TREVNI

You're very welcome, @John Hjorth. Thank you for the kind words about the book and the material I've compiled elsewhere, such as theoraclesclassroom.com. I've benefitted so much from the value investing community and hope to continue to give back and continue to learn.

I enjoyed reading the account of building Berkshire and all the predecessor companies. I come down on the side of admiring the work Stanton et al did but also faulting him for not changing course. And I'm not sure I could do it differently in his shoes. He grew up in the business and had his identity tied to it, his legacy and his father's legacy. Buffett had none of this and could view the capital as fungible.

Wish I'd found this sooner. Tracked it down in a library and scanned it for anyone that's interested. It's the speech Seabury Stanton gave to the Newcomon Society in 1961 which gives a detailed account of Berkshire Hathaway's early days. A Saga of Courage_Seabury Stanton.pdf

And its get even better. $1.3bn in repurchases from Mar. 31 to Apr. 22.

Nice work! While I harbor some nostalgia for the old site, it's exciting to see the new possibilities! Heck, if Warren can learn to use a smartphone and buy Apple, we can learn this new setup! ?

Found it! Thank you LongHaul! It's from the 2014 DJCO AGM. “One person said to me, 'I have a list of 300 potentially attractive stocks, and I constantly watch them, waiting for just one of them to become cheap enough to buy.' Well, that's a reasonable thing to do. But how many people have that kind of discipline? Not one in 100.”

I would venture that the $19m per year has almost no marginal utility for Greg. Nor for Jain for that matter.

In my perfect world, Greg takes over and tells the board he's not worth as much as WB and asks for a $99,000 salary. he would really endear himself to shareholders if he did that, in my view. He's already rich multiple times over.

Thanks for sharing. The Barron's article references BRK purchases of shares from Scott. Here is the history through 2019.

Well, that didn't take long! "The investment banking industry will sell shit as long as shit can be sold." The man is 97. No F's given.

I'm searching for a Munger quote (could be Buffett) in which he said it would be an intelligent investing strategy to follow 300 companies and wait for a few to go on sale. I swear it was at a Daily Journal meeting, but I've had no luck listening to a few prior meetings. Does anyone remember this comment or am I now dreaming up Mungerisms? Thanks!

Fair enough. Are there any other large holders of the A? After WEB's shares all get converted to Bs and sold it seems like there could be a bit of a power vacuum. And I think the one-time gains from the split would be pretty attractive. Another group worth remembering is what Lawrence Cunningham calls Quality Shareholders. There are a lot of large institutions with significant holdings that will probably be called on to weigh in on decisions in the future. Even if they approve of continuing as is, which is likely to be the case, there will be more calls for them to bless the actions of management once present management has passed the baton. I suspect there won't be any real threat to breaking up Berkshire for the first 10-15 years, maybe longer.

Nice find, thanks for sharing!

You're making an assumption about the "tons of corporate employees" producing accounting reports. The quarterly reports are prepared at headquarters - I heard that directly from someone in accounting at HQ. Berkshire doesn't produce monthly consolidated financials. The subsidiary financials would remain and still have to be prepared. You'd have 1 & 1, but they'd still add up to 2. No change in costs. Same with the tax return: two smaller piles adding up to the same size as before.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and comments. I'm still in favor of the split (either 2 or 3 - in 3 you'd have to get a 3rd allocator) since you have 2 capital allocators (Ted and Todd), which would allow for at least 2 smaller Berkshires. I do believe it would create additional value. Arguments against have included: no incremental value created (I believe in smaller size even at 1/2 helps), not a permanent home for cos selling (they would still be a part of Berkshire Hathaway 1 or 2 or 3 (though 3 i would envision be cash only), not be able to reallocate capital (they would as cash is generated a capital allocator can re-allocate, except they have less businesses to choose from, but on the other hand plenty of businesses just as Buffett did 20 years ago). Help us understand your logic for splitting it up. What specifically would BRK gain access to that it doesn't already have? The operating subs can take advantage of smaller acquisitions as bolt-ons. Berkshire wouldn't magically gain access to a new subset of opportunities because it was half the size. The subs are operated in a decentralized manner already. It's almost as if they're still investments vs. wholly-owned subsidiaries. In other words, Berkshire takes a portfolio approach. Berkshire is really a collection of businesses, not one large business. Say you take GEICO, BHE, and BNSF and put them into a BRK#2. Now the other businesses are "smaller" - what have you gained?