Liberty

Lightning will strike Thurso and Landquart simultaneously any moment now.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-11/putin-s-34-billion-siberian-hoard-hunted-by-cash-starved-allies

Agreed -- I think you can find pockets of unreasonableness (CRM, Unicorns, etc. come to mind), but there are still places where value is "hiding in plain sight." Moreover, I've spoken to many people who seem to believe, as Jurgis pointed out, that in the next crash all correlations will go to 1 -- perhaps because of the availability bias that correlations largely went to 1 last time. Indeed, there are always pockets of enthusiasm. But this isn't 1999 when Cisco was worth half a trillion and Microsoft 600 billion and thousands of companies with no profits and barely any revenue were getting funded and IPOing and 1/3 of Canada's stock market was Nortel or whatever, despite the fact that just a tiny fraction of the number of people who are online now were online then, and each of those people were spending a tiny fraction of what they are now on online-related products and services. So IBB has been going up pretty fast in the past 2-3 years. Whoop-dee-doo. It was pretty much flat between 2001 and 2011. It's probably overvalued now, or maybe there's a secular trend with demographics, people getting older, etc. I don't know, but that's not 1999. http://i.imgur.com/4wGIWSL.png

It's not even just two fields. He's the chairman of SolarCity and had the idea for that company (run by his cousins), his hobbies include designing an electric plane (with vertical landing and takeoff) and the hyperloop (to which he open sourced the design), etc. He's really a guy for the history books.

Buying Visa Europe for $20bn.

Ackman's whole point is to be conservative and to show that despite cutting some assumptions in half and not giving any credit to pipeline stuff, it's still doing well.

Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html

Up 13%. http://www.ebix.com/PressRelease/PressReleasebyID/336

I don't want to misrepresent what you said, but you mentioned wanting to see "at least a year" of debt repayment and organic growth a few times and then made many posts about not being comfortable with the debt in the "7th inning" of this macro environment and all that. You can follow the discussion from here: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/valeant-pharmaceutilcals-international-inc-(vrx)/msg212121/#msg212121 Hey, it's fine to change your mind. I do it often :)

Ahahah!!!! ;D Well, truth be told, Pearson also played a meaningful role... when he started declaring organic growth results that were truly unexpected! ;) Cheers, Gio Of course. But if you go back a few pages in this thread, you'll see that you were telling me that you wanted to wait a few more years to see how he did :)

If the investment turns out well, remember that I convinced you first. If it doesn't, remember that it was all Ackman's fault ;)

A lot of the risks of the past were taken because there was not really any way to avoid them. Today, our technology is so much more advanced that we can mitigate many of those risks. Why not? Space Exploration will certainly advance faster if rockets don't blow up all the time and astronauts aren't killed frequently. It's not just to save lives, it's to avoid derailing the whole project and cause a major PR problem.

That must be a key aspect of the watch appeal, if you like that kind of attention. The iPhone was very notable in public too when it was brand new. Soon enough, it won't attract that kind of attention.

Q1: http://www.libertyglobal.com/pdf/presentations/Liberty-Global-Q1-2015-Investor-Call-Presentation-FINAL.pdf http://www.libertyglobal.com/pdf/press-release/Liberty-Global-Earnings-Release-Q1-15-FINAL.pdf

That did seem a bit crazy, thanks for the correction. It's still an impressive number even per month.

Aspirational. http://fortune.com/2015/05/07/look-whos-buying-iphones/ "@mims: In China, Apple represents 25% of smartphone sales to people who make less than $650 a year"

Things are starting to move ... http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0NS2HU20150507?irpc=932

It's nitpicking, but I would say that the problem isn't that Buffett is too nuanced, it's that the people who follow him aren't nuanced enough. Buffett says "it's bad when hedge funds do this and that" and all people remember is "wow, Buffett really dislike hedge funds". It's like they dumb down what he says, and then attack that dumbed down version. That's no Buffett's fault.

Aren't these guys supposed to be smart? Well, I guess they're smart enough to know that people only care about soundbytes and headlines. When I hear stuff like this, I always try to imagine what Buffett might reply. I don't pretend to always know, but in some cases, the answer is obvious. ie. Buffett is not against all activists and hedge funds, he criticized certain behaviors by these groups, so obviously if someone from that group doesn't have that behavior, that's fine with Buffett. For example, 3G is not short-term oriented, Buffett's partnership had a fair fee structure that didn't reward underpeformance (and since then, he's used a vehicle that doesn't charge fees to people, so he's kept improving on that front), etc. This is the same tactic used to attack Michael Lewis on HFT. They pretend he claims that all HFT is bad, while Lewis just talked about the behavior of a sub-group in the industry that basically skims money while providing no value at all.

Hopefully you're buckled in for that ride! Its a testament to the whole "space" community that they spend millions if not billions on safety features like this, many of which may never even need to be used in order to protect the lives of their crew. Pretty sure SpaceX didn't spend that much on this particular feature. They just have a modern design that was built for safety from the ground up. Trying to retrofit that stuff on older designs would probably be very expensive, but the Dragon capsule has the ability to land under its own power, so they're just using that to double as a safety mechanism. Everybody assume that everything cool must be expensive, but developing the first iPhone is reported to only have cost 150m :) As for the ride, yes, you must feel like quite the pancake for a bit. But I suppose that's better than being dead. I was reading on g force earlier today, and rocket sled pilots have been exposed briefly to up to 45+ g forces... Crazy! What astronauts would go through here probably isn't too different from what some fighter jet pilots go through.

I find it remarkable how fast SpaceX is making progress on so many different fronts, with so many very difficult endeavors. Not bad for a private company founded in 2002.

This is what genius is like. 1997 internal meeting at Apple, Steve just starting to turn the company around, finding the core of things, focusing on what matters, etc. It's not just about getting the numbers right or whatever.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMQhOm-Dqo The sound is mangled in the ad because of copyright issues. You can hear a better version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8GiNGcXuM And the version that never ran publicly, with Jobs reading it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rwsuXHA7RA

Always an interesting read, even for bystanders: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/145871698x0x827135/90332B15-F6AE-4F44-B634-624BE548291E/Tesla_Motors_Q1_15_Shareholder_Letter.pdf

Good stuff: https://stratechery.com/2015/the-aws-ipo/