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I guess Warren’s quote only applies to other people, not him. "It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in
by dugmartin 14d ago
I guess Warren’s quote only applies to other people, not him. "It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics." (https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/us/dozens-of-rich-americans-join-in-fight-to-retain-the-estate-tax.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/us/dozens-of-rich-america...)
- datsci_est_2015 14d agoMaybe the implication is that Warren thinks it’s significantly easier to run a wealth fund than get gold in the Olympics. I would probably agree.
- dzonga 14d agothere's nothing wrong with leaving things to your kids to run. that's the point of the effort after all. warren as smart as he is was tryna go against the grain of thousands of human evolution. if you train your kids - then most likely they would've values similar to yours. hit or miss but most times a hit.
- mcculley 14d agoA lot of rich men, when younger, say that they will not leave so much of the wealth to their children. Then they get older and realize what other old men realized.
- willmarch 14d agoWhich is what?
- jnsie 14d agoDon't grow old
- lifestyleguru 14d agoYou only have to get rich once and opportunity to get rich occurs only once in every few generations.
- expedition32 14d agoWe live in neo feudalism. The hard part is getting to a billion but once you do your family will be part of the elite for centuries.
- mcculley 14d agoEvolutionary psychology is stronger than whatever they thought previously.
- willmarch 13d agoSad.
- moate 14d agoThat it's a lot cooler saying noble things than actually DOING noble things.
- detourdog 14d agoThese are jobs with titles we are talking about it says nothing about Buffets assets or will.
- saalweachter 14d agoYeah, the "upside" to nepotism is that, if you or your brother or your buddy did a good job raising the kid, you have someone who has had solid training for longer than it's possible for any other candidate to have had, and a better understanding of their character than you can get from interviewing another candidate a few times. Hiring Joe's kid is a no brainer, if you trust Joe, less risk of a really bad hire even if he doesn't turn out to be stellar. The other downside of nepotism -- besides the risk that Joe did a shit job and won't admit it or maybe can't evaluate his kid objectively -- is that even if the kid is the bee's knees, a great hire, it's not really fair -- there's almost certainly other candidates who are just as good and trustworthy as Joe's kid but they can't compete with either Joe's kid. It doesn't really matter what sort of references or credentials a candidate can show you if you can serve as a reference for the other candidate. You can't really run a meritocracy like that.
- dzonga 13d agofor the downside - countless cultures have had preventative mechanism for that. if your biological child is an idiot/wasteman - then you could adopt - the Roman Empire ran on adopted children, with biological children seen as wasteman. the other way it's done e.g with Japanese businesses - again adopt your son in law and give him your surname. the thing about giving helm to the sons - is usually you would've had a whole lifetime to evaluate the candidate 20+ years. do mistakes happen yeah, but honestly the risk is overblown.
- fsckboy 13d ago>there's nothing wrong with leaving things to your kids to run. where that's true or not, that's not what happened. this is more like "there's nothing wrong with trying to help your son in his career and getting him a job." Berkshire Hathaway's market cap is a trillion, and Warren Buffet's net worth has never been close to that, i.e. it's not his company so he's not leaving it to his son to run. You might admire Warren Buffet's acumen and think he'd be good at picking people, but all (for varying values of all) parents believe in their children so it's not easy to tell if you'd be getting his best advice in this case if you were another major shareholder in Berkshire.
- nlitened 14d agoAs I understand, the son is there not to lead the company (Greg Abel is the CEO), but to oversee their family's share in the enterprise.
- yuuu 14d agoI thought he was giving away 99% of his wealth?
- apothegm 14d agoStill leaves an absurd amount of wealth to manage.
- bragr 14d agoWell he's not dead yet.
- Betelbuddy 14d agoThat is what I told the tax man...they did not buy it...
- mrlonglong 14d agoCan he give me a few million then?
- andrewstuart 14d agoAnd me please. 2 mill.
- ozim 14d agoFew million? I would be set for the rest of my life if I got half a mill falling from sky today, I guess I could even make it work with 250k. Currently I am pondering how absurd amount of money a billion of dollars is. When loads of people can only -earn and eat through/spend not save- $1 million; working their asses off for something like 20 years.
- Iolaum 14d agoWhile I liked your comment enough to upvote, I then realized that Chairman isn't an operational position. It's more a position where the person can exercise ownership of a company (to put it in layman terms). In your analogy he wouldn't be the athlete, more like the person who gets the winning money (assuming his son also has shares) and chooses the trainer/coach of the athletes (which still needs skill btw).
- seanclayton 14d agoI think Claude can do that right?
- mcculley 14d agoBut we have been told for a long time that Buffett was a very active Chairman.
- kristianc 14d agoWhose strategy is explicitly to hold good stocks for a very long time.
- deleted 14d ago[deleted]
- mgfist 14d agoWarren was CEO until 9 months ago. While yes, he's been chairman for 50 years, he's been an exclusive chairman for only 9 months. The role is ambiguous anyways and it's pretty obvious that someone else won't have the authority Warren has. And his son has been a director for 30 years so it's not like he's a new hire
- mcculley 13d agoI appreciate this correction as I had misremembered his dual roles.
- jjallen 14d ago
- Nemi 14d agoThe Chairman position is to protect company culture, not make operational decisions.
- cube00 14d agoNot sure any chairman has their ear to the ground to fully understand the culture within their organization. I never saw our CEO in person, never saw our chairman even on a webinar. And yes it's not their job to be that low level, but they can't have an idea of the culture either.
- ekjhgkejhgk 14d ago"Company culture" at Berkshire Hathway doesn't mean the same as at most companies. BH buys companies and don't interfere with them. So while BH employs upwards of 100k people, the people whose culture the CEO cares about is probably under 100 people.
- Nemi 14d agoThis is the answer. While it is very real to talk about "employee culture" as company culture, in this particular case, the "culture" I was talking about was from a corporate/investment/acquisition level. Howards job is not to understand how each company that BRK owns is run, that is the CEO's job. But Howards job is to look at BRK from a high level and make sure that the CEO is executing in the same way that Warren set up, namely – buying companies and stocks at a "fair" price or below, and not micromanaging the companies that they acquire. If the CEO is not living up to that, Howard's (and the board's) one card that they can play is to replace the CEO.
- red-iron-pine 14d agosounds like a role that can be replaced by GPT
- GuB-42 14d agoI actually asked GPT that question some time ago. The importance of top executive decisions is overstated, they often do no better than random chance. But their decisions are not where their value lies. The important part is that they own their decisions, or at least appear to do so. And in doing that, they gain trust for the company, they are the company face. It is more of a performance than a technical job. By that, I don't mean it is fake, people will notice if you don't know what you are talking about, and it won't inspire confidence, which is what leaders try to avoid at all costs. LLMs will probably be at least as good at decision making (I mean, that's almost a dice roll), and they can be convincing, which is important too, but they are completely lacking in the trust department. No one want to work for a machine, no one want to do business negotiations with a machine either. That's why it is important to have a human on top.
- wmeredith 14d agoOh it applies to him. He just doesn’t care.
- runjake 14d agoWarren's son has been a leader at Berkshire for a very long time. He was voted in by the board, not Warren. Here's his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Graham_Buffett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Graham_Buffett
- NegativeLatency 14d agoI’m sure his dad had nothing to do with it and it’s just a coincidence.
- lesuorac 14d agoHis dad probably has a lot to do with it. You think he didn't teach his children anything about finance?
- avdwrks 14d agoThe guy is 71 years old and has built a life long career of his own, people are acting like he just elected a 21 year old nepo baby to run the company.
- moate 14d agoExactly! They elected a 71 year old nepo baby to run the company. Vastly different.
- jpk2f2 14d agoHis son isn't running the company. The company has a CEO, who isn't a member of the Buffet family.
- moate 14d agoIf you want to split hairs as to what the responsibility of the Chairman of the Board of Directors does, you win. IDK, maybe I'm a mushbrain but it seems like if someone said they're the chairman of the board, and you told them to their face "well it's not like you run the company..." they'd finish their drink and go talk to someone else for the rest of the night.
- micromacrofoot 14d agoYes, the powerful always do this. It might be challenging to find an exception. It's not as rewarding to consider that you've reached your position by more good luck than effort, so you hand down advice from on high because clearly you're smarter than everyone else (doesn't help that many people treat you this was to gain access). Then you continue to do whatever you want despite your own advice because of course... you're smarter than everyone else.
- Aurornis 14d agoThis is a position on the board. The Buffett estate gets an important board role because it represents their family’s large stake. Choosing someone in the family is consistent with this structure. The article you’re picking the quote from is about estate taxes.
- thayne 14d agoBut his family inheriting his ownership of the company contradicts his statements about estate taxes in that article. And passing the chairman position to his son may even be part of a plan to pass wealth to him that avoids estate taxes.
- epolanski 14d agoHe also invested his personal money in securities that Berkshire itself owned, thus breaking one of the rules of Berkshire itself.
- cmiles8 14d agoHis son isn’t running the company, he’s just the board chair which has fairly limited power on its own.
- kurtis_reed 14d ago"Warren"? You know him personally?