Charlie Munger
speaker
204 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2022
last heard 6 Feb
Charlie Munger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Look how hard it would be to go into the auto business and have some big killing company. Who's going to win? Who knows? The whole thing has been thrown way up in the air by all these electric cars. All those big new capital requirements, different ways of selling cars. And plus they got these tough unions. See, I just don't even look at the auto industry.
Well, for maybe for one or two years, electric cars that are really good at it. Maybe, but certainly nobody else. It's too tough. BYD was a miracle. But that guy works 70 hours a week and has a very high IQ. He can do things you can't do. You can look at somebody else's auto part and he can figure out how to make the goddamn thing. You can't do that, you see.
Yes, but they're clever too. How was that investment for you? I lost money. Not much because I was stubborn. I held out until I got back to almost what I paid for it when I was older.
Well, but that is a no-brainer. Something like that, if you're as smart as Warren Buffett, maybe two, three times a century, you get an idea like that. The interest rates in Japan were half a percent per year for 10 years. And these trading companies were really entrenched old companies. and they had all these cheap copper mines and rubber plantations.
And so you could borrow for 10 years ahead all the money and you could buy the stocks and the stocks made 5% dividends. So there's a huge flow of cash With no investment, no thought, no anything. How often do you do that? You'll be lucky if you get one or two a century. We could do that. Nobody else could. It looked attractive at half or a century. You couldn't get it.
But Berkshire with its credit could. And the only way you could get it was to be very patient and just pick away at it little pieces at a time. It took forever to get $10 million invested. But it was like having God just opening a... chest and just pouring money into it. It was awfully easy money.
That's true. But why shouldn't it be hard to make money? Why should it be easy?
That's a very different company. Yeah. Did you ever look at it? That's a style company. Of course, I've looked at it, but I don't like style comedies.
Well, I suppose if it were to be Hermes, an achievement on a price, I'd buy it. But short of that, I'm going to buy a new style of company.
Well, if you're as good as they are, what they've done, you have a lifetime to do it in. Every now and then, three or four lifetimes to do it in. You can create another, but it's not easy.
It's not a bit easy. They have meetings every day where they make policy decisions. They choose the locations one at a time. It's work.
Well, they just got a brand people trust so much. It took them a century to do it.
Kirkland is a brand the way Tide is a brand. And Hermes is a different kind of a brand.
Well, it's hard for us not to love brands since we were lucky enough to buy the See's candy for $20 million as our first acquisition. And we found out fairly quickly that we could raise the price every year by 10% and nobody cared. We didn't make the volumes go up or anything like that. Just made the profits go up. So we've been raising the price by 10% a year for all these 40 years or so.
And it's been a very satisfactory company. We didn't require any new capital. That's what was so good about it. Very little new capital. We had two big kitchens and a bunch of rental stores when we bought it. Now it's got two big kitchens and a bunch of rental stores. Well... Charlie was a playboy. And his brother ran the company, his older brother, and dominated it completely.
But when he died, Charlie made his brother his executor. And now he needs a lot of money to pay death taxes. He doesn't have it. And it's due, you know, eight months or something later. And so they really wanted to sell so they could pay the death taxes. And Steve was only making $4 million pre-tax when we bought it.
We only found out about it because Charlie C. was on his cruise to Hawaii or something with this guy who was a client of an investment counselor who also worked for Blue Chip Stamps, which is the company that bought it. And at any rate, that's how we found out about it. We paid that guy a finer fee. We've never paid one cent. He always says that it was worth it.
Of course, but you don't want to have a reputation for paying finer fees. Everybody in the world will be bothering you all day long.
I think your chances of buying one of them is so low I wouldn't even look. I don't even believe in looking at things that I might find. You're not going to get a chance to buy Hermes. No curiosity without a return. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There are a lot of professional investors that buy nothing but branded goods. The one they usually start with is Nestle. They've done two or three points better than average, but it's not a bonanza.
Showing 101–120 of 204 · page 6 of 11
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