Jurgis

Musk faked Moon landing in 1969. 8)

Right. It literally assaults various Dons. Even socialists like Kochs are talking about it. What is this world coming to! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/01/i-dont-like-the-idea-of-capitalism-charles-koch-unfiltered/ It's good to be the King! I'll just end up with a quote from Koch:

My yearly dose of Elon: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

Our CEO is such a nice, upfront, no bs kind of guy. He pulled up to work with his sweet new car this morning and I complimented him on it. He replied, "Well, if you work hard, set goals, stay determined and put in long hours, I can get an even better one next year."

Sure he is trying to change the world and is super driven. But at some point people overworking and burning out becomes an issue. Especially in situations where quality/reliability has to be nine nines or something. And if people burn out and leave, you have to train new ones and stop them from making errors previous ones already knew to avoid. Anyway, this is not an argument to short Tesla or that Tesla will fail. It's just an argument that it's not healthy to maintain the startup mentality and non-stop-sprint for years. And BTW most startups that do the all nighters are not building things where a crash costs lives. Honestly, I am surprised that Tesla/SpaceX don't have more failures. It's either quality of people or good controls or both.

I believe you are conflating a lot of different things that should be taken apart and examined separately. It would be way easier to sit down with you and go together through this example rather than to try writing wall of text and numbers here. So, sorry, but I pass on writing. :) Maybe someone else will take the challenge. :) Edit: having a discussion based on market prices in abstract is meaningless. First of all, market may be wrong in valuing one or both companies. Second, market may be valuing things that you think are not important - but they might be. In short, of course you'd rather have a $1M that produces $100K per year rather than $1K per year. But how much would you pay for the first vs the second? Would you really pay $500K (5P/E) for first and $5K for second? This ignores earnings stability, future proof'ness, etc. It also ignores what $1M is (cash? securities? a mine? a contract? 100 old trucks?) and whether it is easy/possible to make the second $1M earn much more than $1K per year. Then you are introducing growth into the scenario and this complicates matters further, since you don't define what the growth is based on (earnings? sales? book value?) and what happens to the non-invested earnings/fcf. I'll stop there. :)

I am sorry to say this but this is got to be the worst joke here :) :) :) :) :) And I thought that jokes about German sausages are the wurst.

Longer term if automation goes ballistic, society may have to figure out how to compensate people who don't work. Short/medium term unless trends outlined by vox change, the situation likely will continue. Things might change if/when labor force decreases because of low population growth. Things may change if/when global income rises to developed country levels - but this is slow and doubtful. Personally, I want to live in society that doesn't have huge social inequality, since IMO this raises crime rate and risk of social disturbances. I doubt that I can influence the situation much though.

Yep.

I'm still in AAPL because I'm in love with Tim Cook. OOPS wrong board. :-[

If people aspire "to their highest level of success in whatever job they choose", for most of them they will not get paid as much as CEO and likely will get paid way lower. Even worse, the productivity gains by workers are likely not increase their salaries, but will rather increase the salary of the CEO, since any revenue and profit gains will be attributed to the great CEO "leadership". Do you really believe that someone who doesn't aspire to be a manager (CEO) and aspires to be a great line worker, will get a proportional benefit for their productivity gains? Mostly not. Regarding CEOs creating tremendous value - most CEOs don't. I've seen enough crappy struggling or going down organizations that pay enormous bucks to the CEOs. Of course, CEOs and boards can rationalize anything "oh, we are going down, but we'd be going down even faster if not for tremendous sacrifice of our CEO who earns multimegabucks for it". Most companies don't measure CEO productivity and contributions - not that this is easy to do for CEOs. Edit: and BTW most of the compensation plan formulas are not real measurements of CEO productivity or contributions.

This comparison is not correct. Unlike swimming which is unlimited sum game (if you teach everyone to swim really really well, there is no limit or restrictions how well they can do apart of human capacity to swim), salaries are limited by the revenues of the businesses. Even if you taught everyone to be Buffett or Jamie Dimon or John Malone - which is admirable and I would be very happy if this happened - some people would still have to serve Big Macs, some would have to assemble cars, and some would still be CEOs. And unfortunately, even if you are trained to be Buffett, you will not get paid CEO salary while serving Big Macs. Tech startup model with options is the only model that somewhat pays low level workers big bucks. But this is not gonna happen in other industries. So the problem exists even if you trained and educated the workers as much as you can.

It's interesting that T&T are investing in Liberties while Buffett talks against leverage. ;) I know, I know: Liberties are "good" leverage and T&T are independent. But still. ;) Disclosure: I have positions in BRK and Liberties.

Where do I apply? :o :-*

IIUC compensations of Berkshire unit leaders are nothing interesting/special. So I guess Buffett doesn't work on having interesting compensation plans for his sub-CEOs. Apart from Todd and Ted. Or am I missing some interesting stuff there? (I might, since I don't follow the buyout agreements of some BRK subs in detail).

Possibly OT, since I'm not retired or close to, but I'd probably keep 200K in cash if I was retired. Right now I keep less than that.

I forwarded to some people who might be interested in this opportunity. I'll let you guys know if any of them contact Doris and get a position. :)

Well, I vote against the compensation proposals of most companies where I hold shares. However, like Buffett said, it's very hard to change anything. Boards are usually management friendly. Most shareholders vote party line or don't vote at all. In big companies big shareholders are index funds that vote party line or don't vote at all. Government can't do a lot. There is already a salary limit of $1M (or is it $2M?) above which company faces some tax repercussions IIRC. This does not matter, since companies just make CEO salaries $1M and pay the rest as easy-to-get bonus. BTW, like Uccmal said, it's very hard to legislate or even devise a scheme that cannot be subverted by smart CEO/board. And we already had VRX's Pearson who was taking no salary and just stock compensation - which is thought to be ideal by a lot of people - and look how this ended. There is also the fact that some superstar CEOs are worth their pay (Buffett says he'd pay the multimillions to Jamie Dimon), though most are probably not worth it. In general, we need humankind as a whole to step up in ethics (including altruism, generosity and more concern and support for others). And not only because of income inequality, but also because we might blow ourselves up if we can't temper our conflicts in the coming century or so. But it's very hard. Changing people's morality and attitudes is very slow. And our combative and egocentric nature reasserts itself given opportunity or conflict situations.

Tipping a lot benefits quite specific socioeconomic slice. If that's what you want to achieve with your charity money, then OK. Otherwise, not. Personally I donate to charities that are likely very different from what I would do with tipping more. Apart from some charities that I have personal connection with, I donate to WWF and some charities from http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/

Perhaps we should split this into another thread. Comparative valuation is not easy. Let's take BRK and a number of "Buffett-approved" companies. By "Buffett-approved", I mean companies that are owned by BRK, Munger or where Buffett talked positively about management and owning the stock but doesn't own it for some reason (usually we are talking banks here - Buffett just buys more WFC instead of something else). So: AXP, BAC, JPM. I don't believe the following are cheap, but they also have been mentioned/approved/owned by Buffett: MCO, KO, DIS, V, MA, COST. Buffett approved, cheap, but I don't like them: DE, IBM. Feel free to add others. So how would you compare valuations and quality of these companies to BRK and would you invest in them rather than in BRK at this point in time? Personally, I hold some AXP, BAC, JPM, MCO, DIS, COST. All things being equal, I'd probably just buy BRK instead of all of these. But things are not equal - I am concerned about Buffett's mortality (and this is yet another thread, but I'm am gonna sell BRK the moment Buffett dies and I'm not changing my mind on this). So things not being equal I could add to AXP, BAC, JPM now rather than adding to BRK. What are your guys thoughts though? Are any of the Buffett-approved companies attractive enough for you to buy them instead of BRK? Or even sell BRK and buy company XXXX? Why or why not?

He's saying that people are buying other (worse) companies for worse valuations at the time they could buy easily analyzed (by Buffett himself) BRK at 1.2-1.4 book. At least that's my interpretation. :) I somewhat agree that if you buy non-BRK, it may be worthwhile to compare it with BRK and decide if the non-BRK is cheaper and/or better company than BRK. Otherwise why buy the non-BRK?

Harambe for ISIG board!

Picasso, you go man! 8) ;D 8) Harambe lives!

Your $.02 is what makes price difference between $.08 and $.06 :P ;D For companies of such size and liquidity CoBF sentiment is enough to move prices a lot. And/or some people liked new management and wanted to get in "at the ground floor" possibly regardless of price. (Although anyone who wanted to build sizeable position either had to have a lot of patience or pay up).

I disagree with this. Someone looking where everybody else isn't would have automatic advantage only if the pool of companies/stocks they are looking at is of similar quality than the one where others are looking. But that's not true most of the time. Most of the time the companies/stocks in "contrarian pool" are actually (much?) more crappy than in the other pool. So, yeah, the guy gets advantage due to "other people not looking", but they get a disadvantage because the pool is crappier. And I disagree with your claim that the advantage automatically outweighs disadvantage. In other words, if you fish by the known fishing hole, you have more competition, but you also have a tons of large good quality fish there. If you go where people know the fishes don't swim, you have less competition but fewer and smaller fish. The secret of course is to find ignored fishing hole with a lot of large fish, but that doesn't happen automatically by just being contrarian. And yeah, sure it happens that ignored holes exist at various times for various reasons. Whether for growth investing or value investing or art investing. ;)