Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…What better jewel to put that capital into than GEICO. Amazing. It’s funny, I said in the first episode something that I was totally convinced was right at the time, but now maybe not. Where I said that God, if Warren had just held on to GEICO and not sold, imagine what his returns could have been. Who knows what would have happened otherwise. But GEICO almost died. If he had held on, would he have had this ride anyway and ended up here? He got to buy back in at $2 a share. Totally. Yeah. That’s a good point. He did get it on an extremely low basis even though he skipped a few decades of compounding and growing there. It is also worth pointing out that despite the fact that it is a Buffett mantra to hold great businesses that you believe in forever, he can dump a stock just as fast as the next guy. The way that he dumped all the airline stocks at probably the low point of the COVID stock crash. It was really interesting hearing you on stage last where he was totally unapologetic for that. He thought it was totally the right move. You could imagine that he easily could have been convinced that that was the right thing to do in the GEICO situation too. Totally. All that matters is the long run, Charlie Munger would say. I think it’s Charlie quoting John Maynard Keynes that in the long run, we’re all dead. But in the long run, GEICO becomes one of the major jewels, if not the most important piece of Berkshire. Especially given all the float that they generated. I guess that is the big thing that Berkshire and Warren miss over that 20-year period where he’s not invested in GEICO is using the float.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.