“I don’t want my personal life to be [around] a bunch of guys who are living in a state of delusion, who happen occasionally to win big,” Munger told Daily Journal’s shareholders. “I want the prudent person.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/19/charlie-munger-ideal-hire-wo...
Not surprisingly, he didn't. This quote is the end of a much more nuanced statement to conclude the point that he generally prefers to invest in operators who take less risk.
Regardless of your opinion on Elon, this sort of manipulation of reality damages the discourse. It's not helping anyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1Oi3esiry8&feature=youtu.be...
And to me, he is only attributing a quote to Elon, nothing else, but the audience takes it a different way. Regardless the quote above is not about Elon.
Of course it is understandable that Berkshire Hathaway wouldn’t hire anyone like Musk. They are as far from tech and VC as any investor could ever be. I admire Buffet and Munger, but the guys are 90 years old, I honestly couldn’t care less what they think about IT industry.
Well, then you need to tell me your age, to know whether I should care about what you have written above.
It’s terribly ironic that they think Musk is just lucky considering Munger and Buffett were able to invest during one of the most prosperous times in American history.
Admit you’re passed your prime and move on. Make way for innovators instead of valuing reading a 10-K and preferring conservative companies you believe are undervalued, or distressed companies you’re going to try to twist their arm into a deal (as Buffett did during the GFC with banks).
Elon doesn't just like to take risks, he would probably agree with being described as "risk obsessed". If your investment strategy is risk aversion and stability, you should avoid Elon. That isn't an outdated perspective, nor is it arrogant in any way - Elon would probably agree with it. The last sentence was an exaggeration of his bias when evaluating any operator to drive his point home clearly.
It's fairly difficult to imagine that Charlie Munger thinks Elon Musk has just gotten lucky for his entire career, and unsurprisingly he isn't saying that in this example. I'm all for fairly criticizing out-of-touch arrogance, but I can't see it being the case here.
Indeed, we'll see if Tesla survives, not only the coincidental depression, but also the multi-hundred-billion-dollar war chest being leveraged against them by the other car companies with a century more experience each, more connections, and broader reach.
It's a bit early to be calling the game is all.
Like reimplementing a distributed multithreaded C++ processing cluster in NodeJS to make the codebase more accessible.
Or like those fashionable people that try to replace a grep shell script with a multi-node ElasticSearch cluster in the cloud, at only 100x the operating costs.
The knowledge that novel does not equal unquestionably good ages extremely well. The "innovator" of today may well be a "debunked hype" by tomorrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
(this page seems a little more biased than I remember in favor of a conservative viewpoint)
I wonder if in 6 months opening a business quickly will seem prescient, or will it have been a disaster?
What I actually think Musk should do is do what he's done well before, "science the shit out of it". Figure out how to move forward without killing someone (in a rocket accident or a covid accident)
Imagine thinking anyone knows what will happen in the future.
Do continue ignoring all the massive failures and continuous capital / opportunity these supposed kingmakers have.
With one exception that I know of, share prices are the average over all estimates of future earnings.
The exception is: When investors just follow the leader instead of producing their own price estimates, you get bubbles.
No, but it does mean they aren't any more skilled than anyone else on the same level. They surely cannot know what will happen next any better.
How's the Boring Company? Hyperloop? Funny thing is ~all of his companies involve heavy government subsidies.
"is bold and brilliant, and he swings for the fences."
and ...
"People like that get some remarkable results,” Munger continued. “Sometimes they get some quick failures. I haven’t the faintest idea how Elon Musk will turn out, but he has a considerable chance of success and considerable chance of failure. He seems to like it that way."
Wait a second, by all measures this billionaire is _already_ successful, no? How could anyone claim the contrary?
Will he be reduced to a mad man shouting on twitter, with nothing left to his name but failed enterprises?
Or will he carve the moon in his image?
It’s more like being a medieval king: to the extent that you’re the shareholder, your wealth is the “nation’s” wealth; your guards are paid for out of your pocket; and you can be drawn into conflicts that lead to you losing everything.
It’s that latter part that I’d be worried about with Musk. He took a very big gamble with SpaceX, and if one more launch had failed in the early years, he would’ve become a mere footnote on someone else’s Wikipedia page. The concern is he might make similar gambles in future.
His opinion is absolutely valid, but it’s not like his track record is any more exceptional than Musk’s.
Everyone makes mistakes, but to conclude that Berkshire Hathaways' track record is "not ... more exceptional than Musk's" is beyond folly. Their success over decades is unparalleled.
Furthermore, Berkshire on principle plays the long game. They rarely act on short-term events.
Tesla was also badly affected by the Covid-19 measures. The Fremont plant is still closed. You would have expected Munger to dump airlines sooner; but would you also have expected Musk to dump his TSLA stock, too?
For some people, being an investor means looking at a time horizon of decades, not months.
Sounds like the politicians and assorted apparatchiks who still think, or claim to think, that this virus is orders of magnitude worse than it actually is.