Warren Buffett

“Warren Buffett's approach to purchasing companies is very straightforward. He will give you an answer immediately if he has any interest, and he will immediately give you a non-negotiable price.”

“I think Berkshire's Warren Buffett shareholder letters may be the greatest example or the most successful example of content marketing in the history of business. The amount of opportunity, unique opportunity that flows to Buffett or that has flown, flowed to …”

“When Warren Buffett bought Hellsberg diamonds, he felt so positive about the deal that he cut out the usual due diligence to speed negotiations.”

“Perhaps one of the key reasons Warren Buffett has been the world's most successful investor, he does not buy turnaround opportunities, something that Buffett spends a lot of time discussing over many years in his shareholder letters. He doesn't believe turnaro…”

“In the late 19 sixties, both Charlie and Warren had their own hedge fund. As the bull market of late 19 sixties raged on, everything became overpriced and Warren could no longer find anything cheap enough to buy. So rather than alter his investment strategy, W…”

“It's not greed that drives the world, but envy. You have to cure yourself of this. Curing yourself of this is key, key for a well-lived life.”

“By the late 19 seventies, the float at blue chip had grown to approximately a hundred million dollars money that Charlie and Warren could invest.”

“Average out betting on the quality of a business is better than betting on the quality of the management. But very rarely you find a manager who is so good that you're wise to follow him into what looks like a mediocre business.”

“Charlie would help Warren make the investment and management decisions that would take Berkshire Hathaway from a net income of one hundred and forty eight million in 1984 to approximately twenty four billion in 2016.”

“The blueprint he gave me was simple. Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices, and instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices.”

“Bernard is like this odd combination of, I would say Warren Buffett and a John D. Rockefeller.”

“If you ever look at The net worth of Warren Buffett by age, something like 99% of it or something like that comes after the age of 50.”

“So he buys ABC network for nearly 3.5 billion dollars with financing from his friend, Warren Buffett. The ABC deal was the largest non oil and gas transaction in business history to that point.”

“The employee assumed that adding 20,000 dollars to the annual payroll would be inconsequential, but his boss told him that the proposal should be evaluated as a three million dollar decision, given that an additional person would probably cost at least that Am…”

“Warren, you can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow. You haven't missed that opportunity. Just forget about it for a day. If you feel the same way tomorrow, then tell them that then, but don't spout off in a moment of anger.”

“If each of us hires people who are small, smaller than we are, we should become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”

“If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its accumulated billions, the top 10 insights account for most of it. Most of the money came from 10 insights.”

“Well, fortunately they put Warren Buffett on the board and he convinced them to buy back more than half of the outstanding stock, which enriched the remaining shareholders by much more than a billion dollars.”

“Once I get most of the circulation, I get most of the advertising. And once again, most of the advertising and the circulation, why would anybody want a thinner paper with less information in it? So it tends to cascade to a winner take all situation.”

“Trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth. He's gonna apply this to what, ah, inside of the partnership that he had, ah, with Warren. And so he talks about the highest, one of the highest forms of civilization that one can reach, ah, is a seamless,…”

“There was no formal partnership or contractual relationship. The bond was created by a handshake.”

“If you watched him with a time clock, you'd find that about half of his waking time is spent reading. Then a big chunk of the rest of his time is spent talking one-on-one. Either on the telephone or in person with highly gifted people whom he trusts and who tr…”

“So they were partners up until they died up until Charlie died, so that would be 64 years by my math.”

“He wind up turning down Buffett earlier in his career. He winds up turning down Michelin tire. They wanted to buy the company and turns out KKR tried to buy the company as well.”

“The individual businesses that Berkshire owns, the person running that business is only Incentivized and paid and rewarded are punished based on the performance of that individual business and not Berkshire as a whole.”

“Keep a fortress of cash. This is what John D. Rockefeller did. This is what Warren Buffett did. They kept fortresses of cash. It is a distinct advantage to have near at hand All the supplies you need.”

“Trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth.”

“That is the moat, and you want to moat, you want to widen that moat, and that is exactly what Tarantino has, and what I would argue is one of his most valuable assets,”

“When I had dinner with Charlie Munger, this is the advice that he gave us. ... He talked about the fact that they would meet people, you know, in their third, their twenties, thirties, and forties, and they would do business and do deals for the rest of their …”

“Warren Buffett said it was a crime that business schools didn't study him.”

“I've made the point multiple times that if you think of the greatest Content marketing in business history, I would argue is Warren Buffett's shareholder letters.”

“Decisions in your life are all about opportunity costs and wise people think in terms of personal opportunity costs. In other words, it's your alternatives that matter. That is how we make all of our decisions.”

“Buffett said, Benjamin Graham taught me only to buy cheap stocks. Charlie allowed me to change my thinking. That's the real impact Charlie's had on me. I needed a powerful force to walk out of the limitations imposed by Graham's theories. Charlie's ideas were …”

“And he says their biggest ideas, meaning Munger and Buffett's, their biggest ideas really gave them 10,000 times their money.”

“The founder only raised 300,000 in venture capital before the IPO. He raised money in an IPO and then Buffett gave him two hundred million dollars. And so at this point they had 160,000 employees, six to seven billion in revenue and five hundred million in net…”

“In the mid-nineteen eighties, because at that time Coca-Cola had become a poorly defined conglomerate, including a shrimp farm, winery, and a film studio. As the poor businesses were cut away to reveal the jewel that is syrup manufacturing and marketing operat…”

“Nomad was not a particularly large fund, but over the years, it did make around two billion dollars for its clients, which were predominantly charities and educational endowments.”

“We were paying 10 dollars a click for something that had a marginal cost to Google of exactly zero. And we saw that the ads were working for us. We could see at Geico how well Google advertising worked, and we just sat there sucking our thumbs.”

“Buffett says there's one chapter in the general theory by John Maynard Keynes that relates to markets, the psychology of markets and the behavior of market participants. You'll get as much wisdom From reading that as anything written in investments.”

“There is something interesting when I had dinner with Munger. One of the most fascinating things he said, it was so odd. He thought it was very unusual to be so wealthy and love that that goes against human nature. The fact that him and Buffett, everybody obvi…”

“We have no human relations department, no legal department, no investor relations, no public relations. We don't have any of that. We've got a bunch of all-stars out there running businesses. We just asked them to mail the money to Omaha.”

“Buffett bought Disney stock after meeting Walt Disney in 1966. He paid 31 cents a share. And sold when the stock went to a 48 cents a share.”

“I would guess that CEOs of most public companies waste a third of their time, at least on all kinds of things that really don't add a thing to the business. And in many cases, subtract. From the business.”

“So he winds up investing four hundred million, I think in Petro China in the early 2000. He's going to sell this for a few years later for a 3.5 billion dollar profit.”

“If you look at how the fortunes were built in this country, they were built by someone who identified a wonderful business.”

“If we find an idea that we want to put five hundred million dollars in, we probably would be even happier if we could put three or four billion in. Good ideas are too scarce to be parsimonious with once you find them.”

“And I actually think it's because there's the benefits of teaching, you know, it's not like they hoarded the knowledge that they, of their six or seven decade career. They wrote about their shareholders. They talked about the AGM. They, you know, people wrote …”

“The ideal asset is a royalty on somebody else's sales, where all you do is get a royalty check every month, and it's based on their sales volume. You came up with a product originally licensed it to them, and you never have Another bit of capital investment. Y…”

“And like one thing that they bring up over and over again is in their wholly owned businesses, unless it's going to completely drain a bunch of money, they're not going to sell them. Even if, you know, they can say, Oh, we're, we used to make 15%. Now we make …”

“Another thing, the important thing we do with managers generally is to find the 400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing.”

“Grinnell actually buys 10% of the private placement that was the initial funding of Intel.”

“In fact, interesting enough, Buffett made more money on Ogilvy's company than Ogilvy did because Ogilvy got scared and sold his equity too early before it appreciated.”

“Many of the distinctive tenants of Warren Buffett's unique approach to managing Berkshire Hathaway were first employed by Singleton at Teledyne. In fact, Singleton can be seen as a proto-Buffett, and there are uncanny similarities between the two.”

“He concluded, Henry was a lot smarter, but Warren had thought about investments a lot longer.”

“Both Singleton and Buffett recognized the potential to invest insurance company float to create shareholder value. And for both companies, insurance was the largest and most important business.”

“Here's a quote from Warren Buffett and Buffett said, Henry Singleton, Has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would no…”