The Ledger, every show

“The people who made the most money out of venture capital are a lot like investment bankers deciding which hot new area they're going to get in. They're not great investors or great at anything.”

“The guy at BYD is better at actually making things than Elon is.”

“If I were running the world, I would have a tax on short-term gains with no offset for losses on anything. And I would just drive this whole crowd every ball of business.”

“It's very difficult to invest money well, and I think it's all but impossible to do time after time after time in venture capital.”

“By and large, having bumped into a lot of people in the businesses with venture capital financing, I would say the ordinary rule is that people in the business doing the work, they more or not, they hate the venture capitalists. They don't feel their partner t…”

“The world is full of Goldman Sachs partners that formed a private fund, and they manage a billion dollars or something like that, and they charge two points off the top plus this, and that enables them to make very handsome livings themselves, but the endowmen…”

“The answer to that is no, we wouldn't.”

“Well, my position in China has been Well, that the Chinese economy has better future prospects over the next 20 years than almost any other big economy.”

“The first store they tried to open in China, the first store somebody wanted a 30,000 dollar bribe. You know, Chinese culture. And they just wouldn't pay it. And that made such a bad impression on Jim Senegal. He wouldn't even talk to him going into China for …”

“You got a big truck company and Take the depreciation out of the trucks, out of the earnings. You're ever lying about the earnings.”

“Well, I've never liked John Malone's extreme manipulations. I don't want to be known as the great manipulator like John Malone is. He paid less income taxes than anybody.”

“Well, I think a lot of companies are pretty good, but you can't confidently say what's going to happen because you may get some guy like Iger in that just wants to push everything and do the right public relations. So no matter how good the business is, it'll …”

“And the way they get their returns year after year is taking the leverage, the midday leverage up higher and higher and higher and higher. So they're making smaller and smaller profits on more and more volume, which gives them this big peak leverage risk, whic…”

“When you know you have an edge, you should bet heavily. You know you're right. And most people, they don't teach that in business school. It's insane. Of course, you got to bet heavily on your best bets.”

“If we used a little bit more leverage throughout, we'd have three times as much now. And it wouldn't have been that much more risk either.”

“The endowments have started to say to the, all these people that charged three and 30 or whatever they charge, they said, we'll pay your three and 30, but we're going to put in twice as much money, and then the next half you'll get nothing on it, or you're jus…”

“So it offended them to go against the rich suburbs and to have to pay up for the good locations, and Costco just specialized in the good locations where the rich people live. And Walmart just let them do it year after year. It was a terrible mistake.”

“Once I had enough money on my own, I'd rather just operate with my own money. That is a much better way of doing it.”

“I carry no fire insurance anywhere.”

“What everybody has learned is that everybody needs some significant participation in the 12 companies that do better than everybody else. And you need two or three of them at least.”

“So naturally, I'm willing to have some China risk in the Munger portfolio. How much China risk? Well, that's not a scientific subject, but I don't mind whatever it is, 18% or something, whatever, whatever's worked out in the Munger family, it's okay with me.”

“Damn near. Of course it could be possible. It's not only possible, it's likely, and it's actually happened.”

“Yes, an unpleasant blow up of some kind. And God knows what happens after an unpleasant blow up with our modern democracies. You would get to see a lot like Europe, which is quite dysfunctional.”

“If it all blown up and went to zero, we would have written it off and gone on and done pretty well.”

“Big shot businessmen get into these waves of social proof. Do you remember some years ago when one oil company bought a fertilizer company? And every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company. And there was no more damn reason…”

“And it's a very important part of human organization to set things up so the noise and the reciprocation and so forth, of all these people who have what I call say-something syndrome, don't really affect the decisions.”

“No, of course not. Are the dog tracks and racetracks of America, are the casinos good for America? Of course not. They're just very popular.”

“There aren't many times in a lifetime when you know you're right and you know you have one that's really going to work wonderfully. Maybe five, six times in a lifetime you get a chance to do it. And people do it two or three times early. All go broke because t…”

“They had originally agreed that Brotman would be the chairman and CEO, because he was his idea. He founded the whole thing, but Senegal decided, no, I have to be the CEO. So, it was a big, unfortunate board meeting, a big internal struggle, and Brotman moved a…”

“If it's a problem business we've never been able to fix, we'll sell it. But if it's a halfway decent business, we never sell anything.”

“Well, for maybe for one or two electric cars that are really good at it, maybe, but certainly nobody else.”

“BYD was a miracle, but that guy works 70 hours a week and has a very high IQ. He can do things you can't do. You can look at somebody else's auto part and he can figure out how to make the goddamn thing.”

“If you're as smart as Warren Buffett, maybe two, three times a century, you get an idea like that.”

“The interest rates in Japan were half a percent per year for 10 years. And these trading companies were really entrenched old companies, and they had all these cheap copper mines and rubber plantations, and so you could borrow for 10 years ahead all the money,…”

“Well, if you're as good as they are, what they've done, you have a lifetime to do it in, or now a lifetime, really three or four lifetimes to do it in. You can create another, but it's not easy.”

“There's something about the flavor of ketchup on a goddamn fried potato. People are really willing to change brands over. They want Heinz. And so we could raise the price of Heinz pretty much. But you try to raise the Kraft cheese, and everybody goes into rebe…”

“In its heyday, General Motors was a great company. It just gradually went to hell one contract at a time.”

“Well, I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And Never a year passes, but what I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”

“I tried to get Warren to buy out the French. When they left, careful. And Warren wouldn't do it. Warren doesn't like retailing.”

“We bought a little pissant savings loan company for maybe twenty million dollars. And when we left that thing, we had taken out of our little twenty million dollar investment Over two billion dollars in marketable securities, which went into Nebraska insurance…”

“Well, they really did sell cheaper than anybody else in America, and they did it in big efficient stores, and all the parking spaces were 10 feet wide instead of eight feet nine or whatever they normally are.”

“Floor and Decor is the current imitator, and it's just, it's in vinyl, wood imitating vinyl flooring, they're running a Costco model.”

“We found out fairly quickly that we could raise the price every year by 10% and nobody cared. We didn't make the volumes go up or anything like that, just made the profits go up. So we've been raising the price by 10% a year for all these 40 years or so, and i…”

“Yeah, well, it got cheap. It got it did about 10 times or anything more.”

“Well, I don't like that as well as I like something with a real consumer brand of its own like Apple.”

“No, so price had that figured out to announce. Yes. He always wanted the rich man trying to save money.”

“After huge mistakes, they almost went broke with their early dealership building system.”

“This first really hit me between the eyes when a friend of our family had a Super athlete, super student son who flew off a carrier in the North Atlantic and never came back. And his mother, who had, was a very sane woman, just never believed that he was dead.”