Warren Buffett always wanted to make money. As a child growing up in Omaha, Neb., he traded Coca-Cola and chewing gum with other kids, sold stamps and golf balls to adults, and worked in his dad’s grocery store.
But in April 1942, at age 11, he bought his first stocks, purchasing three shares in the utility company Cities Service, and his career in investing had a liftoff, as equities analyst Alex W. Morris explains in “Buffett and Munger Unscripted: Three Decades of Investment and Business Insights from the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meetings” (Harriman House).
“Much of what I’ve learned about investing and business came from Buffett and Munger,” he writes. “For that, I will be forever grateful.”
Fast forward a lifetime and Buffett, now 94, is the world’s eighth richest man — and it’s been quite a journey.
Buffett began buying stock in holding giant Berkshire Hathaway in 1962 and, three years later, took a controlling stake in the business.
Charlie Munger, meanwhile, joined the operation as vice chairman in 1978.
For decades, the company’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) of shareholders in Omaha became a must-see event, as investors and analysts quizzed the pair and tried to uncover their investment secrets and strategies.
But unless you attended in person, you only had access to what people remembered and reported back. “For one of the financial world’s most storied events, the Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings were long available to just a relatively small group,” writes Norris.
In 2018, however, Berkshire released the archives from all shareholder meetings dating back to 1994 at which point Morris began the “daunting task” of trawling through hundreds of hours of video and more than 1,700 questions asked by attendees, upon which his book is based.
“Buffett and Munger’s answers represent a treasure trove of investment and business wisdom,” he writes. “The goal of this book is to unlock that trove and to make it accessible to all.”
For the most part, Buffett and Munger’s success has been driven by intuition, and the key, said Buffett, is recognizing the right investments when the market is fluctuating.
“Markets produce wild, wild things over time,” he told the 2000 assembly. “The trick is to take advantage of one of those wild things and not to get carried away when other wild things happen because the wild things create their own truth for a while.”
Successful investing is also all about learning from your experiences, both good and bad.
“What you formerly knew is never enough [in investing],” Munger told the 2018 meeting. “If you don’t learn to constantly revise your earlier conclusions and get better, you’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. “You have to get up each morning and try and go to bed that night a little wiser than you were when you got up,” he said.
There are certain investments Buffett and Munger never touch — like gold.
“If you owned all the gold in the world, you could get a ladder and climb on top of it and think you’re king of the world. You could fondle it, polish it, stare at it — but it isn’t going to do anything,” said Buffett. “All you are doing when you buy that is you’re hoping that somebody else will pay you more to own something that, again, can’t do anything.”
Munger agreed. “[It’s like] people who think they can protect themselves by buying paintings of soup cans,” he said. “I don’t recommend that, either.”
The book also acts as a potted financial history of the world over the last three decades as the pair ruminate on issues that have come and gone, like, for instance, the “Y2K bug” at the turn of the millennium.
“It is fascinating that a whole bunch of people with 160 IQs could build up such a problem – that’s why we stick with simple things,” said Buffett in 1998.
They didn’t always get it right, though. In 2000, Buffett told the AGM that the internet was a “wonderful thing” for society but a “net negative for capitalists” in that he foresaw reduced profitability and increased costs for many companies. Munger agreed.
“So, all of you can be happy that the progress of the species will affect your economic futures for the worse,” he added. Clearly, the Internet has brought investors untold riches.
The pair’s investing success has nevertheless seen them amass huge personal fortunes.
In November 2024, Forbes magazine estimated Buffett’s net worth to be $149.7 billion and when Munger died in November 2023, aged 99, he was worth $2.6 billion but had also given over $550 million in donations to hospitals, universities, and other institutions.
Now 94, Warren Buffett continues to be one of the most respected and successful investors in financial history.
His secret? “I have a friend who says, ‘The first rule of fishing is to fish where the fish are,” he said. “And the second rule of fishing is to never forget the first rule.
“We have got good at fishing where the fish are.”
