Charles Munger, the partner, friend and most faithful ally of investment guru Warren Buffett, died this Tuesday in a California hospital. as reported by Berkshire Hathaway through a statement. Munger, who was 99, lived in Los Angeles and was a vice president of the company. “Berkshire Hathaway could not have achieved its current status without Charlie’s inspiration, wisdom and involvement,” Buffett said in the statement.
Munger, a joker and fan of playing cards, appeared every year with Buffet at the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, in Omaha, a city of 475,000 inhabitants in the state of Nebraska, not far from the geographical center of the United States. The meeting became a spectacle in which they shared their investment and life philosophy with a sense of humor and without mincing words.
The last meeting in which the two were together was last May. The pilgrims of capitalism came from all over the world to hear the lessons of the Oracle of Omaha, knowing that there were not many opportunities left for them. It remains to be seen if Buffett maintains those long question and answer sessions on varied topics, from which politics, or at least partisan politics, was excluded.
In that last meeting in May, Buffett expanded on how to live according to the obituary you want to have or on whether artificial intelligence will be the one that decides in the future where to invest and he joked, as he always did, with his partner. “When I woke up this morning, I realized there was a competing broadcast somewhere in the United Kingdom,” Buffett said, referring to the coronation of Charles III, which was that same day. “They were celebrating a King Charles, and we have our own King Charles here today,” Buffett said, pointing to his partner and Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger.
They also made another joke – only suitable for financiers – about his age due to the banking crisis. With some black humor, some kind of identification signs were placed in front of them, where instead of the name, in Buffet’s case, “available for sale” appeared and in Munger’s, “held until maturity.” They are two key concepts in the recent banking crisis and the word maturity (maturity) It also means maturity in English.
Until his death, Munger remained a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the company that helped him transform over six decades from a declining textile manufacturer to an empire valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.
“It’s great to have a partner who tells you, ‘You’re not thinking clearly,’” Buffett said of Munger, sitting next to him, at the 2002 Berkshire meeting, Bloomberg recalls. “It doesn’t happen very often,” Munger chimed in. Too many CEOs surround themselves with “a bunch of sycophants” reluctant to question their conclusions and biases, Buffett added. For his part, Munger said Buffett benefited from having “a conversation partner who knew something.” “And I think I have been very useful in that sense,” he added.
In those meetings they sometimes seemed like kids joking, sometimes grumpy, always complicit and with their own criteria. They denigrated cryptocurrencies at the 2022 meeting, before their bubble burst. They did not recommend specific actions, but they did give ideas and share their wisdom. They used to appear with a Coca-Cola each, free publicity for the company in which Berkshire Hathaway is a prominent shareholder.
A lawyer by training, Munger also collaborated with Buffett, seven years his junior, to develop a philosophy of long-term investment in companies. Under his leadership, Berkshire earned an average annual profit of 20.1% between 1965 and 2021, almost double that of the S&P 500 index. Decades of compound profitability made the company one of the most profitable in the world and made the pair into billionaires and folk heroes to the investors who adored them.
Munger was a vice chairman of Berkshire and one of its largest shareholders, with shares valued at about $2.1 billion as of March 2, 2022. His total net worth was about $2.5 billion as of early 2023, according to Bloomberg.
He was born on January 1, 1924 in Omaha and as a teenager he worked at Buffett & Son, a grocery store owned by Warren Buffett’s grandfather. After enrolling at the University of Michigan, where he chose mathematics because it seemed easy, he never returned to live in Omaha. At the beginning of 1943, at the age of 19, he left university to join the Air Force. He continued his studies at various universities and entered Harvard Law School, where he graduated. magna cum laude in 1948.
He moved to California to join a law firm in Los Angeles, but seeing that he would not get rich there, he began working on construction projects and real estate businesses. He founded a new law firm, Munger, Tolles & Hills, and in 1962 he created an investment company, Wheeler, Munger & Co, modeled on those Buffett had created with his early investors in Omaha.
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