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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why this is posted on hackernews.

Maybe the OP thought this was announcing Buffett's successor or that Buffett himself was stepping down?

I guess the one big thing is that Todd Combs is out at Geico which is pretty bad news for the firm as he was tremendous at running Geico and helping Buffett and Munger in an investment capacity.

Who ever gets the new CIO role at Berkshire is going to have a field day. They currently hold about $382B in cash.

You can invest in alot with a 1/3 of Trillion dollars and you can outright buy the vast majority of companies with a bank roll that big.

My theory is that Buffett is hoping for one last large crash before he retires so he can go shopping for distressed companies.

With so many long term people announcing they will be leaving within the next 2 years this announcement sets the table nicely for a new CEO(probably Greg Abel) and new CIO to pick their team.

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> "My theory is that Buffett is hoping for one last large crash before he retires so he can go shopping for distressed companies."

There was a video of a QA session with him recently where he was asked something like that and he answered (paraphrased) "we are keeping cash so that we can buy cheap things when they come up. Some people think I'm waiting so Greg Abel(?) can have a nice opportunity when he takes over, but I'm not that nice, if I see something I will buy it". And reiterated the commonly stated idea that Charlie Munger thought they'd have done better if they only ever made ~5 carefully chosen investments in the lifetime of the company, and that investing too freely, quickly, often, was a bad idea.

I think that leaves a difficult situation for the next CEO, people are going to expect them to do something and probably the best thing they can do is as much nothing as possible, reading, watching and waiting. Without Buffet and Munger's history of that it might be hard to defend.

If there was ever a stock to invest in where the investors are satisfied for management to carefully do nothing, wouldn't it be Berkshire? Will they automatically go nutso-stupid once Buffet is gone? It's not exactly like it's a day-trader stock, the share price went from merely ridiculous to absurd-beyond the last few decades.

You'd think, but while I was looking for the video I mentioned, I found one of their conferences from ~2022 with audience questions like "omg omg you've got huge cash reserves GIVE IT TO SHAREHOLDERS WHEN?? GIMME GIMME <money_mouth_emoji>" and Buffet gave the answer even I could have predicted: "we want cash reserves for the next market crash, whenever that is. If a big company gets into debt trouble, there aren't many people they can pick up the phone and call who could do a $50 - $100 billion deal like Berkshire can".

I can't imagine how often he's repeated "We want enough cash to be able to buy something, and we're waiting until something is cheap" over the last 40 years, but people going to their investor conferences don't all seem to have internalised it.

Buffet is stepping down at the end of the year.

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/nov1025.pdf

agreed. That had been previously reported

I think the same, we maybe entering the state of market Munger grew up in. Dalio has been calling it for years. if it happens on Buffet watch and he manages it successfully it would be a text book example of resiliency in a kind of centenarian almost-black swam scenario.

Wonder if he can pull it just as he did with Solomon Brothers

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