The Ledger, every show

“It makes sense to take taxpayer money and try to save a otherwise dying business. So think about businesses that are in structural decline. This would, you know, likely put them out of business. But I wouldn't spend any of taxpayer resources on them.”

“I do think this is a depression era moment in the sense, psychologically, the same way that the generation of people that went through the depression thought very different about, differently about financial leverage, you know, than the generations that came a…”

“And actually the big opportunity for Berkshire is Berkshire itself prior to the coronavirus crisis was a cheap stock, you know, in the low 200, you know, in the one eighties it's, you know, a real bargain.”

“The good news is when you buy things as opposed to short things, your mistakes become smaller.”

“In the last six months, and you can Google it, Herbalife paid, settled with the SEC for twenty million dollars for misleadingly describing their China business and their public finance, because it actually, the compensation scheme is precisely the same as, and…”

“I was concerned about the country because I felt we needed to have a, basically a two-week pause. You know, this is March of or February. I guess it was March. And I assumed we were going to just do a short-term shutdown, let the virus cool down, as hospitals …”

“I actually invested in X. I invested in XAI. I'm in an SPV. Ron Barron said, Bill, you gotta invest in SpaceX. So I, so I'm in”

“If you're investing in the world's most dominant music company, Universal Music, it's, has very little debt. It has a great market position. You can predict business with a very high degree of confidence, and you're buying it at a fair price.”

“We bought, in effect, the way to think about it is we bought a call option. That paid off when two-year interest rates went above 93 basis points, and we had about an eighteen-month term. And at the time we bought that instrument, two-year rates were at 12 bas…”

“But of the original six, four of the six were in the four, 400 wealthiest people in America.”

“And what was interesting is the people who were entrepreneurs really liked the idea of backing a couple of young guy, a couple of young guys who were entrepreneurs. And I think that was a big part of the connection.”

“Probably, probably neither but I would say I form a view of a person's character pretty quickly, and the vast majority of the time I've been right with only a few disappointments, I would say. And the disappointments have been cases, in most cases, and there h…”

“There's plenty of capital available for people who are second time founders and the first one was not a successful exit.”

“We built Pershing Square to invest only in, you know, liquid large cap public companies and it's served us really well.”

“I'm quite sure he actually follows me, you know, not under the name Jay Powell.”

“The only financial institutions we own are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which we've owned for years, which are kind of, if you will, options on a potential restructuring of those institutions years from now.”

“Silicon Valley Bank was, I would say, unique in the disproportionate amount of exposure they had to, kind of, long-duration fixed-income assets versus other banks.”

“Someday. I'm open to it. Someday when my day job gets boring. I don't think my day job's gonna get boring.”

“I don't know that it matters so much whether you live in a 300,000 dollar house Or a two million dollar house, or a twenty million dollar house, or whether your parents drive a Toyota. You know, I think that the major differences are, you have access to a good…”

“Look at Elon Musk. He's been on the brink of failure however many times, and it's, I think, why he's beloved by many, hated perhaps by some, but I really admire the guy in terms of how he's dealt with, you know, near catastrophe”

“It is, it can be very distracting to be contemplating whether one should stay married While running a business that requires, you know, a lot of, you know, judgment and clarity of thinking, and you know, I ultimately made some, you know, failures of judgment i…”

“And beginning sort of, as I got deeper into coronavirus, I started using Twitter actually as a news feed and found it to be very, very helpful and interesting. You know, almost having the experience of reading the news a couple of days before You read the news…”

“The markets generally overreact to short-term information and noise, because many stocks are traded on the basis of, you know, the marginal buyer and seller is a short-term investor trying to predict whether the stock's going to go up or down on the quarter.”

“85% of our capital is in the, you know, comes from a public company. And as a result, we have very, very long duration money, and we don't need to worry about this quarter or this year in making decisions, and that, I think, is a huge advantage.”

“All they do is put on these kind of hedges waiting for disaster, and they're, you know, some of them are up a thousand percent. You know, some of the smaller ones are up a thousand percent in the last month or so.”

“And so, again, you'll see restructurings where the lender to the mall ends up with the asset. Someone entrepreneurial decides, you know what, we don't need this much retail. We'll make half of it a hospital, medical facility, office, apartments, and then there…”

“So if you invested a dollar in Pershing Square, you know, 22 years ago, that's, that became you know 20 I think, I should know this number. It's like 27 or 28 times net of all fees. Okay? Over, over 22 years.”

“But we had I think we eventually saw well over a hundred people, and we had six people ultimately say yes and give us money, and the six people totaled, look, 3.1 million dollars. Actually three million, and my partner and I put up a hundred together.”

“And I'm a relatively small investor in, you know, startups and I do it for fun. I do it because, you know, occasionally I make a good investment and also it helps me see the future in terms of what potential threats are coming. That might disrupt either a busi…”

“The vast majority of our capital today is 85%, you know, over time that will be 90 or 95, or eventually a hundred percent of our capital will be in a public enterprise that we're the largest shareholder of.”

“I've been Consistently happy pretty much since birth.”