David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…This is like 1975-ish? Yeah, in 19775. He and Warren got a call from one of Charlie's former partners at MTO, Chuck Rickershauser, who had done the See’s deal for them. Chuck says, hey guys, I just got off the phone with the SEC and they're considering pressing charges against you for securities violations for this Russian doll version of corporate structure that you've got going on here. Chuck would spend weeks putting together a corporate flow chart of all these different entities and who owns what. We'll try to link an image of it in the show notes, it's amazing. There are so many different subsidiaries and subentities, and he looks at it and he says, there's got to be an indictment in here somewhere, guys. I don't know what you've been doing. I remember reading this when I was doing the research. The Buffett image that you know of today—the sort of folksy, near benevolent, multi-billionaire or multi-deca-billionaire (I don't even know the right phrase for it, would be a hundred billionaires if he wasn't donating so much to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That he was in hot water with the SEC. It's just the last thing that I would have expected as sort of the Buffett novice before I started doing the research.…

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