David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Every other time we're investigating someone, what they ended up doing was buying the stock as cheap as possible after they precipitated an event that made the stock price fall. They're very confused. Warren ends up getting subpoenaed and testifies that they paid the price they did because, "It was important how Wesco management feels about it. " Now you can say, 'Well, we own the controlling interest so it doesn't make any difference.' But Louis Vincente, who is the president of Wesco, doesn't really need to work for us. If he felt that we were slobs or something, it just wouldn't work." Munger, when he's testifying, of course, invokes, who else but Ben Franklin in his testimony. He says, "We didn't feel our obligation to the shareholders was inconsistent with leaning over backward to be fair. We have that Ben Franklin idea that the honest policy is the best policy. It had sort of a shoddy mental image to us to try to reduce the price." It's almost like the notion of the VC founder-friendly thing where we're saying, hey look like, let's take a super long lens here and say that the way that we're going to maximize value for everyone—including ourselves way down the line—is by making sure that management likes us as shareholders, feels that were deferential to them, and not capturing every little bit of value we possibly can out of their company at their expense.…

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