主题： Berkshire Hathaway

I’ve made all kinds of huge mistakes of omission. The ones of commission show up in accounting. If I buy something for $1 and sell it for 50 cents, it shows up.… We’ve made relatively minor mistakes of commission. Those aren’t the ones that bother me. The acts of omission that I’m talking about are things within my circle of confidence, things I could understand, did understand, and didn’t do anything about. I was sucking my thumb. Those are the big mistakes.

That old line, “The other guy is doing it, so we must as well,” spells trouble in any business. We want to make money only when our partners do and in exactly the same proportion. Moreover, when I do something dumb, I want you to be able to derive some solace from the fact that my financial suffering is proportional to yours.

Our shareholders are far wealthier today than they would be if the funds we used for acquisitions had instead been devoted to share repurchases or dividends.

If I were to buy a farm and have someone run it for me, the deal I would make with the farmer in terms of what percentage of the crop he would get would be important. If I had someone managing an apartment building for me, my arrangement with him is important. It’s important not only in terms of how the profits will be shared, it’s important in assessing the person’s attitude. You want someone running a place that looks at you as a partner and not as an adversary, and at Berkshire Hathaway, we really look at our shareholders as partners.

I have a friend that used to like to own 100 percent of any company that he had, because he liked to look in the mirror and say, “All my shareholders love me.” That has a nice ring to it. I like to look in the mirror and say, “Enough of my shareholders love me.” We will never allow Berkshire to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations, and multiple layers of management. Instead, we plan to operate as a collection of separately-managed medium-sized and large businesses, most of whose decisionmaking occurs at the operating level.

I don’t like to sell. We buy everything with the idea that we will hold them forever.… That’s the kind of shareholder I want with me in Berkshire. I’ve never had a target price or a target holding period on a stock. And I have enormous reluctance to sell our wholly owned businesses under almost any circumstances.

Berkshire, in effect, for 53 years, has been a savings account.… Charlie put his money in, I put my money in…. And it’s a way of saving money over time. And the money gets left in, and we invest it.

The big money—huge money—is in selling people the idea that you can do something magical for them. If I can make one good decision a year, you know, we’ll do OK. When I make the decisions at Berkshire, I’m thinking about the fact that I’ve got 99 percent of my net worth in it and it’s all going to charities, so, I mean, if I cause this place to go broke, there’s a lot of downside to me.

We never get out on a limb rod. We always have lots of money. We never borrow a lot of money.

Up until a few years ago, we sold things to buy more because I ran out of money. I had more ideas than money. Now I have more money than ideas. I like to study failure, actually. My partner says, “All I want to know is where I’ll die so I’ll never go there.” And we want to see what has caused businesses to go bad—and the biggest thing that kills them is complacency. You want a restlessness, a feeling, you know, that somebody’s always after you, but you’re going to stay ahead of them. You always want to be on the move.