Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has become too big, and it’s getting bigger by the day. It makes it a lot less exciting.
Berkshire Hathaway is a gigantic conglomerate that owns a bunch of boring businesses outright and has big stakes in a few arguably less-boring ones. That its annual shareholder meetings have nonetheless became pop-culture spectacles dubbed “Woodstock for Capitalists” can be chalked up in large part to the folksy charm of chairman and chief executive officer Warren Buffett and his long-running buddy act with tart-tongued vice chairman Charles Munger.— at “99.
Subtract Buffett, and you have an event that I doubt many people will want to travel to Omaha for or watch on CNBC, and the 93-year-old made clear that he didn’t think he had many more annual meetings to go. “I feel fine,” he said, “but I know a little about actuarial tables, and I shouldn’t be taking on any four-year employment contracts.”
There is, of course, another thing beyond the charms of Buffett and Munger that gave Berkshire shareholders such strong feelings of attachment to the company. Investing in Berkshire over decades made many of them very rich — allowing them to do things like donate $US1 billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York to make it tuition-free, which Ruth Gottesman, whose late husband was an early Berkshire investor, did in February and was applauded for at the meeting.
So what is the company good for? From the shareholder letter again: “Berkshire should do a bit better than the average American corporation and, more important, should also operate with materially less risk of permanent loss of capital.” That’s not nothing! It’s just also not really deserving of a cult following. The days of Woodstock for Capitalists are clearly numbered.
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