David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…They also own large pieces of many of your favorite publicly traded companies including Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, American Express, Kraft Heinz, Verizon, GM, Mastercard, Snowflake, and now they even own over $100 billion of Apple stock. Somehow, the man behind it all—Warren Buffett—has claimed that purchasing Berkshire Hathaway was the biggest investment mistake he had ever made. And for many of you, you’re probably learning that Warren Buffett purchased Berkshire Hathaway and it was not something that he founded, which is the first takeaway from this episode. We will cover this again much later in the episode, but he claims that purchasing Berkshire Hathaway cost him $200 billion in opportunity cost. When you compound something over 50 years, you can come up with some large numbers. What the heck is this company? How did it come to be? Why is it that even at an all-time high for the stock, so many analysts think it is underpriced today? To do this right, we are going to need more than one episode, even an Acquired-sized episode. So welcome to our first part of our two-part series on Berkshire Hathaway. In this first part, most of it won’t even be about Berkshire the company. It’s about the man, Warren Buffett, and his mental iterations and learnings that would shape what Berkshire would come to be. People always try and reduce what Buffett does to a simple strategy or even a few pithy quotes. In reality, Warren has learned, adapted, and reinvented his strategy at least four distinct times over the decades. In doing the months of research to prepare for these episodes, David and I both learned just how much Warren’s thinking evolved to create the absolutely unreplicatable juggernaut that Berkshire Hathaway is today. In this episode, we bring you the story of Warren Buffett, the learning machine. Are you an Acquired Slack number? If not, what have you been waiting for? It is a stellar community discussing all things Acquired, recent episodes, but more importantly, it is just a genuine, smart group of people having a thoughtful, nuanced, and respectful discussion about the tech and investing news of the day. You can join at acquired.fm/slack. Lastly, to keep this short and sweet, if you are not an Acquired LP, you really should just become one. Aside from all the things that we tell you every episode about the LP program, we just did a really cool new thing we called community Q&A with the founder of Levels, Josh Clemente, after we had him on the show. We thought, wouldn’t it be cool to let all the LPs pepper him with questions and interact with him? That was super fun. If you missed it, you can check out the recording in the LP Google Drive. If you are not already a limited partner, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquired.fm/lp. Cannot wait to see you in there. David, I think we are ready to do it. Listeners, as always, the show is not investment advice. Like Warren Buffett, we would never profess to give you investment advice. All of our best ideas we will keep a deep dark secret—maybe until long after we’ve executed them—so we can tell the world about our wonderful investments. David and I may have investments in the company that we discuss. The show’s educational, for entertainment purposes only. We hope you enjoy it. Without further ado, David Rosenthal, where are we starting the story?…

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