way they may not cast it off purely as happenstance.
I think this is because of the protestant work ethic + probability/statistics instead of deterministic chaos.
Deterministic chaos in the sense of "fixed, non-random rules producing outcomes that are unpredictable in the long term due to extreme sensitivity to initial conditions".
A life lottery of initial conditions and then it plays out via deterministic chaos is just such an unacceptable idea to the modern protestant self conception.
Instead we will continue to pretend the harder you work the luckier you get because at least then we have some free will in the situation.
Buffet is a great example and has made this point practically. Won the life lottery to not have been born in the year 1400 and the idea of buying 6 packs of coke to sell to my friends for a profit as a little boy is just not in my nature, again because of my initial conditions.
You can't be successful without luck, but neither can you be successful with only luck. Most people squander their luck, so those who know how to capture it are probably smart or hard working, or both.
I once heard one such entrepreneurs (Éric Larchevêque) defining luck as "preparation meeting opportunity"
If modern society is inherently unfair and unequal. Then the best thing the powers to be/people at the top of the hierarchy can do is have culture dictate there is meritocracy to justify the status quo and current hierarchies.
The reason they don't believe in the luck part is because the person suggesting it is just saying, "in addition to everything else you did, luck played a critical part". But the successful person hears, "you are only successful because of good luck alone".
If I won the lottery I would say it was 100% my skill.
At the same time i dont think luck is something prople really want to hear about. It makes a terrible story.
You can't emulate luck, you can't control luck, you can't explain luck.
I suspect luck has less to do with Buffet's fortune than most billionaires since he's in investments, so he gets compared to other hedge funds with similar starting resources. He seems to have made it work over the long term and not just had one lucky break.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
And compounding works wonders over the long run.
Apparently he started his first investment at age 11. 8 decades is a long time to compound even at low rates.
Compounding is great, but so is return to the mean. The comparision should be his rate of return. If its continously above the average over a long period, its not luck.
Compounding ensures that he will probably have a lot of money either way, which is why total $$ is a bad proxy for luck vs skill.
Many people manage to reach bankruptcy much faster than eight decades.
“All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage“
> Dynastic inheritors have achieved lifetime financial independence the moment they emerged from the womb, while others have arrived, facing a hell-hole during their early life or, worse, disabling physical or mental infirmities that rob them of what I have taken for granted. In many heavily-populated parts of the world, I would likely have had a miserable life and my sisters would have had one even worse.
Yes, this sounds unfair to our individualist ear. However, I am also cognizant that there could be another lens that is more top down, not acknowledging our sense of individuality, but rather a layer at the species level with crests and troughs distributed and fluctuating across the individuals that come into existence and whose offspring HAS to be affected by the uneven environment in which they find themselves.
An organic feature of the natural world?
What other creatures show this kind of hoarding pattern in nature?
Storing more of a thing than can (reasonably) be used in hundreds, or thousands of lifetimes?
I don't know of any (others) that do so, and then pass the hoard down through the generations.
> What other creatures show this kind of hoarding pattern in nature?
Acorn woodpeckers, beavers, and corvids exhibit true, generational hoarding behavior.
Younger generations learn and maintain the same caches, structures, or techniques as their elders.
Chipmunks and Squirrels.
Do they hoard unnecessarily, or do they hoard what they need to get through winter months, without much surplus?
They hoard instinctively. They can't count; they don't have a sense of "this is enough."
They hoard until it gets too cold, then they hibernate/hunker down until it gets warm.
Squirrels don't really hoard in the sense trillionaires do ("gathering a great quantity for one's own private collection"), they take seeds and bury them all over the place, which is meaning #2 in the dictionary ("save in one's mind for a future need or use"). The squirrel and other animals eat them later, the 50+% nobody finds to eat can take root. That way, squirrels play an important role in seed dispersal for many species of tree.
I suppose the trillionaire analogy would be they themselves investing money.
I remember reading recently that it had been disproved that squirrels can actually remember where they bury all their nuts and seeds. Maybe some, but quite a lot they cannot.
They end up eating food buried by other squirrels as well as their own.
you're splitting hairs. Squirrels evolve to save more food for themselves, everything else is an accident
No, you're ascribing will to a blind and undirected process. Squirrels that survive in recent years and decades bury more food than they ever eat, whether that specifically helped them against certain selection pressures or whether it vestigially remains as a non-impacting behavior.
In my view the effects on the ecosystem are way more important than whatever pressure creates a behavior. For both squirrels and trillionaires.
what political and social pressures are squirrels under that trigger them to gather food for other animals?
I've heard that a lot of trees are grown from forgotten squirrel seed stashes. So at the very least they do store more than they eat.
And over the long term it compounds to more food for their descendants through the buy and forget investments (the trees that sprout out of the stashes).
Very much the former.
I don't know how much of my image of him is his public facade. But the facts that he contently lived in the first house he bought in Omaha for his whole life and stayed together with his wife for many decades, working in the same office until old age, i find very admirable. It is such a contrast to the flashy, unhinged jet-setting lifestyle that many billionaires display nowadays.
You have no chance of knowing where he actually spends his time or with whom.
Lucky guy: He managed to retire before having to reckon with the coming end of the Bubble Era. It won't be the same without him.
On contrary, it's sad that he can't see how his "I Don't Buy What I Can't Understand" strategy wins again. Buffet thrives when bubbles burst.
More than third of Berkshire valuation is now cash. Berkshire has $350 billion USD in cash and cash equivalents. They accumulate cash because they don't find enough things worth buying (all stocks seem too expensive for them). When the bubble bursts, there will be undershoot and Berkshire starts buying.
100% agree
He's been through a few bubble bursts. He used to run basically a hedge fund but wound it up in 1969 at near the top of that bubble and switched to running Berkshire.
So it will be the Greg Abel show during the next meeting in Omaha? Unenviable task. The crowd will be very supportive but those are huge shoes to fill.
They'll sell off / spin-off the smaller businesses (which were held because of sentiment), simplify the business positions, and focus more on Abel's specializations. And Berkshire will lose some of the so-called Buffett premium. Impossible shoes to fill. They'll effectively break Berkshire up. A lot of that cash will go to stock buybacks as the Buffett premium vanishes.
I highly doubt that spin-offs will be a major part of Berkshire’s foreseeable future. Offering a permanent home for good businesses is one of Berkshire’s advantages when competing for acquisitions. Breaking up Berkshire would mean giving up on that competitive advantage.
> In 1958, I bought my first and only home. Of course, it was in Omaha, located about two miles from where I grew up (loosely defined), less than two blocks from my in-laws, about six blocks from the Buffett grocery store and a 6-7-minute drive from the office building where I have worked for 64 years.
Is Warren Buffett getting into the meme too?
Hah - I think it's more likely that he has it timed and it literally takes between 6-7 minutes.
He famously drives himself to work every day in a battered old car because he doesn't see the point in spending money where he can avoid it, so I'm sure he's timed it.
What's the meme?
It’s literally just saying 6-7. No, I don’t get it either. My kids thought it was hilarious to watch me grapple with it, though.
It’s the Waaaasssssuuuupppp of the Gen Alpha.
Your comment finally allowed me to understand 6-7 (older millenial)...
Now get off my lawn, Shorty... or pick up the phone.
True, true.
I don't get it either but me using it is a great way to annoy my kids.
Nothing makes a joke stop being funny to kids faster than an adult trying too hard to get in on it! Some day when they're older they'll realize that was your goal and the cycle will continue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6-7_(meme)
It just gets stuck in your head and is something to laugh at. The kids who are into it are too young to remember the other catch phrases we got into. My four year old repeats it all the time, which keeps it stuck in my head.
I'm just waiting for Sesame Street to declare 6 and 7 the numbers of the day.
Oh my gosh, my six year old just said it to me today. What is going on?!
> It’s literally just saying 6-7. No, I don’t get it either.
A linguist goes into the meme and it's history:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laZpTO7IFtA
You not getting it is the main point of the saying: it's slang term that young folks (in-group) are using to differentiate themselves from the not-young folks (out-group).
And hasn't that been the point of slang since forever?
Not the out group, but the unc group.
Sounds like the point was both achieved and obvious.
It originated as a brag - a basketball player said it like "I am 6' 7", therefore I am a high quality male and women should reproduce with me". Then shorter people picked up on it
lol, they dont get it
6 7
What a genuine, thoughtful, and down-to-earth person. I'm going to miss his annual letters.
"Choose your heroes" is the first advice I've heard in a while that's making me stop and think who I hold in high regard with my actions.
"Never meet your heroes"
> It's hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior
> There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.
Huh.
The second quote is not from the posted letter. It was a quote attributed to Buffett by a New York Times column in 2006.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26ever...
I'm aware of that. That does not make the second quote any less relevant.
Buffett has long been a critic of things over favouring the rich. He argued he should pay more tax https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/oct/31/usnews and almost got a law passed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffett_Rule
> (Thrift runs deep in Buffett blood.)
Combine it with the fact that the only real asset you have is your time.
Imagine getting a tailwind at the age of 50 and being financially illiterate. AND, being partially blind.
I was literally too busy to not realize what really mattered. Decades gone by!
Studied a listed company for about a year, invested a very negligible amount not knowing the share price was at an all-time high. Mr. Market doubled my principal in about 16 months. I realize my intelligence had no role here. It's a defense company being controlled by a democratically elected, nationalistic government. Mr. Market is doubling my money, not me.
End of an era.
classy to the end
What a great read. Buffett could have easily been a comedy writer.
Loved The Snowball Effect I read it at 21 and should probably reread it
> In 1958, I bought my first and only home.
He does also own holiday homes and farms but for the most part he doesn't go in for the typical billionaire lifestyle. On the surface it seems less awful than Musk or Zuckerberg but to hoard that kind of wealth while people suffer is unethical. He may have pledged to give away his wealth, but now he's giving it to his children to give away. What's stopped him from giving it away for the last 30 years?
Excessive consumption isn't really the main problem with billionaires. It's the money they don't spend on consumption which is worst. The money spent on the pursuit of more money, buying up zero-sum goods that shouldn't even be for sale, like political power.
> Excessive consumption isn't really the main problem with billionaires. It's the money they don't spend on consumption which is worst.
Which consumables do you think billionaires should spend their money on?
And how would this improve the world?
From my reading, GP is saying that, if one problem is the main one, it is the problem of billionaires spending money on not-consumption. There was no praise for "excessive consumption".
I think billionaires are a policy failure, and should not exist.
What are the odds of all these hugely successful people living a stone's throw from each other in middle of nowhere Nebraska?
Obviously there is something going on there, magic, lots of minerals in the water, something...
Maybe it just shows that opportunity is the most important aspect of (some measure of) success. It's not that these were one in a billion folks. Maybe buffett himself was one in a billion, and by just giving the normies around him opportunities, many of them made something massive out of it
At such an old age why does he care about his business?
With so much money why do his kids care either?
For goodness sake, stop working, try and solve global warming or world hunger or something.
Or buy a small country. Make yourself president. Create a utopia for its population.
But more of the same.. more of the same.. $300B or $301B when you finally kick the bucket? How shallow.
Why should he stop caring about the things he spent his whole life building?! You don't stop caring about things you love just because you get old. Maybe you don't care about your business because your goal is to sell your idea to Big Tech and sip cocktails for the rest of your life, but that's not what this is about.
If you think world hunger and global warming can be solved purely with financial means, you live in a damn simple fantasy.
If you are younger than 95, you are richer than Warren. Time is our finite resource and I'm sure he would give anything to trade places with you. Spend your riches wisely.
Time is a finite resource and his billionaire class has spent billions making sure to get as little time to myself as possible. And now even that fell through as I can't even grab a job to cover rent.
Time is valuable and they are taking it from us.
A 25-30 year old man with all the accumulated wisdom and life experiences of a 95 year old highly successful man… would literally have opportunities worth many trillions of dollars?
Because they would literally be multiple times better than the next most competent person on Earth of a similar age, and literally dozens of times better than even the median unicorn founder.
So it seems like a given that the relatively paltry sum that Berskhire controls would be insignificant in comparison.
With all due respect, I think your analysis is wrong. He points out how much luck plays into everything and so even if someone younger with 95 year experience came out I think he'd point out that in the end there's an element of luck to everything. The world isn't deterministic.
Yeah of course it isn’t deterministic?
That’s why I used the word “opportunities” and not “guarantees”.
Would you rather be 95 years old with a trillion dollars or 25 years old with a thousand?
If picking as a finishing poker position, I'd definitely to end up as the 95 year old with a trillion dollars. When you're 95, life is about reflecting and living more with the past - and I like reflecting about that outcome with its share of certainly many greats and bads it takes to accumulate that kind of fortune. 25 years old with a thousand dollar on the other hand, statistically speaking, is starting and will finish with mediocre chip stack. Just the laws of averages sorry.
If picking as a starting poker position, I'd definitely want to be the 25 year old with a thousand because you'll be able to play more hands and have more experiences and hopefully have more fun even if you'll most likely end up very average or lose your entire chip-stack. I guess what I'm saying is there's no virtue in poverty and no guarantee wealth will bring you ultimate satisfaction either. Your choice is a false mutual exclusivity imho (in that everyone is 25 AND 95 [assuming that that they in everyone lives to 95], someone wanting to be 25 again doesn't imply that their previous journey to 95 is somehow intrinsically worth less - like an adrenaline junkie wanting to ride again the rollercoaster he just got off from).
It's not a poker position. It is everything.
At 95 you're a lot closer to the end of everything than the start, your body is really giving up and it is exceedingly difficult to enjoy anything much.
The speculation is that buffet would likely give up his entire wealth and have his expertise wiped to wind back his biological clock 70 years. Would he? I don't know, ask him maybe.
What can you do with $100m at 95 you would actually enjoy? Again ask him. Or any elderly friend or relative. It is unlike to be a fun conversation, at least in my experience.
At 25 if you have a windfall of only $1000 you've likely got some ideas!
>What can you do with $100m at 95 you would actually enjoy?
At 95 with 100m, it's less about what I can do with that time left and more about how to make the world better off by the time I croak. I lived my life, as far as I'm concerned.
Putting it another way: I'm out the door in 2 weeks, some people would spend it relaxing. I'd make sure to document as much as I can and keep the transition as low friction as possible.
Note that Warren's personal wealth has been vastly more than he and three generations of his ancestors could ever possibly spend however frivolously for /decades/ now.
The only thin you can do with that money is give it away in charity or politics.
So what has he done with that time? He doesn't seem to be into frivolous spending much at all as far as is reported.
After a fulfilling and education-rich childhood, you awaken from a 70 year coma to discover that, as part of a complicated tax dodge, billionaires had been putting assets in your name, while maintaining control of them while you were in a coma.
You have a trillion dollars, but not the life experiences to look back upon, or any actual personal accomplishments.
Well, both, obviously.
But in all seriousness, if I had to choose, I think I'd rather be 25 with $1k.
I really don't need a trillion dollars, at any point in my life (and certainly not with too few years left to do anything with but the tiniest fraction of it). I don't need a billion dollars, even. I figure $20M would allow me to do anything I wanted to do, with a healthy cushion in case anything went wrong. (Well, with $20M, even if I were to triple my spending habits, I'd likely still die with more money than I started with.)
I'm not sure that I fear death, but I do recognize at middle age that time is finite, and there are so many things to do in this world. Even with close to nothing as a $1k-holding 25-year-old, I could strive to make things better for myself, and likely look forward to a lifetime of experiences. At 95 that would nearly all be behind me.
Put another way: if I was 95 and had a trillion dollars, and there was some highly advanced, crazy-expensive procedure I could undergo to reduce my biological age down to 25, even if I'd only have $1k left over afterward, I expect I'd do it.
> Well, both, obviously.
So, 95 with 1k?
that would imply you would live to 95 which is a gift by itself
Depends on who you ask. From my grandma (97), it apparently stops being as fun when you start losing autonomy and all your relatives your age are dead.
The thing is, when you're 95 years old with a trillion dollars, you have lived 70 years making a trillion dollars (which can be quite fun! Warren B certainly seems to have enjoyed it) and along the way you've - no doubt - spent a decent amount of time as a billionaire. Do not discount the part of life behind you... it's just as real as the part ahead.
This is actually a pretty hard question for me because you’re basically asking. Do you want the power to be able to change the world in radical ways by giving up your life? Suicidal Brewster’s millions..
I'm not sure I'm convinced a trillion dollars in one person's hand could radically change the world. Money is a big deal, to be sure, and money gives you a lot of power, but there's so much else when it comes to politics and power that I expect there would be many roadblocks in your way.
And on top of that, it's possible -- perhaps even easy -- to deploy vast sums of money in well-meaning ways that turn out to have disastrous unintended consequences. I don't think I'd want that kind of responsibility.
The world, no. An 9industry, yes. That's more money than many industries make in years. Of course injecting that into any stage can impact the fate of the sector.
Or you can waste it on a year of AI development. It's not ironclad.
>it's possible -- perhaps even easy -- to deploy vast sums of money in well-meaning ways that turn out to have disastrous unintended consequences. I don't think I'd want that kind of responsibility.
Given my current life, I'd rather try something different than have decades more of statis quo.
I mean, you could self fund any political candidate on the planet for the years you had left. That alone could radically change the world. I’m always impressed at the low cost of “lobbying” in politics. You could fund a moon base! A trillion dollars is bonkers money. It’s also different from “paper billionaires” who have resources tied up in stock.
This is the great tragedy of 21st century western life. When you are 25 with a thousand dollars in realized wealth it is so hard to understand the incredible value of the deep out of the money call option you hold on life.
While the 95 year old trillionaire is really just deeply in debt with the creditor about to collect any day now.
95. I'd spend what little time I have left un-screwimg the system I clearly helped break.
25 with a thousand is out on the streets unless you have good famili connections. I'll be long dead before that money starts making money for me anyway.
Depending on what you want to do in life, a trillion dollars will not help and it may even stop you from doing many things you would like to do otherwise.
I would rather be 25 with zero dollars than 95 with infinite dollars. At 95, you’re just waiting for it to be your turn.
It’s the end of an era. Buffett’s decision to “go quiet” marks a graceful handoff after decades of unmatched transparency and wisdom in business. Greg Abel stepping in feels right—steady, disciplined, and already trusted. Still, it’s hard to imagine a Berkshire meeting without Warren’s humor and plain talk. Thanksgiving letters sound like a fitting encore.
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I always had the impression that the guy is playing a role. He is as amoral as the average capitalist can be, but for some reason he wants people to love him and consider him an ethical archetype.
TLDR: have his cake and eat it.