>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.
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.
> 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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
2 replies →
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.
6 replies →
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.
29 replies →
> 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.
3 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
4 replies →
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.
11 replies →
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.
4 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
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.
2 replies →
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.
4 replies →
“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.
13 replies →
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.
15 replies →
What a genuine, thoughtful, and down-to-earth person. I'm going to miss his annual letters.
> 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
"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"
End of an era.
> (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.
classy to the end
Loved The Snowball Effect I read it at 21 and should probably reread it
What a great read. Buffett could have easily been a comedy writer.
> 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?
2 replies →
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.
1 reply →
Would you rather be 95 years old with a trillion dollars or 25 years old with a thousand?
19 replies →
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.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
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.