Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett
Warren Edward Buffett is an American business magnate, investor and philanthropist. He is considered by some to be one of the most successful investors in the world. Buffett is the chairman, CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway, and is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people. He was ranked as the world's wealthiest person in 2008 and as the third wealthiest in 2015. In 2012 Time named Buffett one of the world's most influential people...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth30 August 1930
CityOmaha, NE
CountryUnited States of America
No formula in finance tells you that the moat is 28 feet wide and 16 feet deep. That's what drives the academics crazy. They can compute standard deviations and betas, but they can't understand moats.
If you know how to value businesses, it's crazy to own 50 stocks or 40 stocks or 30 stocks, probably because there aren't that many wonderful businesses understandable to a single human being in all likelihood. To forego buying more of some super-wonderful business and instead put your money into #30 or #35 on your list of attractiveness just strikes Charlie and me as madness.
Credit worthiness is like virginity, it can be preserved but not restored very easily, so it is crazy to play around with it.
I've never had it so good in terms of taxes. I am paying the lowest tax rate that I've ever paid in my life. Now, that's crazy. And if you look at the Forbes 400, they are paying a lower rate, accounting payroll taxes, than their secretary or whomever around their office. On average. And so I think that actually people in my situation should be paying more tax. I think the rest of the country should be paying less.
You could have these crazy Internet valuations in the late 1990s, but they prove themselves out in the market. The next day they were selling for more than they were the day before, and people said, you know, you're crazy if you don't get in on this. So it's very human.
I don't think it would be crazy to have a model or an entity model on the Reconstruction Finance Corp. That goes back to 1932, although it was really implemented in '33 under Jesse Jones, and it invested in mostly banks initially and preferred stock and that sort of thing.
As long as you have markets, you'll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter.
When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
I've never seen a system as good as Coke has now.
Right now, the rest of the world owns $3 trillion US more of us than we own of them.
Berkshire's board has fully discussed each of the three CEO candidates and has unanimously agreed on the person who should succeed me if a replacement were needed today. The directors know now - and will always know in the future - exactly what they will do when the need arises.
Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
Warren, isn't it fair to say that if we did have an opinion, we wouldn't tell him?
The 3 percent overall federal tax rate I would pay -- if a Berkshire dividend were to be tax free -- seems a bit light.