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Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

latimes.com

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Re: Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

#551

Post by craigds »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #357
TehCorwiz wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The house he bought at 28 is 3500 square feet in a very very nice neighborhood and was worth $1.2 million a few years ago. It's humble by billionaire standards, not by average person standards. He never needed to size-up because of children, or size-down because of a bad economy, he was already set for both space and finances. Let's not create a moralistic myth out of his lack of need.

You say "it's humble by billionaire standards" - I think it's relatively humble by ~$300k a year standards. The thing I love about this house is that I think it represents just about the maximum real utility one can get from a home. He had 3 kids, and a 3500 sq ft house is, IMO, an extremely average size for any decently paid professional where I live with a family that size. It basically looks like something that ha…

the GP said "average person" though and 300k/year is waaaaaaay past average person.

Re: Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

#552

Post by notahacker »

kamaal wrote: post #516
notahacker wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody doubts how compounding works. They doubt the logic of using that to argue that someone achieving a sustained CAGR of nearly 20% over decades and being recognised by peers as the greatest money manager of the twentieth century when he was already one of the world's richest man in his sixties actually achieved "fairly normal" performance mostly down to living a long time.

I think people who are looking at long term wealth building are better off looking at John Bogle's work. The key is this, you absolutely must stick to investing in the index as a whole, but the issue there is fees you pay is a percentage of your investment, even if small, over years compounds against you. That might look small, but its a double digit percentage if done over decades. Hence picking a fund that charges…

Buffet was richer than most nonagenarians put together in his fifties, and has been consistently generating 6x the US economy's growth over long periods. Insurance float is a neat source of capital if regulators will let you put it into equities and six decades of return usually beats four, but it's bizarre to pretend that BRK's outlying returns compared with other financial institutions come from longevity and access to capital. On the contrary, others have typically started off earlier with more, and generally donated rather less than Buffet over the last couple of decades...

The "index funds and live long" advice is sensible precisely because even the average savvy investor isn't likely to time value investments as well as Warren Buffet did.

Re: Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

#553

Post by PostOnce »

WalterBright wrote: post #348
PostOnce wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes he did start with a "small loan of a million dollars"! Buffett started with 1.2 million dollars (105K in 1956) in investments from his family, i.e. his aunt, sister, and father in law. It is very nearly impossible to get rich without starting with a huge chunk of money, Buffett is no exception.

Gates/Allen started Microsoft with $5000. Jobs started Apple by selling his VW bug.

Jobs is probably a good example here, and obviously there aren't many Jobses in the world. As far as I know, he started with nothing really.

Bill Gates however was born rich and had powerful, well-connected parents and grandparents.

Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money? He wouldn't have gone to a prestigious school with nice computers (or any computers), or have been able to fail at traf-o-data and keep going, for example.

His mom was on the board of a charity which included the CEO of IBM, which is how IBM got involved with Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without that deal, or without Mary Gates, or the money that facilitates all these kinds of things.

The older I get, the more I believe that "you can start with nothing and make it" is essentially a lie told to the working class to keep them from cannibalizing the rich (via taxation).

Re: Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

#554

Post by tome »

abirch wrote: post #536
tome wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elon and Peter Thiel don't allow their shares to be shorted Do you have more information about that? That sounds impossible for a publicly traded company.

You can look at DRS: https://www.investing.com/news/company-news/genius-group-sha...

Oh I see, you meant Elon and Thiel prevent the shares they control from being shorted? I originally thought you meant they prevent any TSLA shares from being shorted.

Re: Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

#555

Post by dang »

jimnotgym wrote: post #549
dang wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post cynical or curmudgeonly comments to Hacker News. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hi Dang. I will admit to being suprised that crossed the line. I have reread the guidelines and I will try and modify the tone in my responses

Appreciated!

Re: Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

#556

Post by WalterBright »

PostOnce wrote: post #553
WalterBright wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates/Allen started Microsoft with $5000. Jobs started Apple by selling his VW bug.

Jobs is probably a good example here, and obviously there aren't many Jobses in the world. As far as I know, he started with nothing really. Bill Gates however was born rich and had powerful, well-connected parents and grandparents. Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money? He wouldn't have gone t…

> Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money?

Yes. Remember Woz had no money and no computer and still wrote Apple Basic. He wrote it in a notebook and hand-assembled it. An 8 bit Basic can be written in about 2K bytes.

I designed and built a 6800 computer in 1978, and wrote the software for it all in asm (the result was a VT-100 terminal workalike). I did have an assembler available which certainly made me more productive, but it was still small enough to do by hand. There were only 40 instructions or so in the 6800, and after a while one inadvertently had them memorized. You could hand assemble them as fast as you could write. In those days I wrote code asm in pencil in a spiral notebook.

What made Gates & Allen special was not their families, but their ability to see the opportunity that everyone else missed. When the MITS computer was the front page on Popular Science magazine, Allen saw it and ran to Gates exclaiming that this was the opportunity they were looking for, and they needed to get to work on it immediately.

Re: Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

#557

Post by WalterBright »

PostOnce wrote: post #553
WalterBright wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates/Allen started Microsoft with $5000. Jobs started Apple by selling his VW bug.

Jobs is probably a good example here, and obviously there aren't many Jobses in the world. As far as I know, he started with nothing really. Bill Gates however was born rich and had powerful, well-connected parents and grandparents. Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money? He wouldn't have gone t…

> His mom was on the board of a charity which included the CEO of IBM, which is how IBM got involved with Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without that deal, or without Mary Gates, or the money that facilitates all these kinds of things.

IBM gave Gary Kildall the opportunity first. Gary whiffed the deal, and then IBM went to Gates. Gary Kildall did not have a wealthy background, and he became quite wealthy off of CP/M.

Re: Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

#559

Post by WalterBright »

lr4444lr wrote: post #542
WalterBright wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People buying a house also hope for a dip in the market so they can buy in cheaper.

People with a lot less economic knowledge than Buffet still understand that another Depression could easily render them jobless and unable to pay a mortgage on a cheaper house. Wishing for a housing market downturn is not the same as a widescale GDP pullback.

I know a lot of investors who wait for a dip in the market to buy stocks.

Personally, I am terrible at timing so I just buy stocks and let them stew for years.

Re: Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

#560

Post by WalterBright »

globular-toast wrote: post #393
WalterBright wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McDonalds has healthy food options. Getting a quarter pounder, a salad, and a cup of water is reasonably healthy. It's the soda and the shakes and the fries that'll getcha.

The quarter pounder is loaded with sugar too unfortunately. The sweet bread is one of the worst things about it. The salad dressing will be too. It's not healthy and doesn't even taste good. But it's addictive.

The hamburger buns I buy at the grocery store taste like cake to me. There's only one brand of bread in the store that doesn't add sugar, and they only stock a couple loaves at a time (and it's the one I buy).

The sugar in the McBurger is nothing like the amount in a coke or a shake.

And no, McBurgers are not addictive. I don't want more than one or two a month.

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