Railroad investment seems like a far more long-term driver of everyday everyman quality of life than pop up companies that try to take our attention and suck down a $billion while failing to do so.
VCs, and the Silicon Valley style culture in general, is a different investing culture than what Berkshire Hathaway is doing here. The underlying current of this discussion is which investing culture is better.
There's a lot of benefits to patiently waiting for an opportunity, rather than spending money as soon as it comes up. SV is surprisingly short-term in its thinking and culture. That's the lesson IMO for the past decade or two, SV is always about keeping up with your neighbors as opposed to thinking about the long term stuff that matters.
In the SV mindset, idle money is awful, you should have spent it on the latest-greatest recent whatever. 5 years ago that was maybe VR, 10 years ago maybe Internet of Things. Just 2 years ago it was cryptocurrency.
Guess what? If you spend your money on dumb things, you don't have money left over when the important revolutions happen. Patiently holding money is slower, but still valid form of investing.
You're looking at a literally $Trillion++ company. This $100B is literally pocketchange for a rainy day for them.
They've got the vast majority of their assets invested. Saving some money for later is more than just "patience", it also involves thinking about the overall picture of the company in question.
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In any case, "Cash" earns 5.25 to 5.5% right now (Federal Funds Rate), meaning all companies with a PE Ratio worse than 19 is a worse investment than cash.
And there's a _LOT_ of companies that have less than a PE Ratio of 19. EDIT: I'm not saying that they're always going to be a worse buy. But a $1 Billion company needs to make 0.0525 Billion/year to be comparable against cash right now, or at least make an argument why this next year of investment is worth more than the 52.5 million that could be easily obtained from a (state-tax free) 1Y Treasury.
When you have $450 B. in liabilities, $160B in cash suddenly doesn't look so big.
I'm saying I believe it is bad for pro-social ends and society and that we should be striking a better balance in ensuring we keep the money moving in a trickle up fashion if at all