Warren Buffett, Chariman, Berkshire Hathaway Investment Group | Terry Leadership Speaker Series
Jun 03, 2021good morning. It certainly calmed down quickly. That surprised me. Can you hear me? Are you? They have returned well for business school. You know there's nothing better than this. Having the largest investor in the world coming to our campus. It's a pretty boring office. The
investment
s of the German holding company Berkshire Hathaway range from backup insurance. American Express. portions of coca-cola jewel stories entire city braska mr. Baumann has been described as the God-valued Michael Jordan investors of theinvestment
game. He started his first investment company in the mid-1950s with 100 hours of his own money. A few years later, he began investing in a struggling Massachusetts textile mill called Berkshire Hathaway.
During the anniversary of his birth, he began investing capital. in other companies that are looking for insurance that generates cash flows for more investments, which have done very well, in addition, the share prices are around eighteen dollars in 1965. Today, Berkshire is around sixty-nine thousand one hundred dollars per share. Over time, the company's annualized return is more than double that of the S&P 500, and Berkshire is worth more than $100 billion today, but Mr. Buffett is known as much for his unpretentious style as for his great success, he has become an advocate for investors, he is legendary for his aversion to corporate doublespeak, he is rare among CEOs and he happily admits his mistakes, he wrote three years ago years in its annual report.
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He reports that the butcher would have been better off if he had simply gone to the movies. It's a great job, many years like this since 1965, believe me, Berkshire was proud even to be finally absent from the point, stereo in recent years and now that the bubble has burst, as we all know, it is Warren Buffett who is having the last laugh in his most recent letter to shareholders he wrote. He quotes: We have embraced the 21st century by entering cutting-edge industries such as brick carpet installation and painting. Try to control your enthusiasm. friend, you know that I am personally fond of reading his letters, it is simply a pleasure, it is a business lesson in itself, I recommend that whenever you have the opportunity to take sides and read it carefully, you will learn a lot from his wisdom. and knowledge or so much value that some investors buy shares just so they can listen to his legendary annual meeting or, as he calls it, Woodstock for capitalists, he doesn't talk about periods that often and we are extremely lucky to have him with us today Earl joined from Coca -Cola and our distinguished resident executive had a lot to do with a thorough and we are deeply indebted to you for helping us raise us.
Thank you so much. Our format today will be primarily questions and answers. Sir. Buffett will make some brief comments at the beginning and then we'll come to you. We'll have a microphone set up here. We would like you to come. We were recording on video. We would like you to use a microphone. So go ahead and get started. to line up there to ask your questions, so could you give a very warm welcome to the order of the Oracle of Omaha? Yes, good evening, try 1 million two million three, okay, I came from Nebraska today and you're probably all familiar with us mostly.
On our football team we have those guys in the white bingo helmets with those red hands. The other day I asked one of our starters what the final position is when he said knowledge, okay, we can do a lot, although I mean you know, roller coaster. Nebraska just because you're a football player with that they made you in agricultural economics and there's a final question for all the fires and the first question is what's all that McDonald has and they were giving it to one of our potential Heisman Trophy winners . the other day and he started sweeping finally right now it's a farm pressure in light of of course you don't want to find a Heisman candidate so I said now, he said you're halfway home, he said just one more question, as? you spell away I think I really start to sweat and he looks at the ceiling and looks around five his face alone says how much for that guy I'm sure it will be done right now I look, I really want to talk about it Which side are you thinking?
So we're going to do a question and answer session and the men and I. There are a couple of questions I always get asked. Know. I always said, "Well, should I go to work?" When it comes out, then I have. A very simple answer, we can elaborate more on this as we go, but another thing you really need to do is start first with some institution or individual that you admire. I mean, it's crazy to accept between jobs just because they look good. your resume or because you get a slightly higher starting salary. I was at Harvard on the way back and some really nice young men picked me up at the airport to go to Harvard Business School and he said, look, he said I went to undergrad here and then I worked for x and y and z and now I've come here and he said I thought my resume would be perfectly rounded if I want to work for a big management consulting firm now and I said what is that?
What do you want to do? He said no one. He said that's the perfect resume and I said well, are you going to start doing what you like? and he said, well, someday I'll get to that and I said, well, you know, I said your plan sounds a lot to me like saving sex for your old age it just doesn't produce much sexual head. I told that same girl. I told him you're not going to work for every admiration and I told him you can't get a bad result by jumping out of bed in the morning and you'll have fun when they call me a couple of weeks later, he said what you tell us, he said everyone They are becoming autonomous, so you have a temper, that advice is a bit ah. play a little game with me for just a minute and then move on to answer your questions and for the moment I would like you to pretend that I made you a great offer and told you so. that they could pick any of their classmates now they know each other pretty well after being here for a while, they can be thankful that they have 24 hours to think about it and they can pick any of their classmates and they'll get ten percent of their earnings for the rest of their lives and I ask you what goes through your mind when determining which of those who would choose you can choose the one with the richest father who does not count on me, you have to do this on merit, but you probably wouldn't choose the person with the highest grades in the class.
I mean, all we're getting are grades in the class, but that's not going to be the quality that distinguishes a great winner. From the rest of the pack, think about who we would choose and why, and I think you will find that when you are done you will choose some individual, everyone has the ability, you wouldn't be here, otherwise everyone has the ability. the energy, I mean, you have it here, the initiative is here, the intelligence is here in the whole class, but some of you will be bigger winners and others will have it all comes down to a bunch of qualities that, interestingly, you are ourselves .
In fact, I mean, it's not about how high you're willing to kick a football 60 yards, it's not about whether you can run the hundred yards in ten seconds, it's about whether the best-looking person in the room is a Lots of qualities that really come out of Ben Franklin or the coldest Boy Scout, so whatever it is, I mean, it's his integrity, it's honesty, it's his generosity, it's being willing to go above and beyond his share, it's just all of those qualities that are self-selected and then if you look at the other side of the ledger because there's always a problem with these, you know, gifting in June is a joke, so you're going to have to do that too.
This is the fun part, you also have to downsell one of your classmates and pay ten percent of what they make so what do you think will do worse in class is a lot more fun and think about it once and again? It wasn't the plan, but he's not the person with the lowest grades or anything. type is the person who just doesn't fit in the character department when we look for three things when we hire people we look for intelligence we look for friends for initiative or energy and we look for integrity and if they don't have the ladder the first tool kills you because if you're going to get someone without integrity you want to be lazy and depressed I mean you don't want to have much self smart and energetic is that third quality and everything related to that quality is your choice you know you can't change much the way you are wired but you can change a lot of what you do with that wiring and are the habits that you generate now about those qualities or those negative qualities, I mean the person, the person. who you know always claimed credit for things they didn't do who always take shortcuts who can't count on getting it in the end those are habit patterns and the time to form the right habits is a year when you're your age, I'm serious, I don't mind.
There's a lot of use in taking golf lessons now, if I took golf lessons when I was your age it might be a decent deal, but someone once said that the chains of habit or two are too light. they sit until they're too heavy to break and I see all the time I see people with patterns that are self-destructive when they're in their 50s or 60s and they think they can't really change their incarceration because of it. but you are not in prison for anything, so when you write down the qualities of that person that you would like to buy ten percent of, look at that list and ask yourself if there is something on that list.
I couldn't give the answers. there are, there won't be and when you look at the person yourself and you look at those qualities that you don't like, if you see any of those in yourself, he could tell them any selfishness that you can get rid of. I mean that's not ordered and if you follow that you and Ben Franklin did this in my old boss Ben Graham did this at early ages in his teens, they just looked around and said who do I admire, you know and want to be. He admired himself and said: do you know why I buy from these other people? and he said that if I admire them for these reasons maybe other people will admire me if I behave similarly and he decided what kind of person he wanted to be. and if you follow that in the end you will be the person you love my ten percent I mean, that's the goal in the end and it's something that everyone in this room can achieve, so that's the end of the knowledge of the sermon, let's talk. about what you have in mind and you are going to ask anything, the only thing I will not tell you is what we are buying or selling, let's say yes, I don't know, I don't even tell myself.
I write that I like the Coca-Cola formula. You know, there are only two people who can go into the Trust Department and find out which ones they are and I don't know which ones they are, so we don't talk about that. what we are buying or selling, but anything else is fair game, personal business, anything you want to talk about and in fact the main questions are the most interesting to me, so don't spare my feelings. just thrown at my head add that and with that I guess we have a microphone is this the only microphone there is one that feels good here is my ceiling I'm going to make a microphone to line up with them and I'll be Regis Philbin and you can, yeah, I have an old fashioned belief that I can only hope to make money and things that I understand when I say understand, I don't understand, you know what the product does or something like that.
I do not understand. I understand what the economics of the business will be like 10 years from our 20s, and I now know, in general, what the economics of a Wrigley's gum will be like 10 years from now. Now the Internet is going to change the way people should do it. Come on, it's not going to change, which becomes true now, if you own the gum market big time and you have the double mint and juicy fruit experiment, those brands will be there. Analysis of 10 years. I can't pinpoint exactly what. The numbers will look like what I really am, but I'm not going to go wrong if I try to look forward to something like that where that company's evaluation is when I call my circle of competence.
I understand what they do. I understand. the economy and understand the competitive aspects of the business. There may be all kinds of companies that have a wonderful future, but I don't know what they are and in the past I've given talks where I carried a 70-page book with me. printed list and shows two thousand automobile companies now, at the beginning of the 20th century, they had seen what the automobile was going to do to this country, the impact it would have on the lives and then on their children and grandchildren, etc., what it simply transformed the American landscape, but of those two thousand companies, you know, three basically survive and haven't done as well as I have many times, so how do you choose three winners out of 2,000?
I mean, it's not that easy to do, it's easy when you look back, but it's not that easy looking forward, so you could have been right that the auto industry probably could have predicted the huge impact it would have, but you wouldn't have it if you wanted companies across the board. you wouldn't have made money because the economic characteristics of that business are not easy to define, I said, I always said that the easiest thing is to find out who loses and what you should have really done in 1900 fiveo So when you saw what was going to happen to the car, you should have come up short.
There were 20 million horses and in 1900 there are about four million horses now, so it's easy to see that the losers give the horse to the losers, but the winner was the. Auto in general, but 2,000 companies almost failed you, they merged and so on, there were three automotive companies in Dow Industrials in the twenties and thirties, Studebaker Nash Combinator and Hudson Motor, all those names are familiar to me and maybe some more familiar for you, but they don't make any cars that you I know they didn't make any money. I had once. They were in the pin 30.
They were the aristocrats of American business and they ruined them, so discovering the economic characteristics of the winners in a wonderful business is not easy in North Carolina. in a horrible and Roberto golf, I guess, or we'll talk often, we're seeing, I've been Wilbur, but if you could have seen the future of the airline business from that point forward and how that would transform things, you know it would blow your mind. . By the way, that's got people excited ever since, but if they're going to capitalize on Kitty Hawk, it should have taken down horribly. I'm serious because it's nothing more than costing investors money.
There were 400 airline companies in the 1920s and 1930s. the room was Nebraska, we were the Silicon Valley of the United States, apparently very bribed and they all disappeared in a terrible deal at the end of 1991, if we add up the aggregate profits of all the billion-dollar airline companies since Wilbur and Orville was there, they reached less than zero. The number of passengers increased every year. The importance of the industry increased dramatically decade after decade and no one made money from it, so find out the economic consequences. TV. I think there is, I don't know. 20 25 million years sensei in the United States I don't think one of them is made in the United States anymore, I mean it's a television manufacturer, what a wonderful business site, everyone and no one, a television in nineteen fifty , there are between 45 and 50 people. has several gadgets now no one is in the United States and made real money, giving the feeling that everyone is out of business in the magnetic boxes.
The radio from all those RCA companies was the equivalent of 20 of the more than 500 companies that made radios in the 1920s. Again, I don't think there's an American radio manufacturer right now, but Coca-Cola, you know, I had 1880 for Jacob's Pharmacy or whatever and some guy comes up with something with a lot of photocopiers around. over the years, but now you have a company that sells approximately 1.1 billion total servings of its product, not everyone undercover writes some other newspaper around the world honest 17 years later, so understanding the economic characteristics of a company is different to predict the fact that an interest is going to work out wonderfully. so I look at the internet companies that are looking at the tech lady.
I say this is a wonderful thing. I love playing on the computer and now I order my books on Amazon and all kinds of things, but I don't know who's going to win unless I know who's going to win. interested in the best, I'll just play on the computer to define your circle of competence is the most important aspect of investing, it's not how important the size of your circle is, you don't need to be an expert in everything except knowing where. the perimeter of that circle of what you know is what you don't know and staying within it is the most important thing Tom Watson senior founded IBM said in his book he said it I'm not a genius he said but I'm smart in some points stay in those places and You know that's the key, so if I understand some things and I stay in that field, I'll do well and if I don't understand something, but I got really excited because my neighbors are talking about the stocks they're going up everything they're starting to lose the time somewhere else I'll eventually get cream and I should, so now let's go a little bit here.
I have two quick questions: one is how do you find the intrinsic value in a company, while the intrinsic value is what is the number that if you knew everything about the future and could predict all the cash that a little bit of business would give you from now Until judgment day, discounted at the appropriate discount rate, that number is the intrinsic value of the companies, in other words, the only reason to invest money now is to get more money later. That's what investing is all about now, when you look at stocks, when you look down, so Miss United States Government is very easy to understand. is going to come back it says it directly on the bond it says when you receive the interest payments then when you get the principal it is very easy to calculate the value of a body it could change tomorrow if interest rates change but you are the cash flow are printed on the bond cash flows are printed on a stock certificate that is the animals job is to print change that stock certificate that represents an interest in the business and change it into a bond and say this is what I think is going to happen This will be developed in the future when we buy, you know, some machine for Shaw, to make rugs, that's what we're thinking about, obviously, and you know, everyone learned that in business school, but it's the same for a large company.
Coca-Cola today the company sells between one hundred ten and fifteen billion dollars in the market the question is if you had one hundred ten or fifteen billion would you be listening to me but I didn't listen to you it's nothing but the question is: would you raise it today to get what the Coca-Cola company will offer you for the next two or three hundred years? The discount rate doesn't make much difference as you go, but that's it. one question is how much cash are they going to give you, it's not a question of you knowing, that's a question of how many analysts are going to recommend that or what the volume of the stock is or what the chart looks like, it's a question of how much money in cash you will get the one who only reads the truth if you are buying a farm;
If you are buying an apartment building, any financial asset for oil in the ground, you are exposing how to get your Cashin. cash back later and the question is how much will one get here to get it and how safe is it and when do I calculate the intrinsic value of a business when we buy businesses and if we are buying an entire business or a small part of the business I always think we are buying the whole business because that's my focus. I look at it and say what will come out of this business and when and what do you really like, of course, from them power.
Use the money you earn and get higher returns as you go. I mean, Berkshires never distributed anything to shareholders, but their ability to distribute increases as the value of the companies we own increases. We can aggravate it internally, but the real question is Berkshire. sell for about one hundred and five billion now, what can we distribute of that hundred? rates to distribute that cash now and that's what he comes out doing in the end, if you can't answer that question, you can't buy the shares, you know, you can bet on the shares if you want, your neighbors can buy them. but if you don't answer that question, I can't answer that for internet companies for example, there are a lot of companies that are all types, so I can ask, but I stay away from number two so you get the formula. involved in finding intrinsic values and girth and you have a math, this is that you just got a present value of the future segments of the cash show.
The question is why haven't you written down your set of formulas or your strategies in written form so you can share them with everyone else, well I think I've actually written about that, oh and if you read the annual reports along of the years, the most recent and the report, I use what I just talked about to use the illustration of Esau because here he stopped in 600 BC. C. The intelligent man was intelligent enough to know that it was the year 600 BC. C., although I mean it's going to take a little forethought, but he stopped, you know, between turtles and hair, there's always other things that he found time to write about, you know, Bert and he said a bird in the hand is worth more than cent flying now is not quite complete because the question is how sure are you that there are two in the bush and how long do you have to wait to get them out now they probably knew it but he just didn't have time because he had all these other problems to write and I had to keep going, but I was halfway there and 600 a.
C., that's all you have to do to invest, how many birds in the bush, what are you going to get? And how sure are you now if interest rates are about fifteen percent, you have to get two birds out of the bush and five years is a bird in the hand, but if interest rates are three percent and you can get two birds with one stone? 20 years from now it still makes sense to give up the bird in the hand because it all comes down to discounting interest on the interest rate which Hamish often doesn't know, not only does he know how many birds in the bush they put into the case.
Internet companies had no bird in the bush, but they still take the bird you give them by the hand, but, in reality, I have written about this type of thing and I have theft far from the top of the rotor about 2,600 years ago, but I have fallen behind in my reading, yes, yes, good morning, eh. I know you are vain about your success, but I was curious to know if there are any particular times in your life where you made mistakes or failures. That was particularly memorable, what you may have learned from them and if you have any particular advice for the students here in dealing with the discouraging cycle.
Yeah, well, I may have made a lot of mistakes. I exalt the biggest mistake and not the biggest. not necessarily the biggest, but Berkshire Hathaway's was a mistake because the textile business was practically terrible and I brought in a very cheap business. Ben Graham taught me how to buy things quantitatively. Look for things that are cheap and that I was taught that the same period of 1949-50 made a big impression on me, so I went around looking for what I call a bunch of cigar stocks and the cigar butt approach to buying stocks. is that you walk down the street and look for cigarette butts. and honestly, you find this terrible looking, soggy, ugly looking cigar.
There's a jug left inside, but you pick it up and take a drag. It's immediately disgusting, but it's free, I mean, it's cheap and then you're looking for another soggy one. I know cigarettes well, that's what I did for years, it's a mistake, ah, although we make money doing it, but you can't do it with a lot of money, it's much easier just through wonderful businesses, so now I prefer to buy a wonderful business at a fair price, a fair business with a wonderful price, but in those days I was buying cheap stocks and Berkshire was selling below their working capital, I bet you have no plans for anything in the machinery, you get the inventory and the Accounts receivable discounting is cheap. so I bought it and twenty years later I was still running a lousy business and that money didn't add up.
You really want to be a wonderful business because at that point you are friends with the wonderful business. You continue to capitalize. Keep doing more business. continue earning more money, time is the enemy of bad business. I could have sold Berkshire, maybe liquidated it and made a quick little profit. You know, a mouthful, but continuing with that kind of business is a big mistake, so you could say I learned something. I got out of that mistake and would have been much better off if I had taken what I did with the Berkshires. I kept buying, but I started with better deals.
The insurance business sees candy, Buffalo and all kinds of things. It would have been much better to do it with a brand. -New little entity I set up instead of using the Berkshire platform, now I've had a lot of fun. I mean, everything in life seems to get better, so I have no complaints about that. but it was stupid. I flew out of the US I bought a preferred stock in 1989 ah, as soon as my check was cashed, the company went into the red and never came out I mean, it was what was really done, I mean, a dead .
I have an 800 number that I call now whenever I think about buying airline stock. I call them at any number that luckily I call at three in the morning and dial it myself. My name is Warren. I am a narrow holic and I am thinking of buying this and then I was dissuaded. Many things happened. Thanks, sometimes it takes hours, but it's worth changing. If you ever think about that era of buying airline stock, call me and I'll give you the 800 number because I don't know, you don't want to do it, but we were lucky in terms of how we ended up doing it, but it was a dumb, dumb decision, all mine. and I've taken the biggest step in terms of events than in terms of opportunity because eventually the cost brought me half the interest in a Sinclair gas station, it was about 20 with a guy who was in the national guard with my ten thousand dollars , then I put in two thousand dollars and lost it all, so it was twenty percent. and that means that theopportunity cost is now six billion dollars of that gas station, which is a high price to pay for, you know, getting the target with your windows in the fields, Hannah's windshield and things like that, so I actually like it when Berkshire goes down, it reduces the cost of that mistake by one opportunity for us, but the biggest mistakes that we've made, by far, I've made, no, we've made the biggest mistakes, I've made, by far. , our errors of omission and not coalition, are the things that I knew enough to do were within my circle of competence and I was sucking my thumb and that's really, those are the ones that she doesn't show up anywhere I It probably costs Berkshire at least five billion dollars, for example, for sucking my thumb twenty years ago, it's close to Fannie Mae was having some problems and gave up the whole company for practically nothing and I don't worry about that if it's Microsoft because I don't I don't know what Microsoft was, it's not in my circle of praise, so I have no reason to think that I have the right to make money from Microsoft or cocoa beans or whatever, but I didn't know enough to understand it. .
Fannie Mae and I bleat and that never shows up in the conventional county, but the call, I know the cost, I know, you know I let it go and those are the big mistakes and I've had a lot of them in and you, unless I tell you talk about them in the annual report and sometimes I resist the temptation, when I tell you about it in the annual report, you won't know it because it doesn't appear in the conventional county, but the automation is much bigger. of what has been achieved, there are great opportunities in life that must be taken advantage of, we do not do many things, but when we have the opportunity to do something big, we have to do it and even do it small. scaling is just as big a mistake, it's almost not doing it at all.
I mean, you really have to catch them when they come and that, since they're not going to get 500 big opportunities, you'd be better off getting out. from school here you have a punch card with 20 punches and every big financial decision you made, you spent a hit, you become very rich because you think very well, each of you wants to go to a cocktail party and someone talks about a company not even understood what they did, couldn't pronounce the name, but they made some money last week and another similar one, you wouldn't buy it if you only had 24 inches on that card, there's a temptation to dabble if it's particularly During all the sock markets it's so easy now you know easier than ever because you can do it online you know you just click on it and maybe it goes up to.
Get excited about it, buy another one the next day and so on. You can't make money over time doing that, but if you have a punch card with only 20 punches, we'll bring another one of us into your life. You would think long and hard before every investment decision and make good and big ones and you probably wouldn't even use the 20 hits in your life, but you would need to, yes sir. perfect morning and in your comments about making mistakes and errors like this you talk a little about your self-discipline when you are in a position and you feel that it is no longer good what criteria to use, you finally abandoned it, yes, when I started, the situation in the South has changed over the years because when I started and why ideas, the money and I would go through the movie manual, I would go through it page by page and then I would go through it again by page and I would find stocks there.
I could understand that we are selling a bicycle for time travel, even once it serves well when you don't have 10,000 dollars. That can be a little frustrating and if you don't like borrowing money, which I never like. borrow money so I always came up with more ideas than money so I had to sell what I like least to buy something new that appealed to me and for a long time I was in that mode and now our problems are over. I have more money than ideas, so where is it? If you look at our annual report, which is on the Internet, under the furniture in our base, out of the way. com you will see something in the back, call the economic principles of Berkshire and you will see which ones I believe in establishing my partners, they are my partners, I don't look at my part of my partners and I have my partners for life, so I want tell them how I think and if they don't agree with my way of thinking, that's fine, but I don't want them to not be disappointed in me, so I just stand there and say.
In terms of wholly owned businesses, we're not going to sell, no matter how much someone offers this for me, I mean, if someone offers three times what something is worth that sees candy, buffalo news for showers, whatever, maybe we won't sell. I may be wrong and by having that approach, I know I'm not wrong about my own daughter's openness percentage because that's the way I want to live my life. I have all the money I could ever need, you know, it just amounts to what a change in the newspaper story in my obituary and the amount of money the foundation has and breaking off relationships with people I like and people who have left. attached to me because they think it's a permanent home to do it simply because someone expects a big check for me.
It would be like something for my children because even a big shot I won't do that and I want to tell my partners that I won't do it so that they don't disappoint me more and more with certain stocks that we have. That approach now, if we were chronically underfunded and all sorts of opportunities came along, we might have a slightly different approach, but our inclination is not the cell stuff unless we get very discouraged, maybe with management or think that The economic characteristics of the business change. to a large extent, I mean, and that happens, so what I'm going to sell simply because it seems too high, yes, in all likelihood, that means I can't achieve that one hundred percent, but that's the principle under which operate, we're generating right now at least five billion cash, so it's a hundred million dollars every week and you know, we just met, we've been talking for about half an hour and I'm nothing, so you know, I think the The real question is how can you advertise intelligently and if we were selling things it would be a lot more for them to make money, there may come a time when that changes, but what we want and I have partners, Cheryl. partners who would say if you can get three times the value of candy, why don't you sell it?
And that's why I want to make sure that before they come in that they know what I think about it, I mean, they have the right to I know you really want to thank meta, you know if you're getting married and you want to get married, that's going to last initially. , the happiest married person you know or one that Martha Stewart will talk about anything you want in a marriage. is it going to last what quality are you looking for in a spouse a quality good for the brain you are looking for humor you are looking for character to look for beauty now you are looking for low expectations that is marriage we will see them both have low expectations I made it and I want my partners to have low expectations because I want the classes of marriage, financial marriage when I join me in virtual and I don't want him to think that I'm going to do things that I'm not going to do, that's our guiding principle.
The device is all free based on your medical advice. Everything next time. Good morning, Mr. Babbitt, I have a question regarding your assessment of investment sounds over the last few years. It seems that the use of tax shelter in preparation is increasing and as you know big name companies like UPS and others involved in a cold shoulder of silver with the IRS and as we know most of these transactions are very artificial, but there is still a gain from the investor's perspective. Do you think it is beneficial for the investor that the company in which he invests does not participate in rental contracts?
If so, do you think it would be useful if it were constructed in such a way? that was revealed in statements and immediately no statement, I'm not sure I understood it one hundred percent, George, I'll tell you again and it's all the Giants that shot him, if you believe that the participation of a corporation in which you invest or of anyone for that matter invest in tax shelter which is, by some definition of that attack, rains, right, I have never used one, yes, I know, I want to come out and say it, so I ask you if you know that the corporation is involved in such activity. beneficial in chart pattern, would you think that is useful for investments?
What does that mean? There are ways, but they are perfectly legal, to show your taxes. I mean, we did it and we still do it, but we were the first to go low income. Housing tax credits, that guy met with the president, the first President Bush, about that and those benefits are still slight. It's not a big part of his penis virtue and, in terms of pictures, overall value, but it is a tax benefit mandated by Congress. I wouldn't exactly call it a shelter, it's a tax benefit that Congress has decided they're willing to offer to businesses and them because they believe it's the best way to create low-income housing, so we participate in some of it, but we don't.
It's like that. a is not an important factor and what we do and what I want there is nothing wrong with that, so if you engage in tax evasion, I mean, it is a completely different game, that point they will go to jail, no, but Certain companies have some insurance. The companies are incorporated in Bermuda. In addition, you can save a lot of taxes. There are other tests to meet that we wouldn't want to meet, but if we were willing to meet those other tests, there is nothing illegal or immoral about us moving to Bermuda. Bermuda, we are not going to do it and what would happen if the restrictions were made?
The tax code is the rule book and you follow the rule, but I think some of the things that people do in terms of bending that rule book come very close. cheat and sometimes cross the line into fraud and when they do that I think they would be prosecuted but that's another game and on the inside there has been more pressure than I would say in the last five years and it was certainly my experience before and there. there's more, I think it's now down last year as well, but a couple of years ago there was very aggressive marketing by some of the audit firms and these, even with certain percentages of profits that would be paid to others , I think those things got pretty dodgy and pretty when they sought legal opinions and also that if you get caught doing these things you can say well I trusted this legal opinion and therefore I shouldn't go to jail but just pay the back taxes , so I don't know how many things were associated with that, but obviously, if they push too hard, we don't want to be there.
Yeah, I was curious how many people have tremendous amounts of wealth now, what do you think of the current state of philanthropy? Well, I'm going out this week and then, actually, 10: I'll fly to Seattle and then I'll talk to the United Way
group
and they'll see how well you hide the raises. more per capita, I believe in it anyway in the country and Bill Gates will be there, we were talking together, his mother was very active and united, but Bill is going to donate more than a billion dollars a year and much more more forward. but right now a billion and it's very interesting and he's very rational about it and he's very informed, in fact, he got someone who I think is a senior advisor in the medical field as a fellow at the CDC in Vienna and Bill reads 15 books a month about this.I mean, he's thinking just absorbing it, he couldn't get it that fast, but he's just saying that with a billion dollars he wants to save as many lives for years as possible, so how did he achieve that goal? both a metric of your foundation and any other return on capital metric could be for a company and it says: I'm going to spend a billion dollars or how many lives can be saved for that, so you've gotten really into Vaccines and AIDS. In Africa there are many things that are very rational. I personally believe that I have all my 99. some percent of my net worth will go to a foundation after the ladder of my wife and I, and I, as far as I'm concerned, everything will go to the foundation, what I received from the society, will go to society.
I wrote a letter to my trustees I have too few trustees to have a lot of trustees, in my opinion they just homogenized down to the lowest common denominator because I had 30 people in a room and prestigious people, but also everyone has their particular modern everything allows another particular hospital and it will become a great compensation game. You know they like Congress, so I have very few people and I don't give them anything specific because I tell them their judgment on the surface will be better. That my instructions are six feet under, son, I don't like to think that, but it's true, so I tell him that I see that society is the one that has no real funding, the voters see you as loved or they are just damned intractable. and very difficult to solve, so I am NOT going to come after you at all if you spend a lot of money on some terribly important problem and fail because you are taking on difficult problems whenI buy businesses, I'm buying easy businesses, the reason society's big problems or big problems is that they're very difficult to solve, so they're swinging at bad pitches.
I am doing it with ease. Images in business, but they are doing it. They have to swing at bad pitches, but me. Tell them that I wanted to try to do it and if they fail it doesn't bother me at all and I tell them that if they give a million dollars here and a million dollars there in a million dollars there they are not going to sleep because I'm going to be chasing it. I'll come back every night. You know, I didn't want the eyedropper approach to be used to fly through p, but I want them to use their judgment to look at important problems that have no natural funding. constituency, you know if the government will do well, you know, I mean, they should fund important problems, but we don't need to, the ball applied to be in my opinion, I have fun things that don't have the natural components and that's what they do the bills, it's not the neck, there are a lot of people around you can make an emotional appeal to make vaccines available to millions and millions of children around the world it just doesn't aim at anyone's heart stranger you can build buildings afterwards it means that It's just not the kind of thing that you can raise money for on an emotional basis and there's nothing wrong with raising money on our emotional basis, but that's a problem that will be solved by a constituent funny, I was responding to that, but bill is speaking his mind, that's how important it is to save lives and he doesn't care if his name is on a building or if something happens or what everyone knows about it and they publish it just because of the scale on which It is, but he doesn't care about that, I can promise you that. that is my philosophy is that I got this money not because he is a superior human being not because he has done more for society and other people.
They wired me up the right way to be dropped off in the United States at this particular time. I mean, it's a huge capitalist society and I don't get any credit for it, but it was born that way, so I'm better at asset allocation than other people to some extent, just like other people are better at all kinds of other things. things and I was with two Sun Valley teachers are doing more for society than me and they don't. This market system does nothing for them. The market system does all kinds of things for me. Kate says I was born five thousand years ago, you know?
I've been having lunch with some animals, you know, because I can't run very fast, climb trees. I mean, you know what those states are and I could say that animal is chasing me in a way that we see how I can allocate assets, you know? It wouldn't make any difference, so here I am, yes, I'm bored again. I'm just very lucky and when I was born in 1930 the odds were 50 to 1 against a baby born in the United States, it's a terrible set. in the face and then I was like a rock here, you know, and if I then dropped and/or in some emergency place or China, I mean, I wouldn't have a chance, then society is the one that does it for you and I should come back and I could Be with you, come back into society if you've been lucky enough to be included in a society where your particular wiring is worth it, now that's just luck and you know there's nothing wrong with saying I don't feel guilty about anything else, but I also don't feel like I have a lot of fun doing what I do, but I think money should go back into society and it should go back in the smartest way possible and the best way to do it smartly. is to have smart, high-level people running it at that time and you don't know what problems there will be in 10 years or 20 years from now or 30 years from now, but I do know if I have a small number of smart, high-level people and the high grade is applied more.
Oh, if you gave me 20 extra IQ points but cheated a little on the high grade, I wouldn't take it because it has to be them. There has to be someone who has a chance of doing things in a mean way or, you know, trying to get people to rely on their own minds for their own interests instead of the interest of the institution, so I really want him to. make very high level people. and I have them and I think the money could do a lot of good, it may be of no use but it will operate in the fields or if it doesn't work that good would probably have been done otherwise yeah just wondering.
There are many differences between the recent stock market boom and bust and one of the 1920s, but there are also many similarities and simulators are allowing people to draw the conclusion that stock prices will be stuck depressed for some time. What do you disagree with? Agree that we buy throughout the century. It is quite interesting if we take the 20th century. It was an incredible century for the United States, GDP per capita and that's the way to think about this per capita. Sometimes they talk about our gdp versus that of Europe, but if their populations are the same every year, an artist increases by one percent, you should know that at the end of the goods you must have a divisor in addition to the numerator and, therefore, GDP per capita in the 20th century. in the United States, one in six hundred and ten percent was actually qualitatively much more than that because you can't really measure it, you know certain things and medicines or whatever and the improvements, but just from a quantitative basis it went up every decade, including the 1930s, so here we have a hundred years where basically the American citizen was really improving their lot decade after decade after decade, in the 1930s it was 13 percent, that decade was World War II the night in that Forty, 36 percent, the worst decade was World War I, so sometimes you get the analogy.
I can get into trouble and analogies, but all of that was huge. Interestingly, there were six big periods for the stock market in both directions, there were three big bull markets between 1910 and 1920, one the Dow wants from 66 to 70, one less than a 10 percent move in 20 years, less half a percent here. You have evidence that half did not go from 21 to 29, as you point out, it went from 71 to a maximum of 381 in September 1929, while five hundred percent, obviously, is the well-being of the country. approximately five hundred percent during that period and the well-being of the company in the country approximately more than ten percent during the first 21 years, so it had this very uneven development from September 19, 1929 to the end of 1948, the discharge from 381 to about one hundred and eighty was halved and that was eighteen long years and yet the GDP per capita was going up throughout this period and the economy is doing well for 38 265 the wrist again from about one hundred and eighty up to about a thousand again 541, which far exceeded from 65 to 80 1 the doll went back down literally well per capita and then we had this last period where it's going to be prolifically if you take the full hundred years. rose one hundred and eighty-four one thousand dollars became one hundred and eighty thousand, but forty-three and a quarter years is forty-three and three-quarter years with those three big bull markets and fifty-six and a quarter years with periods of stagnation, all In an economy that was doing well, you know, year after year, after your net fifty-six and a quarter years, the dow went down a couple more points during that period and the other forty-three and three-quarter years constituted the rest of this. going from 66 to 11,000 someone in dallas you excited yourself, how could it be that you can have a country that was doing better and better and better and better citizens that we lived every generation lived better than the one that preceded it, but you have these big changes big profits several times a long period of stagnation 20 years I mean, that's a long time to do nothing the answer is that investors behave in a very human way, that is, they get very excited during bull markets and look for the rearview mirror and they say I made money last year I'm going to make more money this year so this time I'll borrow an hour or the neighbor says you know I wasn't last year when that neighbor was much dumber than me about money, so I'm going to go this year, they are always looking at the river, where and when they look in the rear view mirror and see that a lot of money has been made in the last few years, they plow and just push. and they push and push prices and when they look in the rearview mirror and I see that no money has been made, they just say this is a lousy place to be so they don't care what's going on in the underlying business and it's amazing, but That's a great opportunity, a great opportunity.
I mean, I've lived about half of it in terms of investing, about half of that. and I've had that long period of stagnation from 48, I mean, from 65 to 80 - 17 years. I wrote an article for Forbes in 1979. How can pension funds in 1970 be the ones that put 100 percent of their new money into stocks because they were crazy about stocks, then they became much cheaper and put our minimum historical in the nine percent of that nobody in the 1970s, when much cheaper stocks for people behaved in a very peculiar way and in terms of reactions because We are human beings and we get excited when others get excited we get greedy when others they get greedy they scare each other they fear each other and they will continue to do it and you will see, you know, yes you will see things that you will not believe in Your life, the stock markets and the country will do very well over time, but you will see these huge waves and then, and if you can stay objective throughout the whole process, you will be able to temperamentally separate yourself from the crowd, you will become very rich and you won't have to.
Be very bright, I mean it, I'm sure you are, but you know that, it just doesn't take brains, it takes temperament, it takes the ability to sit there and watch something when I started in 1950, I would go and we found things at twice the profits and they were perfectly decent businesses and people wanted two jobs at those companies and everyone knew they were going to be around anyone who was behind at twice the profits and that's when the interest rates were two and a half percent, you know. I went at first installing security lights 21 and Kansas City Life Insurance Company I have to be a pretty prominent company in Omaha and the policies they sold to Google if you buy church life from them had a building and a two percent interest assumption .
Kansas City Life stock was selling for less than three times earnings, you'd get 35% if you bought the stock, there's no question about the company's sound. I went to the local agent while I discovered it, I will deliver it to him. a few shares, I mean, I think I understand that you have invested your whole life in this company with the local agent, we have been with them for 20 years and, as a name is the size of mr. Moose and you know that you are selling these policies at 2%, you even have some members of your own family and you can buy this company whose paycheck is YouTube and every month that you know and whose future you are your beneficiaries of their life.
Policies depend on who you sell them to, you know, a two percent investment and you get thirty-five percent of your money, you know, and I'm stuck trying to be good and then I couldn't. I'm a consultant and I'm they will allow themselves when I mean the world you have to start with that but it just blew me away, blew me away I thought sometimes I used to wonder if I'm crazy you know that but those things happened the same thing I mean 1964 the dow closed the dates 864 and then in 1981 17 years later it closed at 65 years old and moved one.
In 17 years it's not a big step and you can't believe how discouraged people were during that period, but you know people look better so things can go on for a long time and make no sense. but they don't come to an end, I mean the Internet thing, I mean these companies were sold for many billions of dollars and no, frankly, there are no prospects that are making money, that's a sign of a pain in the butt of a bubble, once said something. that can't go on forever it will end now that's pretty good, but think about that and especially think about it the next time you try to do something just because the stock is down a lot, you know a lot of your neighbors make money or something. that you have to be she had to sit down and think objectively and think about what she bought this whole business is an Internet company that has a hundred million shares outstanding a hundred that's ten billion dollars it's worth ten billion dollars it's worth ten thousand million dollars has to be able to give you seven or eight hundred million next year and if it doesn't give you seven or eight hundred million next year, have a good play, maybe ten percent more than that next year and continue with it .
There are a lot of companies that can do that and people just go crazy and of course it's fun. I mean, you know, it's like that sign they put up in doctor's offices.doctors and says to avoid a hangover. Rock status and at that point it's a lot of fun to keep going. I like it, but yeah, you got it, you have to do sensible things to get that result, yeah, yeah, next, we have three people standing there, so let's do the three that are standing. Well, good morning, sir. Hi, I was wondering what your opinion is. the Federal Reserve and their actions taken recently you feel like they're done and not to fix the economy yeah well I'm a big fan of Alan Greenspan over time.
I've known him for a long time. We were in a meeting together. Reason Title Alan is a very, very smart guy, in my opinion, he is motivated entirely by whatever it is for the people of the United States, so you better have, you couldn't have a better person there and the problem he may have is that because his tenure in office has been associated with this incredible market where, although he wouldn't have claimed credit for it, people ran associated with it because of the importance of the Federal Reserve, in general , they could partner with him, so they did if things don't work out.
It worked very well, I blamed them too, but I think his policy in general has been very good. One thing you have to understand about the Federal Reserve is that it is not as powerful as the mystic would make it, it is a break, it is better than its accelerator. When the Fed wants to slow down, we go through the windshield. I mean, how do you know the economy is bad? Yes, and they can brake. Paul Walker did it, he broke inflation by doing it, but I mean when he braked and stuff. around nineteen eighty, I mean, people hated him being crucified because it was the right thing to do and that they could do it.
He did it all by himself and these, he and it was the only way due to the momentum that inflation was generating. The only thing that was what was needed then, normally unpopular, is much more difficult for a Greenspan to brake because no one wants him to brake with such a visible bust, but he has applied them gradually, but when he steps on the accelerator he does not. necessarily get the same result, it can help, but there are thousands of other variables operating and, as you see in Japan, you can go down to zero interest rates and you can stimulate anything, so it's not like the Japanese haven't read The same books we read about economics, I mean, they've read canes and they were everything, so we're not smarter than them, we don't have any secrets that they don't have, but they don't know how to get them. the economy is going and you know,
It happened that they got rid of the dollar, they can't get rid of the dollar, there is a way to get rid of the dollars, they could, at least they can, assets in dollars, because the Japanese want to sell our government bonds to the government, they sell them to us and They obtain a term or demand deposit. you deposit it here you still own a dollar asset if you sell it to the French you get it and you can get some answers from the French, but now the French habit, I mean the only way to reduce foreign investment in the United States is to change like this that they are consuming more than us more than they consumed that could be once when we buy a television from Japan if we buy them more televisions than they buy us equivalent consumables the exchange of what balances things is that we give them some type of investment asset, whether it's cash or U.S. government bonds or stocks or movie studios or real estate or different things, and the only way that that reverses is when we start having a trade surplus that was miles away, so logically you already know if If you read classical economics, you would think that our currency would have weakened and Earl has weakened in recent years and that now a week would pass, but there are other things operating and that is one of the problems of the economy: there is never just one variable.
There are usually hundreds of variables and they operate with different impacts at different times. I mean, it's not like physics to me if I'm serious, although I guess it would be if you get into Heisenberg's principle or something, but the formula has a lot of the same variables year after year, but the importance of those variables and how they interact with each other is never exactly the same and that is what we discover that the Japanese discover that everyone discovers and the foreign currency or the currents are the value of a dollar and the exchange rates defy the which you would expect based on history, but someone said that history was the perfect guide.
You know the Forbes 400 would all be librarians. You know she will look for it in books and always. You know all the answers but history doesn't repeat itself like Mark Twain said it was going to repeat itself but it rhymes I mean things come back but they don't come back at all in the same format I will understand all this perfectly for years why dollars behave the way they have, but I think it would be useful net of the US if the dollar were strong, yes, sir. Buffett, thanks for answering my question. My question is about small businesses and my family spending in the trucking industry for about 50 years and as you talked about the airline industry and other merchants, next week's acquisitions and things happening and many of the smaller actors. being pushed out of the market, what do you see for people who like this room for students who want to start a small business and maybe want to start in a business that is kind of like a commodity business, but as the business, big corporations get bigger? and their shortcomings increase, how can small businesses compete?
These people have the idea that in many areas small companies have an advantage, you know, the scale of other companies has a big advantage and I mean, you don't want to be a small carbon steel producer in On the other hand, when they toured many miles and learning how to use scrap more effectively than with older methods of steel manufacturing, they had actually managed to scale, it's a big advantage in some companies, you know, the biggest airlines haven't gained the airlines of the southwest. For starters, you know that only a few planes fly there between Houston and Allison and they have gotten bigger, but their ambition hasn't been to be the biggest and you know they probably do it because United fuel is as cheap as ours.
I bought it, you know, when there's so much more, Walmart is a classic example. I mean, who would have thought 25 years ago, 30 years ago, I'm serious here, with a hundred-plus story building in Chicago, I had access to money much cheaper than the sample? Sam had not so much good credit as serious credit. All the suppliers wanted to do business with Sears. Nobody had heard of Sam. Every real estate developer was developing a new shopping center. He went to Sears first. Sam got the short end of the stick, so here are the guys who started in Bentonville.
Arkansas and it kills them over time just playing kills it and you're at a disadvantage and you're at a disadvantage buying and borrowing disadvantage in real estate advantage Sam Walton and his ability to ultimately inspire hundreds of thousands of people to get excited about going to work and do what they do right things over time, so I would be equally optimistic about small businesses in general, now there are certain areas where the scale, just when I was playing important, but I don't see any downside, intentionally at Berkshire we have one hundred and twelve thousand more employees in Georgia than in any other state in the Union, by the way, we employ a lot of non-doers and then we put a lot of people in by making one guy leave and we intentionally with our one hundred and twelve thousand, but probably We have approximately how many business units, but many in I will have 13.8 people in the headquarters I am not the main agent said it bothers me when people like that I have a full one but we have one that works four days a week so that is all we have in the headquarters one hundred and twelve thousand people one hundred and five billion market capitalization, but we intentionally keep our units small, we believe that we want them to have the agility and the customer responsiveness, in particular, that will make them, you know, that will essentially offset by far anything that scales having maybe a little more shopping. power something when the will is developed we own a home furnishings business with home furnishings in Utah run by a phone bill kid appeared in Fortune about an issue ago that made the cover story God in Business , was and was Bill was the Illustration number one built that business from his father-in-law that made two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and then I had more than half of the business in Utah in this field, but you're close to 400 million that he built thinking in the customer and the truth was he was competing with Sears he was competing with rabbits he was a big furniture retailer the retailer in the past was competing with everyone but the only thing he thought about from the moment he got up in the morning was how I I take care of my customer and that wins we have a business in Omaha some of you may have heard that it is the largest home furnishings store in the world that only has one SMS and it seats 650,000 people it is on 72 acres and wins 325 million dollars in one. location that turns out to be five hundred dollars for each man, woman and child in the SMS, but it is clear from further that that business arises from her as a result of an investment of five hundred dollars in 1937 by a woman who left Russia in 1921 .she will and left. on a peanut ship landed in Seattle with a tag around her neck she could speak a word of English the American Red Cross look at the tag it's in Fort Dodge Iowa they got a Fort Dodge I what she couldn't learn the language it was There Two years old she said she felt like a fool, so she became gay because there were other Russian Jews there and at least she had someone to talk to.
Her little girl started school. Francis Francis would come home at night and teach his mother the words you say. She learned in school that day, that's how this Rose Bump woman can learn the English language, but from her, from her daughter since kindergarten, by teaching her the words, she bought seven brothers from Russia one of the times, 50 dollars every time he says he sold fifty dollars. he used clothes and the jobs he had, his seven brothers on his mother and father and in 1937, 16 years after arriving here, he saved five hundred dollars, got off the train and went to Chicago to the American Furniture Mart, which was huge, things impressive.
She-smart as hell, but she fought like a peasant and saw this building, she decided to name the company after her and then search today. She wants about five hundred dollars worth of two thousand dollars' worth of merchandise from her to Omaha. She got worried. because she thought I had $1,500 and she only had a capital of five hundred dollars, so she came to Omaha, took the bed, the couch, the refrigerator out of her own house to sell it quickly so she could get the money to be able to pay on time. she took that business and built it from that beginning no one would sell to her she went to court four times because they tried to get the carpet manufacturers to try to stop her from selling the discount and she went to court and told the judge because you realized ways to buy these things in various nefarious ways from other people by a foreigner, she said, look, I pay three dollars a yard for this rug.
Brandeis sells it for 698. I sell it for 398. Just tell me, judge how much you love me. to rob people she defended herself the papers they wrote it the judge bought her the rug the next day I mean, wasn't it wonderful that Brandeis is already selling it was the department stores, she put everyone out of business and the joke she worked on until she was one hundred and three she sold me the business when she was 89 and I didn't have an audit I left this year I want that in the afternoon I wrote a check to Nana because I knew she wanted to do something and I said ma'am.
B, here's the money, I said, I don't even know what, just tell me where the only money is that never opens any money since all those guys back in nineteen thirty-seven and she said it's all free and sure, she never saw a general balance sheet. She didn't know what accounting terms were crazy, but she understood the nature of the business and I told her I'd rather have I don't have your word and apart from an order for each of the big six or larger or whatever their word number is in The moment of the peak they are turning away from sin and she workeduntil he was one hundred and three, he died at one hundred and four, he had three brothers at his funeral, I mean, those are some genes that his son works there now that he's eighty. two or three and the three sisters are all alive, but the joke is that she didn't know how to read or write.
This woman did not know how to read or write. If you told her this room was sixty-eight feet by 43 feet, she would tell you how many square yards it is. was like that she ever went to school to be in her life she would tell you how much it wasn't 598 yards she had the tax it's not about something she liked your looks and that would be it and that was that you know it's what you can't overcome, what you know he had and that you can't replicate at General Motors, you can't institutionalize it, that the person who brings that kind of drive to a business and does it day in and day out and thinks about the customer, yeah, and that It's all he did.
I can't and once you've raised four children in the process, but you can't get it right, you can't miss and no, you don't have to worry if you're an entrepreneur. in most camps there is field work that you can't do because there are some scale aspects, but in most camps you know you will kill people for Sean, which surprised no one who has heard of the Sean rug 30 years ago and got forty percent. of the business in the country, so, I didn't do it? It is a great field of opportunity, I had and know about trucking specifically, but I wish you the best, then you will not be at a disadvantage in many fields if you are small and you will actually have an advantage thanks to Mr.
Buffett, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom and your ideas with us today. They are wonderful stories. We are truly honored and happy to have had the opportunity to get to know you a little better. I'd like to thank a couple of people before we get started. Conclude by helping with Associate Dean of Logistics, Bob Gatewood, our Director of Alumni Relations, and Marie Garrison, thank you both, David. and the communications director are a lot of work and everyone who is involved in this. I thank you all for everything you have done again, thank you for helping to make this possible mr.
But we have a parting gift for you, but it needs to be put into context before we show it to you. You what it is in your most recent newsletter - it's in a report to shareholders, it discusses some of the things you look for and do when making acquisitions. and one of the things he talked about was that landlords look for landlords who care who. They sell and that was important to you. I would like to quote an excerpt from your report: When a business masterpiece has been created by a lifetime or several lifetimes of compassionate care and exceptional talent, it should be important to the owner which corporation has been entrusted to carry out its entrustment. story, a little further down, you say that it is much better for a company painter, Rembrandt, to personally select his permanent home and then have a trusted official or put on disinterested airs.
Well, we believe that many of these words apply to you as well, you two have created a business masterpiece, you have created a Rembrandt, what we have today is a cheerful portrait, a cheerful characterization that we hope to capture some of the commercial milestones of his career and we hope he captures some of that too. quick wit and humor that you demonstrated today was painted by a good friend of ours and a well known artist lives here locally alan campbell Allen kind but he is with us and will help us but we will reveal it today Alan please come down now when we need it When he reveals it to us , please understand that you won't be able to see the details of this while you're sitting there, but you're welcome to come down and walk past it as you leave today Alan, if you're going to speak. on the microphone, place well, thank you and and mr.
Buffett I hope I told you to keep your sense of humor that really appealed to me when reading your corporate report and this will be a test of that famous humor, but it is meant to be a porch for you and your company. and about your values and when I was when Marie garrison my girlfriend the director of alumni here told me you were coming and I read the comments about the Rembrandts and lying on your back you feel like you can afford your back and paint the ceiling every day here Brooks Basically you open the door in your own words, so right next to my brother is one of your executive jet pilots.
I think it's not a reference to jewelry, so you can stay. This is based solely on a very famous self-portrait by Rembrandt. information mr. Buffett will sign autographs. You have books with you like on the side. He'll set up a table here up front for the next 15 or 20 minutes. I would like to take a photo of you. You have a camera with you. Please come up, no. hesitate and thank you all for coming and participating today it was a wonderful event thank you
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