Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

You can buy a bigger and bigger house car tv stereo whatever, but it will not make you happy.

Its probably worth noting that I mean "enough" in the context of consumption and physical goods. "Enough" wealth doesn't really matter, its only a number in a database or a piece of paper until you spend it.

That said, I do, like Buffet, live in a nice house. I’m not depriving myself. But it’s also very approachable by any successful employee of a company (maybe salary of a director or VP of any large company could afford it). It doesn’t represent what I could afford if I wanted to really get into the elite neighborhoods of my city. I don’t really enjoy people in those areas. They tend to always talk about money in one way or another (vacations, private schools, cars, houses, maids, nanny’s, etc). Nothing wrong with it I suppose, just not my jam and not how I want my children raised and not the people I want as my neighbors and peers. I’ve always been much more envious of those unsuspecting rich people that drive clunker cars or live in modest homes and mow their own lawns but then you find out they paid for 16 grand children to go to college or something random like that. That’s the kind of thing I’d rather be known for than the guy with the Ferrari or yacht (even if they weren’t mutually exclusive).

My girlfriend years ago thought it was incredible and amusing that I was working a fancy tech job and drove this old car around. We are now happily married.

These days, I could buy a Bentley with cash. But I don't need one.

Warren Buffet's example is an inspiration that should be followed by more people who go into debt buying crap they can't afford with money they don't have in order to look rich.

YouTube has plenty of videos of people calling in with hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year in income and somehow they are still broke and in debt. Live below your means, save the excess income into an investment portfolio, keep doing that until you have enough money to live off the interest. Don't even think about buying a Rolex until you have so much money coming in from interest that you don't even know what else to do with it. Even then, remember that the Rolex, like anything else, requires maintenance, but that if you make someone else happy, they can take care of themselves.

The score keeping aspect makes it interesting, just like playing tennis while keeping score is more interesting than just hitting a ball back and forth across the net without counting.

Also, given that he is a billionaire, I do kind of assume that he has paid money to upgrade his home at some point, probably also owns additional homes elsewhere, maybe has done other things with his vast amount of money that normal people don't do, that are still consistent with living at the same address as when he was 28.

There was a cool fact in there that he sees every price tag as the opportunity cost with compounding interest.

That's the moral though. He didn't need it so he didn't do it. Whereas so many others with so much less do so much more.

He had 3 kids, and a 3500 sq ft house is, IMO, an extremely average size for any decently paid professional where I live with a family that size. It basically looks like something that had everything he needed, and anything beyond that that you so often see in rich people houses is just for show and bling.

0 - https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DLB-28383

Absolutely, but let's also not do the opposite. Being poor does not make one morally superior either.

Percentage-wise, few wealthy investors are dying out at ages of 60-65. In the US, males that make it to age 60 have a life expectancy of 81-82. But that's across all men - life expectancy is strongly correlated with wealth in the US, so a man in the top 1% could very reasonably expect to live to very late 80s/90s.

Nevermind that Buffet was still fabulously rich when he was 60, so none of your logic makes any sense to me.

The global median income is $2,760 annually. You sleep like a baby making likely 10-100X that, all while people are starving to death.

What are you doing to help the starving poor with your vast wealth? Are you not also morally bankrupt yourself, using your own logic?

While you're joining the current bolshevik revival that the populist left is trying to spin up, I just hope you remember the kulaks (the land-owning peasants) and many of the Serednyaks (the middle class peasants) also got murdered in the revolution. I'd keep any claims of moral superiority to myself if I were you.

Instead of seeing the nuance, you’d see everything that comes out of Elon Musk or Israel whoever you’ve managed to convince yourself is that current villain, as bad - without attention to details. More than that - you’d waste your time arguing whether they are “good” or “bad”, instead of focusing on specific actions, which is what society as a whole seems to enjoy seem to gravitate towards, and what increases polarization and reduce proper discourse.

When was this ever not the case? And what makes you think that you (or any other human) are somehow morally superior and would do a better job if subject to the same environment and pressures?

The point is that power corrupts, so we try to design decentralized systems wherever possible that don't require absolute power to function (ie. free markets, the internet, etc). Trusting specific human animals to wield authority over us in a non-awful way is not a reliable solution.

> Meanwhile, stealing a car because you are hungry can be the begin of a ruined life.

Sure, but the overwhelming majority of people who steal cars are not starving. And thinking that being poor makes someone morally superior is simply an argumentum ad lazarum, one of the oldest logical fallacies going back to biblical times.

That sure does trivialize him. If that was your goal, you nailed it.

I personally don’t think that’s a fair take, but I’ve no interest in trying to change your mind.

I know one anecdote is not data, but his investment in BYD all the way back in 2008 does counter that viewpoint somewhat - his investment success in the BYD case isn’t from other investors following him in, it’s from him identifying BYD as a successful company far before any other major investors did.

There is and it’s found in float, leverage and low-volatility assets [1].

If you look at what he does, that becomes clear. If you only pay attention to how people talk about him on the internet, you’ll be misled into seeing trend following.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19681/w196...

Of course, no one knows the future so who knows if this will continue.

Sort of like holding boring dividend stocks without the dividend.

Over the long run the latter is a better and more scalable strategy.

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1979.html

It's the soda and the shakes and the fries that'll getcha.

He's not exactly curing cancer but i could think of a lot more underhanded ways to make billions. I think he is above average ethically relative to his billionaire peers.

I don't know to what extent Buffet does it. Nor does our current quasi-fascist society where the government is highly embedded with industry and regulating who is the winner and who is the loser and then taxing/inflating the working class to make sure they stay afloat.

But in the idealistic version of America, it is supposed to be a place where becoming a billionaire means you are not just producing billions of profit for yourself, but billions of value for others. That every deal, both sides are better off. This is what we aspire to, the whole ideal towards voluntary trade and capitalism as a method a tide that rises almost all boats and at the very least doesn't involve sinking another boat lower.

THAT SAID...

My uncle (he's 98) had a passing acquaintance with Buffett during their overlap at Penn, and in the one econ class they shared, he remarked having heard Buffett say in almost salivating eagerness as he rubbed his hands that if only there could be another Great Depression, he would make a killing. The dude has value investing in his DNA beyond anything else, I truly believe. But he's argued for changing complex and unfair taxation, and always been a good citizen as far as I can tell. I think if all of Wall Street were like him, the world would be a much better place.

Idk how that can be considered a “life centered around greed”

In fact he had his main residence in Switzerland and was filthy rich which is a bit of a hard swallow especially in Sweden, a country still very much affected by the "Law of Jante".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

A reporter that was doing a documentary about his wealth asked him once directly when stepping out of his old Volvo and Kamprad kinda lost it; it was a big kerfuffle at the time on the telly.

For those paying attention it was really revealing about the true nature of the man (let me add he was a young Nazi back in the day).

Most people came to his defense like the red-blooded capitalist gentleman commenting above about Buffet being a 100% American.

The older generation still swallow the farce hook, line and sinker. For the rest of us it's pretty clear it was a well thought-out facade to placate the plebeians to sell more cheap furniture.

Or are you saying the general environment of high finance supports this?

No doubt he had more money than he needed but if this is referring to his preference for coka-cola and apple stock / any stocks with the ability to set their own prices because of market dominance, I feel like that’s not a totally fair criticism.

America threw off a king and founded a republic. Equality is a founding value and one we still respect. A rich man keeping his habits despite his wealth, and doing so next to the rest of us, is a role model for other up and comers.

(The Romans had a similar thing about pastoral farmers. Every culture has its myth, and we like it when those in power try to live up to it.)

But I agree with the person suggesting not diluting the word.

The internet citizen is so often convinced that everyone with a high net worth is crooked, cheated to get where they are at, and would be even more morally corrupt if only they weren't so undeserving as to be incompetent of the ways to do so.

So often the ambitious can believe that to succeed one must perform ultra sexy acts of innovation multiplied by inhuman hours of naive young team members. This pressure can drive us to be impatient, reckless, and unscrupulous.

When we look at most startup CEOs who make it big, we say "don't try to emulate them" because we know they took huge risks and rolled at least a few good numbers. A person can emulate Warren Buffet. It's just patient and prudent, avoiding self-deception for decades. Yet it is excruciating. If not for Warren Buffet, so many would say, "It's not worth it" or "It will never work because you'll slip up."

Being at least an anecdote that being honest and right can work out in the long run is a herculean counterweight against the vast traps of cynicism that can lead many to defeat themselves before they even try. It's tough to keep going or commit to that path, especially as your options keep going up. Few else tried because it takes an entire lifetime. Making it work saved a lot of people from a lot of imprudent choices and will continue to save more. That is heroic.

We expect the ultra-wealthy to eat at the French Laundry in California, to have chauffeurs, to live in New York penthouses…

That being said, McDonald did know how to do business. I’ve found myself there several times because their spaces are well located and they invested well in their interior that it made it a good place to grab a coffee alone, with a laptop or for a random meet.

Much lower than the chance it's just marketing.

Instead of spending hours of his life negotiating RE purchases, maintaining his properties, cutting checks to plumbers, doing renovations, etc. (that I hear many other billionaires do), he was practical with his (luxury) purchases focusing on time saving (living near work, fast food, private jet) and the experience (luxury vacation).

If you don't appreciate that, I think you're missing the point of his frugality.

Like the way Munger would promote reading but Andrew Carnegie built 2500 libraries. They would view building libraries as an opportunity cost and waste of capital.

"Ah shucks, I wish people like me would pay a lot more in taxes" but of course these guys didn't spend a dime on actual lobbying to make that happen. Again, that would be seen as a giant opportunity cost and waste of capital. They wouldn't want to go outside their "circle of competence" into something like politics or policy. How convenient.

I think the only way to have this image of a saintly grandpa when actually an absolute cut throat , money obsessed, richest person of all time is to believe your own bullshit.

you may consider a simple example for yourself:

Portfolio $100,000.00 $60k into US Tbills, (3, 5, 10y) $40k into SP500 cash $40k into Sp500 on margin

$140k exposure For the portfolio to be wiped out, you would need to have a 50% drawdown in the sp500 which hasn't happened in 90 years, and that assumes in a crash your tbill face value wont soar due to rate cuts

https://web.archive.org/web/20251231204056/https://www.theat...

The work/retirement dichotomy is such a weird and peculiar artifact of the 1950s US middle-class nuclear-family milieu.

That's gone.

For the rest of us, it's just...live your life, until you don't.

(viz. Below the fold: "Buffett remains as chair...")

That doesn't sound very positive to me. Perhaps OP has a point

Don’t apply the morality of a worker to a top capitalist

Build what? The next big ad serving platform? The next mass surveillance platform? New ways to squeeze money out of people? You’re right we all die so nothing matters, why would what you build matter more than the relationships you make, the good feelings you create? Build, but build art. Build something that will change peoples minds, make them feel good, make them want to change the world.

Do not conflate building something to make some guy richer, as just as or more important than spending time with family or creating true art.

For folks with the ability to make truckloads of money and then give it away to good causes, that is going to be the best choice v trying to add value in the world to make themselves feel better.

Imagine if I said "there are so many more worthwhile things to do than painting" if some famous artist retired.

I can design and build anything. If I didn't have to do it for work, I'd be making my own evil projects.

You can't take the country out of this boy it turns out...

I personally realized that I got bored of solo sized projects. It’s a lot more fun working with other really smart, motivated people.

During that period he did some different things which some of his personal money like buying stock in Dae Han Flour Mills, a Korean flour miller that was like 2 times earnings in 2003 but was probably too small a position to make sense for Berkshire. (https://www.netnethunter.com/warren-buffett-cheap-stock-pick...)

S&P500 total return over the same period: about 39,054% (390x gain)

$1 in BRK would be $55k today. $1 in S&P500 would be $390 today. Therefore, following the hypothetical 99% drop, 1% of Berkshire return would be $550, still well above the S&P500's $390.

- our prolific overseas medium.com bloggers

Ben Graham

The public stuff, sure, in the short term. The wholly-owned stuff, however, is pure private equity: their cash flows should cash flow irrespective of financing conditions.