Charlie Munger
Lacy O’Toole | cnbc
Billionaire Charlie Munger, the investment sage who made his fortune even before becoming Warren Buffett’s right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, has died at the age of 99.
Munger died on Tuesday, according to a press release from Berkshire Hathaway. The group said Munger’s family members have advised that he died peacefully this morning in a California hospital.
“Berkshire Hathaway could not have been built to its current position without Charlie’s inspiration, knowledge and participation,” Buffett said in a statement.
despite of being berkshire Vice President, Munger was a real estate attorney, president and publisher of the Daily Journal Corp., a Costco board member, a philanthropist, and an architect.
His fate was predicted as early as 2023 $2.3 billion – This is a surprising amount to many people, but it is very small in comparison Buffett’s immense wealth, whose value is estimated at more than $100 billion.
During Berkshire’s 2021 annual shareholder meeting, the then-97-year-old Munger inadvertently revealed a well-guarded secret: that Vice Chairman Greg Abel would “maintain the culture” after the Buffett era.
Munger, who wears thick glasses, lost his left eye in 1980 after complications from cataract surgery.
Munger was chairman and CEO of Wesco Financial from 1984 to 2011, when Buffett’s Berkshire purchased the remaining shares of the Pasadena, California-based insurance and investment company he no longer owned.
Buffett credited Munger with broadening his investment strategy from favoring distressed companies at low prices to focusing on high-quality but low-priced companies in the hope of turning a profit.
An early example of the variation was painted in 1972 Munger’s ability to convince Buffett to sign off on Berkshire’s purchase of See’s Candies At $25 million, even though the California candy maker had annual pre-tax income of only $4 million. It has been produced since Berkshire’s sales exceed $2 billion.
“He turned me away from the idea of buying very attractive companies at very cheap prices, knowing there was some small profit in it, and looking for some very wonderful businesses that we could buy at reasonable prices,” Buffett told CNBC. But could buy.” May 2016.
Or as Manger said at the 1998 Berkshire shareholder meeting: “It’s not so much fun to buy a business where you really hope the damn thing goes under before it breaks.”
Manger was often the straight man to Buffett’s insightful comments. “I have nothing to add,” He said this after Buffett gave a coy answer to questions at Berkshire’s annual meetings in Omaha, Nebraska. But like his friend and colleague, Munger was a wise man in investing and life. And like one of his heroes, Benjamin Franklin, Munger’s insights were not lacking in humor.
“I have a friend who says the first rule of fishing is fish where there are fish, The second rule of fishing is to never forget the first rule. We’ve become good at fishing where the fish are,” Munger, then 93, told thousands at Berkshire’s 2017 meeting.
he believed in what he said “Lollapalooza Effect,” In which a confluence of factors took place to advance investment psychology.
a son of the heartland
Charles Thomas Munger was born on January 1, 1924 in Omaha. His father, Alfred, was a lawyer, and His mother, Florence “Toody,” Was from a prosperous family. Like Warren, Munger also worked in Buffett’s grandfather’s grocery store in his youth, but the two future partners did not meet until years later.
At the age of 17, Munger left Omaha for the University of Michigan. Janet Lowe’s 2003 biography “Damn Right!” According to, two years later, in 1943, he joined the Army Air Corps.
The Army sent him to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena to study meteorology. In California, he fell in love with Nancy Huggins, his sister’s roommate at Scripps College, and married her in 1945. Although he never completed his graduate degree, Munger graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1948, and the couple moved back to Harvard. California, where he practiced real estate law. He founded the law firm Munger, Toles & Olson in 1962 and focused on managing investments at the hedge fund Wheeler, Munger & Co., which he founded the same year.
“I’m proud to be an Omaha boy,” Munger said in an interview in 2017. Scott DeRue, Dean of the University of Michigan Ross Business School, “I sometimes use the old saying, ‘They took the boy out of Omaha but they never took the Omaha out of the boy.’ All those old-fashioned values – family comes first; be in a position that you can help others when trouble comes; prudent, sensible; being reasonable is a moral duty more important than anything else – more important than being rich. , more important than being more important – an absolute moral duty.”
In California, he partnered with Franklin Otis Booth, a member of the Los Angeles Times founding family, in real estate. One of his early developments turned out to be A charming condo project on Booth’s grandfather’s estate in Pasadena. (Booth, who died in 2008, was introduced to Buffett by Munger in 1963 and became one of Berkshire’s biggest investors.)
“I had five real estate projects,” Munger told Deru, “I worked both together for a few years and within a few years I had $3 million – $4 million.”
Munger closed the hedge fund in 1975. Three years later, he became vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.
‘We think so alike it’s scary’
In 1959, at the age of 35, Munger returned to Omaha to close his late father’s law practice. that’s when he was Pur: The then 29-year-old Buffett By an investor client of Buffett’s. The two got along well and remained in touch despite living half a continent away from each other.
“We think so alike it’s scary,” Buffett recalled in an interview with the Omaha World-Herald in 1977. “He’s as smart and high-class a guy as I’ve ever seen.”
!["I live a better life because of Charlie"](https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/105204014-2018-CNBC-0507-CLIP-14.jpg?v=1529478230&w=750&h=422&vtcrop=y)
,we never argued Over the entire time we’ve known each other, which is now almost 60 years,” Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick in 2018. “Charlie has given me the ultimate gift that a person can give to someone else . He has made me a better person than I would have been otherwise. …He’s given me a lot of good advice over time. …I have a better life because of Charlie.”
Blend of Minds focuses on value investing, in which stocks are selected because they appear to be undervalued based on the company’s long-term fundamentals.
Munger once said, “All wise investments are value investments – getting more than you are paying for.” “To value the stock you have to value the business.”
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (left) and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger attend the 2019 annual shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska on May 3, 2019.
Johannes Eisele | AFP | getty images
But during the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, when Berkshire suffered a massive $50 billion loss in the first quarter, Munger and Buffett were more conservative than during the Great Recession, when they backed American Airlines and Bank of America and Goldman. Had invested in financial companies like. Sachs suffered huge losses in that recession.
“Well, I would say basically we’re like the captain of a ship when the worst hurricane ever comes,” Munger told The Wall Street Journal in April 2020.We just want to ride out the storm, and we would like to come out of this with plenty of liquidity. We’re not playing, ‘Oh goody, goody, everything is going to hell, let’s use 100% of the reserves’ (in buying the business).”
Philanthropist/Architect
Munger donated millions of dollars to educational institutions including the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and Harvard Law School, often with the condition that The school accepted his building designEven though he was not formally trained as an architect.
At Harvard-Westlake Prep School in Los Angeles, where Munger was a board member for decades, she made sure that girls’ bathrooms were larger than boys’ rooms when the science center was built in the 1990s.
“Whenever you go to a football game or a concert there’s a huge line outside the women’s bathroom. Who doesn’t know that they pee differently than men?” Munger told The Wall Street Journal In 2019. “What kind of idiot would make a men’s bathroom and a women’s bathroom the same size? The answer is, a common architect!”
Munger and his wife had three children, daughters Wendy and Molly, and son Teddy, who died of leukemia at the age of 9. Munger divorced in 1953.
Two years later, he married Nancy Barry, whom he had met one day Blind Date at a Chicken Dinner Restaurant, The couple had four children, Charles Jr., Emily, Barry, and Philip. He was also stepfather to her two other sons, William Harold Borthwick and David Borthwick. Munger, who was married for 54 years until his death in 2010, contributed $43.5 million to Stanford University to help build the Munger Graduate Residence, which houses 600 law and graduate students.
Asked by CNBC’s Quicken in a February 2019 “Squawk Box” interview about the secret to a long and happy life, Munger said, “The answer is easy, because it’s very simple.”
“You don’t have too much jealousy, you don’t have too much resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you remain happy despite your troubles. You treat trustworthy people and you do what you “We should do this. And all these simple rules work very well for improving your life. And they are very well-worn,” he said.
“And be happy… because it’s the wise thing to do. Is it so hard? And can you be happy when you’re completely consumed by deep hatred and resentment? Of course you can’t. So why do you Will you take it?
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