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
People always should know better. People don't get - they don't get smarter about things that get as basic as greed.
The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.
Be fearful when there is greed and be greedy when there is fear.
You can go back to tulip bulbs in Holland 400 years ago. The human beings going through combinations of fear and greed and all of that sort of thing, their behavior can lead to bubbles. And it may have had and Internet bubble at one time, you've had a farm bubble, farmland bubble in the Midwest which resulted in all kinds of tragedy in the early '80s.
I mean people, people don't get ,they don't get smarter about things that get as basic as greed and you can't stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you're smarter than he is, and he's doing these things, you know, and he's getting rich, and your spouse is getting unhappy with you because you aren't doing pretty soon you start doing it. And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three Is. The innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.
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.
Today's equity prices presage only modest returns for investors,
I bought a company in the mid-'90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I've made lots of dumb decisions. That's part of the game.