The Ledger, every show

“You know, the Biden wealth tax, which is like, 25% of the appreciation of things that you own privately, it's going to bankrupt every startup. No one will ever start a business in America anymore, right?”

“I thought she should be CEO of OpenAI. I think Sam should be chair.”

“Woke up Saturday morning after the events of the week, pretty convinced that if the government didn't, at a minimum, guarantee deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, we'd have a massive run at pretty much every regional bank on Monday.”

“The best way to solve that problem is to open up immigration, right? Why, why force people out of work to slow the economy to get rid of inflation? Why not increase the supply of workers so that you know, we temper the increases in wages? I just think it's a b…”

“If it's Biden, Trump, I think Trump wins.”

“I don't think we need that extra tax advantage. I carried interest when you're managing assets to motivate our economic behavior.”

“And so with SoftBank injecting, you know, a hundred billion dollars in marking up the value of companies and giving them capital that they could use to postpone going public, I think it's fundamentally been a disservice to the capital markets and probably to t…”

“We'd invested two billion fifty million between March 12th and March 18th at 1230 in the stock market buying, you know, additions, adding to our portfolio, buying, repurchasing Starbucks. We had sold half the hedge for a 1,000,000,300, a little more than half …”

“I think a similar thing is happening today, in a sense, to Amazon and Meta, Microsoft.”

“What we're doing is instead of reinvesting all the cash the business generates into real estate, we're going to reinvest all the cash into insurance.”

“The company's got like a four billion dollar market cap, and the goal is to build it into a trillion dollar thing over time.”

“The fascinating thing about liquidity and valuation is The higher a stock price goes, and it's gonna sound sort of intuitive, but it's not, the more valuable the company becomes. You know, there's actually the increase in value of the company increases the val…”

“He builds an army of believers and followers that enabled Tesla to be built,”

“Missing Google can be a, you know, as important a mistake, or maybe even a bigger mistake, if you will, than missing You know, the next, like some other making a bad investment that doesn't work, I guess is my fault.”

“So we took about a billion dollar position in Netflix after the stock fell about 50%. And then, you know, we're a long term investor, but we learned information within a few months of the initial investment, i.e. The next quarter's results at Colt, caused us t…”

“The reality is, 90% of the investments we've made in the last 20 years have been profitable. In fact, meaningfully profitable.”

“We have never been short regional banks. We've never been long regional banks.”

“And so I think there's a decent chance Powell says, you know, we've, we're not raising rates.”

“And I think they can absolutely get the Democratic nominee And against Trump, they'll get the you know, the center and center right part of the Republican Party and can win.”

“And what I've learned from that is that philanthropy is, is often not the solution to many problems and that you know, business and for-profit business models are much more effective solutions to problems, most problems.”

“The world is a structurally different place than it was for the last 20 odd years, and you're going to see persistent levels of inflation, you know, three to four percent inflation for the foreseeable future. I think that, that's certainly being missed based o…”

“Having index funds as major holders of securities in stable market conditions actually reduces the liquidity of companies, and it means that sort of hedge funds and more active investors who are making day-to-day buy and sell decisions actually push securities…”

“I give a lot of credit to the folks at Muddy Waters who have unearthed a meaningful number of fraudulent companies, and I've yet to find an example of a regulator finding a fraudulent company. It's either a journalist often being fed by a short seller or a sho…”

“In the case of Tesla, you know, I do think, you know, some of the short sellers went beyond the role of identifying overvaluation and their attempts to actually harm a company, and that's where I think it goes beyond the pale.”

“And we at the peak had seventy billion, actually seventy-one billion of notional insurance that cost about an average of 70 basis points per annum. So about five hundred million dollars. We committed to make five hundred million dollars a year in payments for …”

“We ended up spending twenty seven million on premium because we built a seventy billion dollar CDS position beginning in the third week of February, you probably had it completely on by the early, you know, first few days of March, and we started taking it off…”

“Airplanes are not going to stop flying because airlines go bankrupt. What will happen is, you know, the, Owners of the planes, the lessors of the planes, and or the bondholders will end up, you know, controlling airlines.”

“Boeing spent many, many tens of billions of dollars on share repurchases. I do think, you know, if Buffett doesn't want to, the government shouldn't come in on terms that are more favorable than where Warren Buffett would provide the company with capital”

“It appears to us the next generation is going to be much more focused on, you know, extracting the most from the businesses Berkshire owns.”

“I mean, just looking at the Burlington Northern Railroad, we know a lot about railroads by virtue of our experience at Canadian Pacific. It's the largest You know, it should be the most profitable, highest margin railroad in the world. It's not. And I think a …”

“The market you can't short today is basically, or difficult to short today is the venture backed market. And that's why you're going to see, that's why the WeWorks of the world are allowed to happen and billions of dollars of money gets wasted.”

“In the life's too short kind of point of view, you know, we're done with public short selling. It's just not our thing anymore.”

“I know pretty much every CEO in the S&P, either directly or one person removed”

“The best investments are one where you don't need to join the board and do anything.”

“I think there have been sort of monopolistic type profit taking off of customers. When someone had a kind of a niche software product, they're charging, you know, 30,000 a year or something like this. I think those companies are really at risk.”

“Even Amazon is going to have to become an even bigger customer because they're not, you know, Blue Origins, you know”

“It was less than, it was about a point and a half of our, a little under two percent of our capital, but could it have been three percent? Could have been four percent for sure. And so when I look back at something like that, I would have been willing to lose …”

“We should have made ten billion dollars on, on hedging interest rate risk. Instead we made 2.8 billion because we were a little timid.”

“Other than cash we need for daily needs, we keep that number pretty small everything else is in a U.S. Treasury money market account, or we own U.S. Treasury bills directly. So we're not taking bank risks, we're just facing the U.S. Sovereign. And then the cas…”

“So it starts with finding the right person, I would say. That's about 98%. You can have, you can choose the wrong person, and you can do all the right things, and it's not going to make for a great marriage. So I would say, it's a lot in the selection, the mut…”

“Well, I would say of the businesses we own, I would say in an uncertain world, you got to own universal music company, universal music group. Because the one thing I'm confident about is more people will have music subscriptions or be streaming music from what…”

“There are businesses that are guaranteed to be disrupted by blockchain that are old fashioned, old, you know, businesses that everyone hates because they're monopolists and you can disrupt them with blockchain technology. So I would be short those companies.”

“The single most important thing you need to understand is how to deal with failure, and the vast majority of people who got to, you know, Harvard Business School, or pick your favorite you know, top business or law school has not had to deal with failure, and …”

“In fact, if you have to spend A large amount of time, and it's not obvious. It's probably not a good investment”

“I mean, the, just most recently, our hedge that we put on to protect the portfolio, I guess, I wasn't specifically doing work on that investment at all, but I was thinking about the ramifications, for example, of the coronavirus, and then came to a conclusion …”

“Look, I think that a lot of companies have stayed private too long, and so I'm actually a fan of the public markets and a fan of public company governance versus the kind of governance that you've seen, certainly in many of the venture-backed companies, WeWork…”

“And so the incentive on the part of many of these sort of earlier stage funds is to have markups in the portfolio, because it's a way of showing to your investors that you're making business progress. And I think it does encourage, you know, certain kinds of b…”

“Herbalife is still running a negative campaign about me personally, which I find fairly remarkable. The way you can see this is if you Google my name I don't know if you want to do this right now. What will pop up is an advertisement And it, the advertisement …”