Mohnish Pabrai

Pure Buffett-Munger cloning. Mohnish doesn't pretend to be original and that's his superpower.

He coined the term "cloning" for his approach: find the best investors in the world, study their moves, understand their reasoning, and copy what makes sense. He runs a concentrated portfolio — typically 10 or fewer positions.

He looks for what he calls "Dhandho" — a Gujarati word meaning "endeavors that create wealth." The Dhandho framework is simple: heads I win big, tails I don't lose much. He wants asymmetric bets where the downside is limited but the upside is massive.

He's willing to go heavily into emerging markets, especially India and Turkey, where he sees mispriced assets that Western investors ignore. He holds for years, trades very rarely, and does almost nothing most of the time.

Bill Gates

Gates invests through Cascade Investment LLC in established, cash-generative businesses — railroads, waste management, agricultural equipment, farmland. His biggest single Cascade holding for years was Canadian National Railway.

He has sold most of his Microsoft stock over time. His investment philosophy outside Microsoft mirrors Buffett's: durable businesses with pricing power, bought at reasonable prices.

Mohnish Pabrai

Pabrai's philosophy is built on a few bedrock ideas. First: be a shameless cloner.

If someone smarter has figured it out, copy them. Second: look for low-risk, high-uncertainty situations — the market prices uncertainty as if it were risk, but they're not the same thing.

Third: invest in your circle of competence and expand it slowly. Fourth: compounding is the eighth wonder of the world, so start early and be patient.

Fifth: give back. He takes the Buffett giving pledge seriously — his Dakshana Foundation is the real deal, not a vanity project.

He genuinely believes wealth creation and philanthropy are two sides of the same coin.

Bill Gates

His core framework: read obsessively, think long-term, and separate emotion from analysis. He takes annual Think Weeks — solo retreats to a lake cottage in the Pacific Northwest where he reads papers and books for two weeks with no interruptions.

He publishes a reading list twice a year at gatesnotes.com. He has said that the best investment he ever made was paying $100,000 to take Warren Buffett to dinner every year.

Mohnish Pabrai

Moderate to aggressive on individual positions, conservative in structure. Each position can be 10-20% of his portfolio, which is concentrated by any standard.

But he only buys when his downside analysis shows limited risk of permanent loss. He's comfortable with volatility — his fund dropped 60-70% in 2008 and he didn't panic.

He views drawdowns as temporary if the business thesis is intact. He keeps a big cash position when he can't find cheap stocks, sometimes 30-40% in cash.

He's also willing to invest heavily in countries most American investors won't touch.

Bill Gates

Gates's risk tolerance is intellectual and deliberate rather than impulsive. He takes genuinely large bets — TerraPower on nuclear fission, billions into climate technology, the Gates Foundation's campaigns to eradicate diseases that kill millions — but only after intense research.

His Think Weeks exist to force slow, rigorous thinking on big decisions. At Microsoft, he kept enough cash on hand to run the company for a full year with zero revenue because he never wanted short-term survival pressure to force a bad long-term decision.

That discipline carries into his personal finances.

Mohnish Pabrai

Mohnish lives simply relative to his wealth. He drives a used car, lives modestly, and has said he spends very little time worrying about material possessions.

He reads voraciously — 3-4 hours a day, mostly annual reports, business biographies, and investor letters. He takes a no-meeting approach to his day: he has no office, no analysts, no team.

He invests alone from his home in Irvine, California. He checks his portfolio rarely and makes maybe 2-3 investment decisions per year.

The rest of the time he reads, thinks, and works on Dakshana. He's also a creature of habit — he follows a similar daily routine year-round.

Bill Gates

He wakes up early, exercises on a treadmill while watching documentaries, and reportedly does the dishes every night. He has said dishes are meditative.

For a man worth $130 billion, the emphasis on routine is either deeply grounded or very good PR. He drove himself to work at Microsoft for years and lived in a normal house long after he could afford otherwise.

Mohnish Pabrai

His bet on Fiat Chrysler (now Stellantis) starting around 2012 was a masterclass. He bought the stock when Sergio Marchionne was restructuring the company and the market was deeply skeptical.

The stock roughly tripled. He also made a killing on Rain Industries, an Indian chemical company that most Western investors had never heard of.

He bought it cheap, the company's fundamentals improved dramatically, and the stock went up several hundred percent. These wins perfectly illustrate his method: find overlooked companies in overlooked markets and let the market catch up.

Bill Gates

Microsoft Windows. The decision to license MS-DOS to IBM for the PC while retaining the right to sell it to other manufacturers was arguably the most lucrative business decision in tech history.

Every PC manufacturer then licensed Windows. Gates captured the entire PC market without building the hardware.

By 1999, Microsoft's market cap hit $616 billion.

Mohnish Pabrai

The 2008 financial crisis was brutal for Pabrai. His funds lost 60-70% of their value.

He was heavily concentrated in financial stocks and housing-related plays going into the crash. He's been completely transparent about this — he calls it a humbling experience that made him a better investor.

He also admits he's made mistakes holding some positions too long after the thesis broke, particularly in some emerging market bets. But his willingness to openly discuss failures is one of the things that makes him credible.

Bill Gates

Missing the internet. Microsoft was late and initially dismissive of the internet as a platform.

Gates eventually course-corrected and wrote the Internet Tidal Wave memo in 1995, redirecting the entire company toward internet strategy. But the delay allowed Netscape to establish footholds, and Microsoft's browser monopoly tactics led to the landmark antitrust case United States v.

Microsoft in 2000, which threatened to break up the company.

Mohnish Pabrai

Mohnish Pabrai was born in Mumbai in 1964 and moved to the US for college. He started his career as an IT consultant and founded TransTech Inc., an IT consulting firm, in 1991 with $100,000 in savings and $70,000 on credit cards.

He grew it to $20 million in revenue and sold it. In 1999, he read a book about Buffett and had a revelation: investing was simpler and more profitable than running a business.

He started Pabrai Investment Funds with $1 million — $100,000 of his own money and the rest from friends and family. By 2007, his funds had compounded at over 28% annually.

The 2008 crash hit him hard — his funds dropped 60-70%. But he recovered and kept compounding.

His total assets under management have exceeded $1 billion. In 2007, he and Guy Spier famously paid $650,100 at a charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffett.

He's also a major philanthropist — his Dakshana Foundation has helped thousands of underprivileged Indian students get into top engineering and medical schools.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates was born in Seattle in 1955. He taught himself to program on a PDP-10 at age 13.

He enrolled at Harvard in 1973, dropped out in 1975, and moved to Albuquerque with Paul Allen to found Microsoft. Their break came when they licensed an operating system to IBM for the original PC — and crucially, retained the rights to sell it to anyone else.

That decision made Microsoft. Windows became the standard operating system for the world.

Gates became the world's richest person in 1995 and held that title for much of the next 15 years. He transitioned out of Microsoft's day-to-day around 2000 and fully moved into philanthropy via the Gates Foundation.

Mohnish Pabrai

Pabrai Investment Funds — his hedge fund modeled directly after Buffett's original partnership structure. No management fee, just a performance fee above a hurdle rate.

TransTech Inc. — his first company, an IT consulting firm he built from scratch and sold.

Dakshana Foundation — his philanthropy arm that coaches underprivileged Indian students for IIT and medical school entrance exams. Over 15,000 students have gotten into top schools through the program.

Bill Gates

Microsoft (co-founder, former CEO and chairman). Cascade Investment LLC (his personal investment vehicle).

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (co-chair). Major holdings through Cascade include Canadian National Railway, Deere & Company, and significant farmland.

Early Microsoft equity remains a massive portion of his net worth.

Mohnish Pabrai

Pabrai earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Clemson University in South Carolina. He's entirely self-taught as an investor — no MBA, no finance degree, no Wall Street training.

Like Buffett, he learned investing from books, primarily The Intelligent Investor and Buffett's shareholder letters. He considers his engineering background an advantage because it taught him systematic thinking and first-principles analysis.

Bill Gates

Harvard University — studied mathematics and computer science. Dropped out in 1975 after his sophomore year to found Microsoft.