I was reading in The Week about Warren Buffett finally stepping down as chair of Berkshire Hathaway, at the grand old age of 96, and the tone of the coverage was basically one long standing ovation. The nice old man from Omaha who drinks Coke, lives in the same house and is giving it all away. A "benign antidote" to Trump and Musk apparently.
And fair enough, compared to those two most people look benign. But I do think we need to take a step back before we start carving the statue.
The numbers are genuinely ridiculous
Credit where it's due, the investing record is solid... Under his time as boss Berkshire grew at 19.9% a year compared to 10.4% for the S&P 500, which in plain English means a hundred dollars stuck in with him in 1965 would be worth millions today, while the same hundred in a boring index fund would be worth a few tens of thousands.
That's not all luck. He bought decent businesses, held them for decades and didn't faff about chasing whatever was trendy that quarter and that in a nutshell is the WB story... uy sensible stuff, leave it alone, stop checking it every five minutes.
The latest... and a bit of family business
What I found more interesting is who's taking over. Greg Abel already had the CEO job, but the new chairman is Buffett's son Howard, who's been on the board since 1993.
Now I'm sure Howard is a perfectly capable chap, and it's been planned for years. But if a Tory donor handed the top job at a trillion dollar company to his son we'd call it what it is. When it's Buffett we call it "a long-planned succession". Funny that.
Final thoughts
Buffett was a brilliant investor and probably a decent bloke, and compared to the current crop of billionaires buying elections and social media platforms, he looks like a saint.
But that's a very low bar, isn't it? The fact we're grateful a billionaire didn't use his fortune to buy political influence tells you more about the state of things than it does about him.
And the money still ends up controlled by the family, with the son in the chair... dynastic wealth by another name? We shall see.
