And now one of the most respected
investors in America
is going to tell you
about his secrets.
Warren Buffett.
It's the sound of money.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett,
the second richest man in America.
He's estimated to be worth
about 62 billion dollars
and makes him
the richest man in the world.
You know Buffett is not exactly
what you might expect.
Even though he's
in the money business
he doesn't even own
a calculator or a computer.
He takes the long view,
and it's made him billions
many billions.
Maybe you can beat the house
but I don't think
you can beat Warren Buffett.
Buffett filed his first tax return
at 13 years old.
But he's no average billionaire, Tom.
No, he certainly isn't, Matt.
He's a 44 billion dollar average Joe.
Warren Buffett has an approach
that doesn't make him very popular
with his fellow billionaires.
Warren Buffett, the boy from Nebraska
who grew up to become
the Wizard of Omaha.
What was it about him
that allowed him
to become the richest man
in the world?
How did he do it?
Seventy years ago,
I was in high school,
almost a third as long
as the country has been around.
And when I was in high school
I really only had
two things on my mind
girls and cars.
And I wasn't doing
very well with girls
so we'll talk about cars.
But let's just imagine
that when we finish
I'm going to let each one of you
pick out the car of your choice.
Sounds good, doesn't it?
Pick it out, any color, you name it.
It will be tied up with a bow
and it'll be at your house tomorrow.
And you say,
"Well, what's the catch?"
And the catch is
that it's the only car you're
going to get in your lifetime.
Now what are you going to do
knowing that that's the only car
you're ever going to have
and you love that car?
You're going to take care of it
like you cannot believe.
Now what I'd like to suggest...
you're not going to get
only one car in your lifetime.
But you're going to get one body
and one mind
and that's all you're going to get.
And that body and mind
feels terrific now
but it has to last you a lifetime.
On the way to the office,
it's all of a five-minute drive.
I've been doing it for 54 years.
One of the good things
about this five-minute drive
is that, on the way,
there's a McDonalds
so I'll pick up something.
Good morning, thank you
for choosing McDonalds.
Go ahead and order
whenever you're ready.
I'll have a Sausage McMuffin
with egg and cheese.
- Anything else?
- That's it, thank you.
Yeah, and I tell my wife,
as I shave in the morning
I say either $2.61, $2.95 or $3.17
and she puts that amount
in a little cup by me here
and that determines
which of three breakfasts I get.
- That will be $2.95.
- Okay, $2.95.
- Here's the $2.
- How are you doing, sir?
Hey, great.
- You're on Candid Camera.
- I see. Hello, everybody!
When I'm not feeling
quite so prosperous
I might go with a $2.61
which is two sausage patties
and then I put them together
and pour myself a Coke.
- Hi, how are you?
- Here's your Sausage McMuffin, sir.
$3.17 is
a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit.
But the market's down this morning
so I think I'll pass up the $3.17
and go with the $2.95.
I like numbers.
It started before I can remember.
It just felt good
working with numbers.
I was always playing around
with numbers in one way or another.
And it was fun to have
a bunch of guys over
and have them betting on
which marble
would reach the drain first.
I had a lot of energy as a kid.
I was inquisitive
and I was the youngest one always
in the class because I'd skip.
I've always been competitive.
I liked to read more than most kids.
I really liked to read a lot.
My Aunt Edie gave me a copy
of The World Almanac.
And that was heaven to me.
And I can still tell you
that Omaha's population
was 214,006 in 1930.
Some numbers
just kind of stick with you.
And very early,
probably when I was 7 or so
I took this book
out of the Benson library
called A Thousand Ways
to Make a $1000.
And one of the ways in this book
was having penny weighing machines.
And I sat and calculated
how much it would cost
to buy the first weighing machine
and then how long it would take
for the profit from that one
to buy another one.
I would sit there and create
these compound interest tables
to figure out how long
it would take me to have
a weighing machine
for every person in the world.
I had everybody in the country
weighing themselves
ten times a day
and me just sitting there
like the John D. Rockefeller
of weighing machines.
The allowance when I was
a little boy was a nickel a week.
But I liked the idea of having
a little more than a nickel a week
to work with
and I went into business very early.
I started selling Coca-Cola
door to door.
I sold gum door to door.
I sold Saturday Evening Post
Liberty magazine,
Ladies Home Journal, you name it.
I think I enjoyed the game
almost right from the start.
But I like being my own boss.
That's one thing I liked
about delivering papers.
I could arrange the route I wanted.
Nobody was bothering me
at 5 or 6 in the morning.
I was delivering 500 papers a day,
and I made a penny a paper.
But, in terms of compounding
that penny has turned
into something else.
Einstein is reputed to have said
that compound interest
is the eighth wonder of the world
or something like that
and it goes back to that story
you probably learned
when you were in grade school
where somebody did something
for the king and the king said,
"What can I do for you?"
And he said,
"Well, let's take a chessboard
and put one kernel of wheat
on the first square
and then double it on the second
and double it on the third."
And the king readily agreed to it
and by the time he figured out
what two to the 64th amounted to
he was giving away
the entire kingdom.
So it's a pretty simple concept
but, over time, it accomplishes
extraordinary things.
Berkshire is an amazing company
fourth largest company
in the Fortune 500.
He is the only person
who has ever, from scratch
built a company that is
in the top 10 of the Fortune 500.
Berkshire Hathaway. Fine, thank you.
Well, Berkshire is
a holding company of sorts.
It owns a large number
of separate businesses
that operate
independently of each other
and, to a great extent,
from the parent company
Berkshire Hathaway.
What colors do they have?
My favorite green and gold.
It's so strong.
All right, well, we're going to get
more from you in a second...
We have maybe 70,
maybe 80 businesses.
And we ask them to behave in a way
that doesn't hurt our reputation
at Berkshire Hathaway.
But they run their own lives.
Other people do most
of the decorating in the office
so various things come in.
Originally,
when I moved in in 1962...
You can see this.
I went down
to the South Omaha Library
and I think, for a dollar
I got seven copies
of old New York Times
from big times
like the panic of 1907.
This is one, 1929 obviously.
But I wanted to put on the walls
days of extreme panic in Wall Street
just as a reminder that anything
can happen in this world.
I mean it's instructive art,
you can call it.
I was born in 1930
here in Omaha, Nebraska
during the stock market crash.
My dad lost his job in 1931,
a year after I was born.
He was a stock salesman
and he had what little savings
he had in the bank
and so he started his own company.
He worked
right through the depression.
He had an investment company and...
As an adult,
when I looked back, I thought
"Wow, did that ever take
a lot of nerve."
Sometimes, we'd go down there
on Sunday
and we could play
with the adding machine.
My brother and I tended
to play the games together.
And I remember, at one point
he said to me,
"I'm going to be a millionaire
by the time I'm 30,"
or something like that.
It was totally outside of anything
my family had experienced
but he just was unusual that way.
Well, I was the oldest
and then my brother
and then my sister.
And my father would go
to New York periodically
to check on businesses and stocks
and things like that.
When he'd come back, he always had
a costume for each of us
and Warren loved it.
He was very good-natured.
He was quiet.
It was hard to tell
he was a genius at that point.
But, I mean, who was looking?
The first books I read on investment
were actually in my dad's office.
Pretty soon,
I read all the books in the office
and read some of them more than once.
My dad had various nicknames for me.
He'd call me "fireball" sometimes,
because I'd start little businesses.
He didn't care about money at all.
He believed very much
in having an inner scorecard
and to never worry
about what other people
are thinking about you,
you know, just...
If you know why you're doing
what you're doing
that's good enough.
I admired everything about him
to the extent
that I was absorbing lessons
from him without knowing it.
And the idea
that all lives have equal value
is something
that all three of his children felt
since I can remember.
My dad, at one point,
ran for congress
when I was 12 or so.
It was a very Republican household.
And I campaigned for him.
My sisters campaigned for him.
The whole family did.
My mother was very, very bright,
and she was very gregarious.
She was a good campaigner for my dad.
She had a lot of ambition.
And I think my brother Warren got
a lot of his extreme competitiveness
from my mother actually.
She was brilliant at math.
You know, I guess
they still had these things
where you crank them
and things added up.
And she could add it in her head
faster than the machine could do it.
She was absolutely amazing in that.
She was very dutiful
about taking care of the kids.
But you didn't get
the same feeling of love.
It was there, but it just...
It didn't come out the same way
as with my dad.
In the nation,
the only permanent way to prosperity
is a balanced budget.
Unless that goal is achieved
all post-w*r plans will collapse
like Hitler's conquest.
You have heard
Congressman Howard L.H. Buffett
Republican member
of the House of Representatives
from Nebraska speaking on the...
When I was about 12 or 13,
we moved to Washington, my family
and I was mad.
I was having fun in Omaha.
And I lost all my friends,
and now I moved to a town
where they were all strange and...
So I was very, very unhappy.
At school, I just lost interest.
I took pleasure
in tormenting my teachers.
At that time for example,
AT&T was the stock
that all teachers owned
for their retirement.
And I decided
that it would drive my teachers
a little crazy
if I went short the stock.
Because when you go short a stock,
you're betting that it will go down.
So I shorted ten shares of AT&and then brought
the confirmation to school
and showed these teachers
I was shorting the stock.
They found me a big pain in the neck
but they did think
I knew a lot about stocks.
And then at home
my mother would have
terrific headaches.
And you didn't want to be around her
when she was having the headaches.
And she would lash out more.
She would never do it in public.
Well, I think
we were terrified of her.
When I'd wake up in the morning,
I'd listen to hear her voice.
I could tell, by her voice, it was
going to be a terrible day or not.
When she got difficult,
the three children felt it.
When I was at a low point sort of,
I decided that I would run away.
So I talked two other guys
into running away with me.
So we went out,
and we start hitchhiking.
And then we got picked up
by the highway patrol
and that scared the hell out of us.
It's very interesting.
My dad never really gave me hell
about doing this.
But he finally said, you know...
He said,
"You can do better than this."
And just saying that
I mean I felt I was
letting him down, basically.
So in all ways, he was teaching me.
Never taught by telling me things.
He just taught by example.
He had unlimited confidence in me
even when I screwed up,
and that takes you a long, long way.
The best gift I was ever given
was to have the father
that I had when I was born.
I didn't want to go to college.
I was 16
when I got out of high school
and I was buying stocks.
I mean, I actually was having
a pretty good time and I didn't see
that really was much to be gained
by going to college.
But my dad
kind of jollied me into it.
He had a roommate
who was a friend of mine
and the roommate said
it would just drive him crazy
because he studied all the time.
When Warren would come in
like 15 minutes before the exam
and just ace his way through it.
I finished in three years,
because I had enough credits.
And I was in a hurry.
I wanted to get out.
When I got out
of the University of Nebraska
I applied to Harvard Business School.
They told me I was to get interviewed
in a place near Chicago.
I got there, and he interviewed me
for about 10 minutes
And he said, "Forget it,
you're not going to Harvard."
And so now I'm thinking,
"What do I tell my dad?"
You know, "This is terrible."
And it turned out to be
the best thing
that ever happened to me.
Later that summer,
I was looking through a catalogue.
And in the catalogue
it had these names of people
that were teaching.
And one was Graham
and another was Dodd.
I had read this book
by the two of them.
So I wrote him a letter
in mid-August
and I said, "Dear Professor Dodd."
I said,
"I thought you guys were dead.
But now that I found out
that you're alive
and teaching at Columbia,
I would really like to come."
And he admitted me. So you know what?
That, it just shows,
you never can tell.
Gentlemen, Professor Graham.
Ben was this incredible teacher.
I mean he was a natural,
and he drew us all in.
Are Wall Street professionals
more accurate
in the shorter term
than the long term forecast?
Well, our studies indicate
that you have your choice
between tossing coins
and taking the consensus
of expert opinions.
And the results are
just about the same in each case.
It was like learning baseball
from a fellow whose batting .400.
It really...
It shaped my professional life.
There are two rules of investing
according to Warren
and he learned this from Ben Graham.
Rule Number one, never lose money.
Rule Number two,
never forget Rule Number one.
Ben Graham basically coined
the term value investing.
He believed in careful scrutiny
of a company's financial statements
and that if you bought value,
it would eventually prove out.
A few years ago, I went to Amazon
and sure enough,
they had this manual there, so...
while reliving my youth
other guys were going
to Amazon probably
and buying old Playboys or something.
But I bought
old Moody's Manuals instead.
And when I got out of school,
I started selling stocks.
I was 20 years old at the time
and looked about 16
and acted about 12.
So I was not
the most impressive salesperson
anybody ever met.
But what I would do was
I went through page by page
looking for possibly
undervalued stocks.
Is this like going
through an old family album?
Better.
When I got out of business school
at Columbia
I'd developed pretty decent skills
in terms of business
but I hadn't really come to terms
with the world exactly.
What were you like
around girls back then?
Bad. I was...
I was sort of out of the swing
of things there for a while.
I went to my 60th reunion.
There was a girl there.
I took her out one time
to the Uptown Theater
in Washington and I asked her
whether she remembered
what movie we saw, and she said,
"No, I don't remember that."
And then she said,
"But I do remember one thing."
And like an idiot,
I said, "What was that?"
And she said, "Well,
you picked me up in a hearse."
And it was true
that I owned a half-interest
in a hearse
while I was in high school
which was
not the smoothest thing that...
Or coolest, as they would say now,
that you could do on a date.
There were two turning points
in my life
once when I came out of the womb
and once when I met Susie basically.
She was the girl, yep.
But it took her a little longer
to figure out I was the boy.
I was going to be
his youngest sister's roommate
at Northwestern.
So I walk into their house,
and he was sitting in this chair
and he made some sarcastic quip.
So I made one back.
I thought, "Who is this jerk?"
And that's how we met, yes.
Listen, Warren is smarter
than you even know.
His brain is going all the time.
And my dad said to me
"Now you have
to understand about him
you're not going to have
discussions with him
like you would most normal people.
But he has a heart of gold."
He was just totally enamored of her,
and why not? And she of him.
She'd sit on his lap all the time,
and he'd stroke her hair.
It was softening him.
Susie was really kind, considerate
and she was the balancing force.
I just got very, very, very lucky.
But I was a lopsided person,
and it took a while.
But she just stood there
with a little watering can
and just nourished me along
and changed me.
Somebody once said
that the chains of habit
are too light to be felt
until they're too heavy to be broken.
I had been terrified
of public speaking.
I couldn't do it, I'd throw up.
And I knew if I didn't cure it then,
I'd never cure it.
And so I saw an ad in the paper
for the Dale Carnegie Course,
which worked on developing
your ability to speak in public
and I went down there.
Be sincere.
A good smile has the same effect
as a puppy's tail.
They made us do
all these crazy things
to get out of ourselves.
And so we stood on tables
and did all kinds of things.
If I hadn't had done that
my whole life
would have been different.
So in my office, you will not see
the degree I got
from the University of Nebraska.
You will not see the master's degree
I got from Columbia University.
But you'll see
the little award certificate
I got from the Dale Carnegie Course.
As a matter of fact, every week
the instructor would give a pencil
to whoever had done the most
with what we learned the week before.
And so in the fourth or fifth week
I proposed to her mother,
and she said yes.
And so that week, I won the pencil
and I also got engaged.
I mean, it was an incredible week.
The wedding day
was kind of interesting
because I couldn't see anything
without my glasses
and I was so nervous that I just
decided to take off my glasses
and I wouldn't be able to see
all those people out there.
She was 19 when we got married,
and I was 21.
But she was
so much more mature than I was.
There's no comparison.
She was a better person than I was.
But when you get married,
it's not a question of saying
I'm going to put
a 14 percent factor in for humor
and 17 percent for intellect
and 22 percent for looks.
It doesn't work that way.
I knew it was the right decision,
and it was.
You could live anywhere in the world
- why do you choose Omaha, Nebraska?
- Yeah, I love it, and I...
You know, I was born
about a mile from here
and, you know, I've never had
a bad experience in Omaha.
Omaha and Nebraska are home to me.
Everything about it seems like home.
It's the pace. It's relationships.
There's a lot of continuity.
There's a lot of community.
There's a lot of friendship.
It's a very solid place
and friendly place
in which to grow up in
and in which to conduct a business.
When I came back to Omaha
in early 1956
I had no idea what I was going to do.
But a few months after I came back,
some members of the family said
"What should we do with our money?"
and I said
"Well, I'm not going back
in the business of selling stocks
but if you would like to join me
in a partnership,"
I said, "I'll be glad to do it."
So within a couple of months
after coming back
I set up the first partnership.
I wrote all the checks individually.
I filed 11 income tax returns.
I took delivery on stocks
for all these different companies.
I was a one-man band there
for six years.
Warren would sit upstairs
in his little office there.
And I would bring up
the name of a company
and, most of the time
he knew much more
than I did about the company.
He'd know
how many shares were outstanding.
He'd know the capitalization.
He'd know the earnings.
It was absolutely incredible.
I mean, when Warren said something,
it meant a heck of a lot.
And I think all of us
paid a lot of attention to Warren
when he took
a definite stand on something.
When I first met Warren back in 1959
I recognized immediately
that he was
a very intelligent person.
For the last four or five years
the stock market
has been booming along
and presumably forecasting
better business
which has really not materialized.
So maybe the stock market
is really correcting
a previous incorrect forecast
this time
rather than making a new correct one.
He made a lot of money buying
thinly traded securities
that were
incredibly cheap statistically.
Warren was, at that time,
dealing with small companies.
And his investments often were
to buy a company
that you could figure
was a discarded cigar butt
but it had one more smoke in it.
And he wanted to buy
at the right time
to be able to benefit
from the one smoke.
The first partnership started
with $105,100.
I put up the 100,
and the other people
put up the 105,000.
And then at the start of 1962,
I moved to Kiewit Plaza.
And by the time
I moved to Kiewit Plaza
we had $7 million dollars invested
and a fair amount was profits.
I was then renting a house,
I never owned a house to that point.
And then two years later
I bought the house
I live in today in 1958.
We had three children, Susie and I.
And we had them young, incidentally,
which was I think a very good thing.
My daughter Susie was born here.
I named her Susie just like that
as soon as I looked at her
because she looked
just like her mother.
And she was a cinch.
And then Howie was, you know,
this absolute bundle of energy
which made things very difficult
for big Susie for a while.
Peter again reverted back
to Susie's personality
and he was an easy child.
Well, you know, I would describe
my childhood as normal
but who knows what normal is.
People often think
you know, "Well, Warren Buffett
was this famous rich guy."
He was not famous and he wasn't rich
when we were growing up.
What I saw first and foremost,
day in and day out, was consistency.
Every day, we'd hear the garage door
close in the house
and then, like clockwork,
my dad would come in the door
"I'm home!"
And we'd all eat dinner together
which I think surprises
a lot of people.
My dad
used to rock me to sleep at night
and sing "Over the Rainbow".
So I have this insanely sentimental
attachment to that song.
I've always had a really close
relationship with him.
I've got three very different kids
and they've got a common heart
which they got from their mother.
She did most of the work, by far,
of bringing up the children
which is probably a good thing.
They have more of her qualities
than mine
which I would recommend.
Well, my mom was the biggest part
of my life growing up.
Even though I got disciplined
on a regular basis
and she was
usually the one doing it
she was still my best friend.
She was somebody
who would help anybody
I mean, whether she knew them
or didn't know them
or maybe even didn't agree with them,
she would still help them.
She was incredibly empathetic
and she was interested
in every person individually.
She never cared
about money or business at all.
I mean, he would go around saying
"I'm going to be
the richest man in the world."
And I think,
well, it's like somebody says
"I play music,
and I'm going to be Mozart."
I don't know.
How does anyone know...?
How does anyone know, you know?
So that was okay.
I don't really care about that.
I would say that Susie led Warren
toward changing his political views.
He grew up as a young Republican.
His father was
a Republican congressman.
But Susie saw things
in different ways.
She was the catalyst.
Freedom, freedom, freedom.
- Louder! Louder!
- Freedom.
- Louder!
- Freedom.
- What do we want now?
- Freedom.
When the children were growing up,
I was very involved in civil rights.
I was immersed in it.
And I think that's what made Warren
a Democrat.
He would go with me to hear speakers.
I remember that speech
that Martin Luther King gave.
That was one
of the most inspiring speeches
I've ever heard.
I come to say to you this...
Took me right out of my seat.
My wife was with me.
We both had the same experience.
It will not be long...
It was interesting, he...
In that speech, he talked about
"truth forever on the scaffold
wrong forever on the throne,
but that scaffold sways the future."
Well, he was going to be dead
in six months
but that scaffold did sway
the future.
My wife was more active than I was
but I was a hundred percent
with her mentally
and I was just working
a little more on my own investments.
But it didn't make a difference what
we were going to do with the money
after we made it.
I thought I would pile it up
over the years
then she would unpile it
in terms of running
one very large foundation.
And I was particularly good
at compounding money
and, therefore,
society would benefit by waiting.
I was genetically blessed
with a certain wiring
that's very useful
in a highly-developed market system
where there's lots of chips
on the table
and, you know,
I happen to be good at that game.
Ted Williams wrote a book
called The Science of Hitting
and in it he had
a picture of himself at bat
and the strike zone broken
into, I think, 77 squares.
And he said,
if he waited for the pitch
that was really in his sweet spot,
he would bat .400
and if he had to swing at something
on the lower corner
he would probably bat .235.
And in investing,
I'm in a no-called-strike business
which is the best business
you can be in.
I can look
at a thousand different companies
and I don't have to be right
on every one of them
or even 50 of them.
So I can pick the ball I want to hit.
And the trick in investing
is just to sit there
and watch pitch after pitch go by
and wait for the one
right in your sweet spot.
And the people that are yelling
"Swing, you bum," ignore them.
There's a temptation
for people to act
far too frequently in stocks
simply because they're so liquid.
Over the years,
you develop a lot of filters.
And I do know
what I call my circle of competence
so I stay within that circle
and I don't worry about things
that are outside that circle.
Defining what your game is
where you're going to have an edge,
is enormously important.
I bought the first shares
of Berkshire in 1962
and it was
a northern textile business
destined to become extinct
eventually, and it was
a statistically cheap stock
in a terrible business.
Berkshire Hathaway
was closing mills
and, as they closed mills,
it would free up some capital
and then
they would repurchase shares.
So I bought some stock with the idea
that there would be
another tender offer at some point
and we would sell the stock
at a modest profit.
And at one point,
the management asked me
at what price
we would tender our stock.
And I said $11 and 50 cents.
And the tender offer came out
a few months later
and it was at $11 and three-eights
which was
an eighth of a point cheaper.
And that made me very mad,
so I just started buying more stock.
I just felt
that I'd been double-crossed
by the management,
and, in May of 1965
I bought enough
so we controlled the company
and we changed the management.
That was a pretty silly way
to behave
as Warren has recounted
in retrospect.
One of the reasons
Warren's successful
is he's brutal in appraising
his own past.
He wants to identify misthinkings
and avoid them in the future
but it was an accident
that he chose Berkshire Hathaway.
If the chairman hadn't tried
to cheat him out of an eighth
there wouldn't have been any
Buffett-Berkshire Hathaway history.
If you're emotional
about investment
you're not going to do well.
You may have all these feelings
about the stock
the stock has no feelings
about you.
Looking back, it's interesting,
that tender offer
I didn't realize it, but it happened
about five days
after my dad had died
and whether that had
affected me or not, I don't know.
Do you remember your last
conversation with your father?
Yeah, but I don't want
to talk about it.
I think it just sobered him
and hurt him.
But...
Warren soldiers on.
Both Warren and I
could look at our fathers
and see what they did right
and what they did wrong.
Warren's father was
a real old-fashioned
right wing ideologue.
And his father
was so intense about it
that Warren just decided
that it was mistake.
It cabbaged up your head
to be that much of an ideologue.
So he loved his father,
but he didn't want to become
that much of a true believer
in anything.
My politics became more overt
after my dad died.
Civil rights changed my views.
You know, in 1776
Thomas Jefferson wrote
"all men are created equal"
and then
when they wrote the constitution
they, all of a sudden,
decided that no
it was just three-fifths of a person
if you were black.
I mean that struck me
as kind of crazy.
I was talking to him one day
about some racial issue
and he said to me,
"Wait till women discover
they're the sl*ves of the world."
Now how many men
were cognizant of that?
And even women then?
The initial example
is really my mother.
She came from a generation
where the main function
of the wife was
to help her husband in the job
And my sisters
are fully as smart as I am
they got better personalities
than I have
but they got the message
a million different ways
that their future was limited.
And I got the message
that the sky is the limit and...
It wasn't due to a lack of love
or anything of the sort, it just...
It was the culture.
On the other hand, you can look
at the flip side and say
it's quite encouraging
because if you look
at what this country accomplished
only using half of its talent
you know, just think
of the potential for the future.
I'm enormously bullish on America
over the future
and part of the reason is that we,
by some rather stupid decisions
essentially put half our talent
on the sidelines.
Warren is probably
the most rational person
I have ever met.
Charlie Munger would be
a close rival.
And Charlie became a man
that Warren depended on heavily.
And I think his first experiences
in the discarded cigar butt era
convinced him
that it was not exactly
where he wanted to be.
He made so much money for so long
doing what he'd been taught
by Ben Graham
which he'd buy these
very cheap stocks.
If they were cheap enough,
he didn't care
if it was a lousy company
and a lousy management.
He knew he was going
to make money anyway
just because of the cheapness.
Charlie Munger has had
a big impact on me in moving me
toward looking for wonderful
companies at fair prices
rather than fair companies
at wonderful prices.
And that was enormously important
because it enabled Berkshire
to scale up in a way
that would have been impossible
to do otherwise.
- Yep?
- What are the key indicators
you look for within companies
before making an investment?
Well, I look for something
that does give them a moat around it.
We have a company called
See's Candies out on the West Coast
See's Candies boxed chocolates.
If you give a box of See's chocolates
to your girlfriend on the first date
and she kisses you
we own you, you know?
I mean, we can raise
the price tomorrow.
I mean, you'll buy the same box.
You're not going to
fool around with success.
So the key there is the response.
You do not want to go home
on Valentine's Day
and say to your wife
or your sweetheart...
Preferably, they're the same person.
You don't say,
"Here, honey, I took the low bid."
It doesn't work.
Price is...
To a degree, it's immaterial.
If you've got an economic castle,
people are going to come
and want to take that castle
away from you.
And you better have a strong moat.
You better have a knight in a castle
that knows what he's doing.
You're not buying an asset.
You're buying a name.
You're buying a brand.
You're buying a real franchise here.
And Charlie was more responsible
for that than anybody.
We were mental partners
right from the moment we met.
I want to know, going back 50 years
what it was like
when you first met Warren?
Well, I thought he was a prodigy.
And I got a lot of criticism.
My wife said
"Why are you paying
such enormous respect
to that young man with a crew cut
who won't eat vegetables?"
He's ungodly smart.
He's got
a much broader intellect than I do.
And he's magnificent at being able
to condense important ideas
into just a very few words.
If you're not interested
in the economic scene right now
you're mentally dead.
Charlie has no tact.
All right, let's talk
a little bit about bankers.
Charlie, on Friday, compared them
to heroin addicts.
Yeah, well, that's colorful Charlie,
but I would not have chosen that.
I once wrote of him
that when they handed out humility
he didn't get his fair share.
The ideal way to run headquarters
is to have one man
preferably over 80,
sitting in an office by himself.
Anything else is pure frippery.
He's always honest
in what he tells me
so I listen to him.
We never had an argument.
We just...
We just kind of roll with it easily.
Suppose Warren doesn't want to do
something that I would've done.
And suppose that happens four times
over 40 years or something.
What the hell difference
does it make to me?
Net the record
is working out is fine.
Both of us know
that we've done better
by having ethics.
Warren's not interested
in making money by cheating people.
Warren's opinions
of Wall Street investment bankers
would not endear him
to their mothers.
He feels that they're
for the most part,
not out for their clients.
They're out
for their own business interests.
In the late 1960s,
there were just a flood
of accounting shenanigans
and mergers built
upon false accounting
and misleading people.
It was a time
when a lot of charlatans
were prevailing in Wall Street,
were being applauded by Wall Street.
And I understood
what the game was about
but I didn't want to play in it.
So I closed down the partnership
at the end of 1969
and I took on the title of Chairman
for Berkshire Hathaway.
Well, I think the modern Berkshire
is pretty much
all a reflection of Warren.
I have constructed
a business that fits me.
It's kind of crazy
to spend your life painting
if you're painting a subject
you don't want to look at.
I've gotten to paint
my own painting in business
on an unlimited canvas in a way.
It's a different sort of place.
I work with a great group of people
that make my life very easy
and that take good care of me.
We have 25 people in the office
and if you go back,
it's the exact same 25
the exact same ones.
We don't have any committees
at Berkshire.
We don't have
a Public Relations Department.
We don't have Investor Relations.
We don't have a General Council.
We don't have
a Human Relations Department.
We just don't go for anything
that people do
just as a matter of form.
It's exactly the life I like.
And it's not work to me.
It's just a form of play, basically.
Oh, I like things quiet.
I shut the door actually
at the office
because I don't want to hear
anybody talking outside.
distinctively changed his views,
and the belt-tightening proposal...
And I still probably spend
five or six hours a day reading.
To look at what's trending today,
our quick round up of what has...
Well, what's amazing
is the stuff he remembers.
He's like a little computer,
you know?
I keep thinking the hard drive
will run out of space
but it doesn't.
He's one of the smartest people
we know.
So I was at a couple
of the family dinners
at the Gates house
where Mary, Bill's mom, was trying
to convince him to come out
to the family place at Hood Canal
to meet Warren Buffett,
and he was resisting
because he was really busy
with Microsoft.
And finally he said,
"Mom, okay, I'll come for lunch."
So the two of us flew out there
somewhat reluctantly
because, you know,
buying and selling stocks
which is how I thought of Warren,
wasn't of particular interest to me
and didn't seem like value added.
It turned out
that was completely wrong.
We knew that day
that we'd be very close friends.
In fact, we just couldn't get enough
of each other.
Shortly after I met Bill Gates
Bill's dad asked each of us
to write down on a piece of paper
one word that would best describe
what had helped us the most.
Bill and I,
without any collaboration at all
each wrote the word "focus".
Well, focus has always been
a strong part of my personality.
If I get interested in something,
I get really interested.
If I get interested in a new subject
I want to read about it,
I want to talk about it
and I want to meet people
that are involved in it.
We both love to work hard.
You know neither of us like
frivolous things.
You know he doesn't know much
about cooking or art
or a huge range of things.
I can't tell you the color
of the walls in my bedroom
or my living room.
I don't have a mind that relates
to the physical universe well.
Warren, checking the DOW.
But the business universe,
I think I understand reasonably well.
Warren's ability to size up
people and businesses
it's a pretty magical thing.
He is the best out of
anybody we know.
We should all try to be
20 percent as good at that.
I like to sit and think,
and I spend a lot of time doing that.
And, sometimes,
it's pretty unproductive
but I find it enjoyable
to think about...
particularly about business
or investment problems.
They're easy. It's the human problems
that are the tough ones.
Sometimes, there aren't any
good answers with human problems.
There's almost always
a good answer with money.
He was sort of a genius.
I think sometimes geniuses are,
by default, lonely and isolated.
He was not really well-adjusted.
He was just this funny,
I mean, humorous guy
who maybe had a moat around him,
because he was afraid
and he didn't know anyone
that he wanted to let in.
And to this day...
I mean, I don't know...
Well, nobody knows him like I do,
and probably any wife would say that.
But...
He's a loner, in a sense.
And it's difficult to connect
on an emotional level
because, I think, that that's
not his basic mode of operation.
He was there physically.
But he was upstairs reading
all the time.
I always told my mother
we have to talk in sound bytes.
I learned that early on
that if you start, you know,
going into some long thing
unless you've explained to him
ahead of time
that it's going to be a long thing
and you need him to hang in there
you lose him.
You lose him
to whatever giant thought
he has in his head at the time
that he was probably thinking about
before you came in
and really wants to get back to.
He's not like the rest of us.
I don't think my dad
ever took anybody for granted.
But you are a little bit blind,
I think, sometimes
to what other people might be doing
behind the scenes.
And my dad's gotten
a little bit of a pass.
Warren can't find the light switch,
and it's probably my fault.
One time years ago,
when the kids were little
I was feeling really sick.
I had the flu.
So I lay down on the bed,
and I said to Warren
"Will you get me a pan or something
from the kitchen?
I may not get to the bathroom,
I feel so sick."
He said okay.
So he trotted down to the kitchen
and I hear
this bang, bip, boom, bang.
And he comes up,
and he brings me a colander.
And I looked at it, and I said,
"Look, honey, this has holes in it."
"Oh, oh, okay."
So he ran down.
All this banging and everything,
and he comes up.
And he puts the colander
on a cookie sheet.
Physical proximity to Warren
doesn't always mean
that he's there with you.
He's so cerebral, you see?
That's why I learned
to have my own life.
We were two parallel lines and...
But very connected
when he was open to connecting.
I did make a joke at one point.
I said, "You know,
we could make a tape
of Mom yelling, you know,
"Bye, Warren, I'll be back later!"
And then have the door slam.
And you would just think
she was here.
I don't think he knew
what she was doing most of the time.
Once Howie and I were both gone,
as we've gotten older
she started to see
the writing on the wall here
and you know just started
trying to figure out
how she could, at least, have
some more
as she called it,
you know, a room of her own.
The worst mistakes involve
not understanding other people
as well as you might.
Well, she left Omaha in 1977
and there really isn't much
to say about that.
It was devastating for him.
And I came home
because I can't say
I was mad at her exactly.
But I kept thinking,
"How can you leave him?
He's so...
He can't function by himself."
So my mother, she had asked
a bunch of her friends
to sort of look in on him.
And Astrid was one of them.
So I called Astrid, and I said
"Astrid, will you take Warren...
Make him some soup?
Go over there and look after him
because he's not going to make it."
And it took him a while
to figure it out
but he figured it out.
I said, "I'm not leaving you
because I'll be wherever you want me
when you want me."
My mom moved to San Francisco.
And, I think, one of the reasons
it was important for her
to leave Omaha
was because she just felt
like she was kind of trapped
in this environment
that everybody knew who she was
that she, you know,
couldn't have her own identity.
He knew that there was
something she needed to do
and that she really recognized
that the money gave us all and her
a choice in a lot of ways
that a lot of people didn't have.
There was a time
Warren was getting criticized that...
Here was this very, very rich man
who was getting richer every year
and really wasn't giving
a lot of money away.
And it was terrific criticism
by some people
which Warren
never said anything about.
The biggest thing
in making money is time.
You don't have to be
particularly smart.
You just have to be patient.
Susie didn't want to wait
as much as I did
but she never quite appreciated
compounding like I did.
That is a disagreement we have.
I run a foundation now.
I think we should be giving
more money away.
But I understand why we don't,
because it's business.
To me the crux of it is
that it wasn't the money itself.
You can see that
in the way he lives.
I mean, he doesn't buy huge paintings
or build big houses
or anything like that.
It's all mental with him,
and the money is the scorecard.
And he used to say to me
"Everybody can read what I read,
it's a level playing field."
And he loves that,
because he's competitive.
And he's sitting there
all by himself in his office
reading these things
that everybody else can read
but he loves
the idea that he's going to win.
I'll tell you how you do it.
Have you ever seen a juggler
juggle 25 milk bottles?
How did he ever get to do that?
The answer is
he started with one bottle
then two, then three
and just kept doing it
and, pretty soon, he was at 25.
And that's the way we did it.
So, basically,
we started out with cash
and ended up
buying a bunch of businesses
including insurance companies.
Insurance is, in itself,
a profitable business
but it has the additional advantage
of creating something
that's called float.
And float is the money
that hangs around Berkshire
while a claim is waiting to be paid.
And Warren turned out
to have an extraordinary ability
to use the money
thrown off by the float
to buy companies
that fed the growth of Berkshire.
In 1983, Mrs. B cashed in
on her business
by selling control for $55 million
to a company owned
by investor Warren Buffett.
Warren was quite an expert
about newspapers.
He got interested in the Post,
because he recognized it
as a greatly undervalued company.
He had to write me a letter.
"Dear Ms. Graham, I've just bought
five percent of your company
and I mean you no harm,
and I think it's a great company.
I know it's Graham owned
and Graham run
and that's fine with me."
And I thought,
"Whoa, this guy's really terrific."
He used to come to board meetings
with about 20 annual reports.
And he would take me
through these annual reports.
I mean, it was like going
to business school
with Warren Buffett.
Kay Graham did introduce Warren
to the world of Washington
entirely different group
than he had ever dealt with before.
It was clear that working with Kay
gave him a different kind
of confidence.
And he was the star.
Everyone wants to hear
what Warren Buffett has to say.
The Oracle of Omaha
building his image
and having some fun.
Berkshire shares have increased
more than 2000 percent in value.
One of the largest
market capitalizations in the world
and it could grow a lot larger
since Warren Buffett shows no sign
of slowing down.
So how did he do it? By investing
in what he knows and understands.
Good old-fashioned American brands
like Coca-Cola, Fruit of the Loom
and Dairy Queen.
What inspired you? I mean...
- This inspired me.
- Buy what you like.
- Is that what it is?
- Yeah, absolutely.
Today, the Coca-Cola Company
will sell almost two billion
eight ounce servings of one form
or another of Coca-Cola products.
Now if you get an extra penny a day,
a penny a serving
that's 20 million dollars a day,
that's 7.3 billion dollars a year
from one penny more.
When you own Coca-Cola
you own a little piece of the minds
of billions and billions of people.
That is really good.
And whose got the most
hundred-dollar bills these days?
Well, his name is Warren Buffett
in this country
and he has just displaced
his friend Bill Gates
as the richest businessman
in the world.
And the purpose
of Wednesday's meeting
was to discuss Buffett's company
Berkshire Hathaway's plan
to purchase railroad giant
Burlington Northern.
Valued at 26 billion dollars
this would be Buffett's
largest acquisition ever.
He's created Berkshire
from virtually nothing
into hundreds of billions
of dollars in market cap.
Nobody else has a record like that.
He wanted to have
an outstanding reputation.
And he'd never really upset
the apple cart
when he bought a business,
that he kept the management in place.
He was establishing a reputation
that paid off later in life.
It's been building and building
ever since I've known him.
It takes 20 years
to build a reputation
and it takes five minutes to lose it.
When Warren made his investment
in Salomon
I was one of the people,
along with many, many others
who were quite amazed
because he had taken
a very critical tone in talking
about investment bankers
and about their greed.
And here he was investing
in one Salomon Brothers
that was known
to be a member of the club.
Warren and Charlie went on the board.
And Charlie couldn't stand
what was going on there
and didn't like the culture at all.
And shortly after they got involved
the thing exploded.
In 1991, on a terrible day in August,
I got a call
And the two top officers of Salomon
were on the other end.
And they said
that, you know, "We have problem."
This is NBC Nightly News.
Good evening,
it is the kind of scandal
that rocks Wall Street
and raises questions
questions about the integrity
of our financial institutions.
For the giant securities firm
of Salomon Brothers
under investigation for improper
trading of treasury bonds...
Salomon admitted it exceeded
the limit of trading
in government bonds
once by buying bonds
in the name of a customer
who didn't even know about the deal.
Salomon Brothers
is under investigation
by the Treasury Department,
the Federal Reserve
the SCC and the Justice Department.
But more important
than the fate of the firm itself
is the impact their actions
could have on the public trust
and on the credibility
of the American market worldwide.
The company owed
a hundred and fifty billion dollars.
It owed more money
than any other private company
in the United States at the time.
And that night
I met with the man that ran
the federal reserve in New York
who was the sheriff, in effect,
and I said
"You know, I've never really owed
very much money before."
I said,
"I got a little mortgage on a house
but 150 billion
is a little staggering."
And I was hoping he would say,
"Well, don't worry, Warren.
We'll give you
a few weeks to breathe."
And he said to me,
"Prepare for any eventuality."
Earlier today,
the US Treasury Department announced
it had suspended Salomon Brothers
from participating
in the auction of new issues.
It was one more jolt
for a scandal-scarred Wall Street.
The Fed was in effect saying
you're an evil force
and we don't want you
trading our bonds.
It was a huge turning point
for Warren.
And he believed
that at that particular point
his reputation was on the line.
Warren had 24 hours
to make up his mind
as to whether he was going
to go forward
or just bow out.
And I think at that point
Salomon Brothers could have gone
into bankruptcy.
And Warren stepped up
and took responsibility.
Okay...
I'm Warren Buffett, I was elected
interim Chairman of Salomon Inc.
a few hours ago
at a board of directors meeting.
Why was it necessary
for you to step in
and what is
your mandate of leadership?
I think that it was necessary
to step in
because I would do
whatever was needed to dig out
any bit of information
about what's happened in the past
and I would do everything I could
to make sure
that things are exactly right
in the future.
Mr. Buffett,
are you satisfied that...
I had to convince the Treasury
that what was done in the past
was awful and stupid
and they had every right
to be furious at us.
But this firm employed 8,000 people
and it was going to
go out of business
unless they let us continue,
basically.
Warren believed that there was
a too big to fail scenario.
The term was not used then
but he believed
that Salomon was too big to fail.
And if Salomon went down
it would take other important parts
of Wall Street with it.
We had this death knell
from the Treasury
so I called the Treasury.
Nick Brady was the Secretary.
You know,
I'm pleading for my life.
And I'm sure my voice
was cracking and everything else.
I said, "Nick, this is
the most important day of my life."
And then I really did feel
that it was going to be
a colossal disaster.
He wasn't sure I was right at all.
In fact, he probably thought
I was wrong
but he knew
that I felt what I was saying.
So the Treasury modified its order.
And, in effect, of course,
it was quite an endorsement.
It was huge.
It saved Salomon.
Nick Brady went with Warren,
because he trusted him.
It shows how having a good reputation
is really helpful in life.
I thank you for the opportunity
to appear before this subcommittee.
I would like to start by apologizing
for the acts
that have brought us here.
A nation has a right to expect
its rules and laws to be obeyed.
But I also have asked
every Salomon employee
to be his or her
own compliance officer.
After they first obey all rules
I then want employees
to ask themselves
whether they are willing to have
any contemplated act
appear the next day on the front page
of their local paper
to be read by their spouses,
children and friends.
If they follow this test
they need not fear
my other message to them.
Lose money for the firm,
and I will be understanding.
Lose a shred of reputation
for the firm, and I will be ruthless.
I welcome your questions.
It's been 50 years,
since I formally took control
of Berkshire Hathaway.
And, step by step,
we've created something
that is kind of what I dreamt
we might create over time
but it took a lot of time to do it.
It never seemed like we were making
that much progress on any one day
but compound interest works.
When you think back 50 years ago
when you founded this company,
did you ever imagine it would be
the fifth largest company
in the world?
No, I didn't,
but if I was thinking about it
I wouldn't have thought in terms
of being the fifth or the fourth
or the third.
- You would've wanted number one.
- Well...
I mean, if you're going to dream,
you might as well dream.
two, three.
Bill Gates wins. Bill Gates wins.
Well, a Berkshire Hathaway
shareholders meeting
is partly a fun festival,
it's sort of a Mardi Gras
for people to come every year.
It's a chance for us to have
a lot of fun and meet the people
that have entrusted us
with their money.
Well, we used to have
just 30 people in a cafeteria.
And now we have
this huge public spectacle.
Celebration is part
of making a group of people
work well together.
It's a celebration.
We are glad
You're here at our meeting.
Be sure to check out our wares.
We'll sell you
See's Candy and Dilly Bars.
And insurance for all of your cars.
For its buy, buy, buy all you see
at the Berkshire show.
He truly loves to do what he does.
- Love you, Warren!
- Oh, yeah.
I think investors
who own Berkshire Hathaway
they see themselves
as a part of a community.
One, two, three, smile!
There are more
long-term holders of Berkshire
than any company.
People consider it a religion.
They don't buy it with the idea
they're going to sell it next week.
I think most of them buy it
with the intent of holding it
for their lifetime just like they'd
buy a farm or buy an apartment house.
At Berkshire, everybody gets
the same information
from the comprehensive annual report.
We don't meet with the analysts.
I'm not interested in what an analyst
thinks about Berkshire.
I'm interested in what the owners
of Berkshire think about Berkshire.
He came out of a private partnership
where people he knew
were trusting him.
And he had his relatives
in the partnership
and they were not rich.
And as it got bigger,
he started treating everybody else
the way he treated his relatives.
In terms of our feeling
toward the people
who are shareholders
we regard them as our partners.
They're not some faceless group
of people.
And that's why at the annual meeting
you know,
I love seeing 40,000 of them.
It gives real meaning
to what we're doing every day.
Let's try...
If you know Susie like I know Susie.
Oh, oh, oh, what a gal.
We just have a lot of love
and respect for each other.
And that's never changed.
I don't go to most things in Omaha
because I think
Astrid lives there with him
and that's for her to do.
And then we do all kinds of things.
Strange as it may seem to people,
I always think, you know, who cares?
If it's working between the people
who are directly involved
who cares what anyone thinks.
And my mother and Astrid
were very close.
You know,
they really, really loved each other.
And I think that my mother
was glad that she was there
because she, you know,
she loved my dad.
She wanted him taken care of
and happy and...
There's no one better than Astrid.
I mean, she loves my dad.
She wouldn't care if he had one cent.
where you belong.
Well, Astrid has lived with me
for a long time.
She's done wonders for me.
It worked well,
but I don't think it will work
for lots of other people necessarily.
Susie and I loved each other
and we admired each other
and we were totally in sync
with what the other was doing
but we were
two different individuals.
The first time Warren came out
to San Francisco
we took a walk and he looked around
and he doesn't...
He's not very visual.
He was looking around, and he said
"This really is...
This is your city."
I am so drawn to color and light
and form and nature
that he thought
it was a good place for me.
Over the years, I've developed
a better understanding
of human nature.
I can learn a lot about investments
out of a book
but I don't think you can learn
as much about human beings.
You really need some experiences
and I'm wiser in that respect
than I was 40 or 50 years ago
even though
I can't rattle off numbers
the same way I used to be able to.
Well, I think that what we do
reflects who we are.
And that's true
for everybody in this room.
And if you do the work I do
you meet the best human beings
in the world.
People who have made
a choice not to make money
but to serve other human beings.
I think it's the best kind of life
anyone could have.
I was with her in Arizona
at this Fortune Most Powerful
Women's Conference
and she told me
that she got a biopsy the day before.
And I didn't really think much of it.
Then we got home,
and the biopsy results were not good.
It was Stage IV oral cancer.
I was on my way
to a board meeting in India
and I remember saying to her,
you know
"I'll see you when I get back."
And she rarely cried.
And she just started crying and said,
"No, you need to stay here
and you need to come out
for the operation."
So we were all there
and the day she was going
into the surgery, that morning
my dad...
It's funny, he...
There's some of it he just can't...
You know, he just can't...
The thought of something happening
to her was just for him...
You know, it was just the worst thing
that could happen.
She knew it was going to be
really difficult.
She knew the recovery
was going to be brutal.
So I think that she had
that surgery for others.
It was quite a big surgery.
She couldn't talk.
She couldn't swallow.
She couldn't eat.
But she came out,
and I really was with her
for the next four months or so.
And my dad came out every weekend.
And, in a few months,
she was doing better.
She and my dad had gone
to Cody, Wyoming
which they did every year
with a bunch of friends.
And my dad called.
This was, I don't know
eight o'clock at night or something,
and he said
"Something happened to Mom.
I'm in an ambulance.
You need to come."
I actually thought something
had happened to my dad.
I don't know why I thought that,
but I guess I thought
you know, my mom had
had this recovery
it was successful
and why would anything
happen to her?
It was horrible
and a total shock.
You know, she'd been fine.
She'd been fine,
they went off to Cody and...
She was fine,
and they were having dinner and...
You know, she didn't feel well
after dinner and...
She had a stroke.
We went into the hospital room,
and my dad was sitting there.
He'd been sitting there all night,
holding her hand.
I was so proud of him
because when it came down to it
he knew what he was supposed to do.
And he did it, which was nothing.
So my dad went to sleep,
and I sat with her and...
I just kept putting my hand
on her heart
to see if she was breathing and...
At one point, you know,
I didn't feel anything.
So I went out, and I got the nurse.
And I said, "Can you come in here?"
And she said, "No, she's gone."
So I have to say,
one of the worst moments of my life
was waking my dad up
to tell him that.
It's a very strange thing, love.
You can't get rid of it.
If you try to give it out,
you get more back.
If you try to hang onto it,
you lose it.
Susie really put me together.
She believed in me.
She put me together and...
And I would not only have turned out
to be the person I turned out to be
but I would not have...
I actually wouldn't have been
as successful in business
without that and...
She made me more of a whole person.
He went dark
essentially quiet and inward
for a certain amount of time.
You know, my dad is a solitary guy
and he had lived essentially
a solitary life in a lot of ways.
I think it came down
to him figuring out
how he was going to get
through this tunnel
and get out the other side.
In my head at the time, I thought
"God I don't know
if he'll ever get out of bed."
But he did.
Welcome, I'm Patty Stonesifer
the CEO of the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation.
And we appreciate you coming today
especially since I sent
a very vague and very late notice
to ask you to come to a conversation
with Bill and Melinda
on the future on philanthropy.
So let's get on with it.
I have the pleasure
of introducing a good man
whose great decision
is going to change the world
Warren Buffett.
A remarkable decision tonight
from one of the richest men
in the world.
Mega-billionaire Warren Buffett says
he is giving away
most of his fortune to charity.
Buffett has pledged to give away
the bulk of his fortune
to the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation
and giving more than 15 percent
of his money to foundations
started by his three children
and his late wife Susan.
One global health activist called
what Buffett did today
one of the most remarkably
selfless acts
that history will ever record.
That's a better hand than I get
at a Berkshire Hathaway meeting.
I'd like to thank you for coming.
It's a great day for me.
It's a great day for my family.
My wife Susie and I had planned
that whatever I made
would go back to society.
And, originally,
I thought she would outlive me
and that she'd make
a big decision on it.
But since her death, I had to rethink
the best way to get the money
into society
and have it used
in the most effective way.
And I had a solution
staring me in the face.
It was completely out of the blue,
I mean, amazing.
The largest single gift ever given
was what he gave away that day.
I'd like to ask
the people representing
those various foundations
to come out.
The first three letters
are easy to sign. I just sign "Dad".
When he wrote the letter to us,
he put something in that letter
that was incredibly important to me
which was exactly
how our foundation behaves
which is
"If you're going to try to bat
a thousand
you won't do many things
that are important.
But if you're willing
to basically strike out a few times
you can really change something big."
ICCN!
Well, I feel terrific about the fact
that my three children
each run a separate foundation
that combines
their special interests,
whether it's early education
or whether it's farming
in areas where people's techniques
for using small plots of land
could use a lot of improvement.
All kinds of ways.
Vaccines, you name it.
More powerful than Buffett's gift
is the message he's sending
to other wealthy Americans
that those
who have the least in this world
should benefit
from those who have the most.
In my entire lifetime
everything that I've spent
will be quite a bit less
than one percent
of everything I've made.
The other 99 percent plus
will go to others
because it has no utility to me.
So it's silly for me
to not transfer that utility
to people who can use it.
It's doing me no good.
I am so proud of what we do.
I almost cry at every board meeting
because I just think
she would be so proud.
And that is... My biggest job,
in my opinion, is to make sure
that every penny gets spent
the way that she would want it spent.
Whoever you are in this life,
you don't want to think
you wasted a lot
of your energy and love and time
on something useless.
I always thought I'd marry
a minister, a doctor
or somebody out doing
some valuable service
to human beings.
And the fact that I married somebody
who makes just piles of money
is really the antithesis
of what I ever thought.
But I know what he is.
And he is...
There's no finer human being
than who he is.
The truth is that I'm here
in my position as a matter of luck.
When I was born in 1930,
the odds were probably 40 to 1
against me being born
in the United States.
I did win the ovarian lottery
on that first day
and, on top of that, I was male.
Put that down
as another fifty-fifty shot
and now the odds are 80 to 1
against being born a male
in the United States
and it was enormously important
in my whole life.
To think that that makes me superior
to anyone else
as a human being is just...
I can't follow
that line of reasoning.
I think I was lucky
to have been standing
alongside Warren Buffett
while he was becoming Warren Buffett.
He has developed over the years.
He's broadened.
His values extend
through all of his life.
He wants to lead a life
that he and his father
if his father was still living,
would say was a good one.
I think he's going to end up
in the history books
a hundred years from now.
I'm not sure
what role he's going to be assigned.
Will he be famous for what he did
as an investor
or as a philanthropist?
But Warren said
that his ambition in life
is to be a teacher.
The world is a great movie to watch
but you don't want
to sleepwalk through life.
The important thing to do
is to look for the job you would take
if you didn't need a job.
And life is wonderful then.
I mean, you know, you'll jump
out of bed in the morning
because you're really
looking forward to the day.
I have, for over 60 years,
been able to tap dance to work
just because I'm doing
what I love doing
and I just feel very, very lucky.
Okay, class dismissed.
Hi.
- Do you fear death?
- No, I don't.
I've had a terrific life, I feel...
You know, it's going to happen and...
I have no idea what happens after it.
I'm an agnostic, so I, you know...
It may be terribly interesting.
It may not be interesting at all.
We'll find out.
But physically,
I'm pretty well depreciated.
I'm getting down to salvage value.
But it really doesn't make
any difference at all.
It doesn't interfere with my work.
It doesn't interfere
with my happiness.
It doesn't interfere
with my thinking.
I don't feel any diminution
in my enjoyment of life
or my enthusiasm for life at all.
In fact, in a sense,
the game that I'm in
gets more interesting all the time.
It's a competitive game.
It's a big game.
And I enjoyed the game a lot.
Good night, Susie.
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Becoming Warren Buffet (2017)
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