David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…He's an underwriting savant. This guy can hear a crazy story that you tell him, like what if I'm going to strap this guy to this rocket and then we're going to shoot it at a hurricane and you know I want insurance that bypasses the force majeure and that can help give you a price for it. He's like I know exactly how to price this. He is a jet-jackering roll reincarnate. Ajit, he grew up in India. He went to IIT in India and then he worked for IBM. Maybe this explains Buffet’s fascination with IBM. Ajit came out of there, it's gotta be good. Then he goes to Harvard Business School and then he goes to McKenzie and then he joins Berkshire. We were talking about him like he's an insurance pricing savant—that is true. There's probably never been anybody better than Ajit at pricing insurance. He is also hyper aggressive. If Ajit had decided to be a venture capitalist, he would have been like Bill Gurley times 10. Hyper-smart, hyper-aggressive for basically his whole career. I doubt this is still going on, probably at Warren’s request not Ajit’s. But for decades, every night, I don't know if it’s every week night or every day of the week, they would do a nightly call at 10:00PM to go over the insurance portfolio and all the deals that Ajit was doing. He’s just a monster. When he joins, he takes over all of Berkshire's other insurance businesses besides Geico to start. Then he starts a new reinterred business within Berkshire, like himself. This is the great entrepreneurial story within Berkshire. Famously, he takes out an ad in Business Insurance Magazine full page ad when he starts this saying we are looking for more, more casualty risks where the premium exceeds $1 million. This is the insurance business. This is crazy. Nobody does this. So basically he’s saying like I will insure things that other people won't insure because I'm more confident in my ability to price these weird, crazy, expensive policies, yes.…

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