Morgan Housel

So don't try to emulate that.

What you can emulate, especially for young people, of course, is the most important and powerful thing that he did is that he was a good investor for 80 years.

And it's just the time that he was doing it for that made all the difference in the world.

So I pointed this out in my first book.

If you look at his net worth, 99% of it came after his 60th birthday.

99% of his net worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday.

So if he had retired when he was 60, when he was worth a couple hundred million bucks, like pretty good, you would have never heard of the guy.

The whole reason he became so famous and so wealthy is that he started investing when he was 11 and he retired last week when he was 95.

I think there's quite a bit.

One is I think what Berkshire did, what Buffett did for 60 years is on one hand so unbelievably simple.

And on another hand, almost impossible to replicate.

And it's hard to kind of square those two.

But what it required was an unbelievable amount of patience, an unbelievable amount of goodwill in terms of the trust that he had among all other businesses, among his investors, among regulators, because everybody around him just left him alone to do his thing because they trusted him.

And I think that's an overlooked part of this.

Like any other hedge fund manager, private equity fund manager would not have the trust among their investors, among portfolio companies, anybody to let them do what Buffett did.

He had the track record and the narrative that...

if you sell your business to Berkshire, it is not going to molest it and rip it apart and sell it for parts.

It's gonna nurture it and let it grow forever.

And I think that was, and if you compare that to Blackstone, KKR, all the other private equity shops, their stated purpose, and I'm not saying this is wrong, but their stated purpose is we're gonna maximize IRR and we're gonna do whatever's necessary to get there.

Whereas Berkshire was, we are intentionally not going to maximize returns.