Warren Buffett

Buffett's approach is simple to describe and almost impossible to copy. He buys great businesses at fair prices and then just...

holds them. Forever.

He calls it "buy and hold" but that undersells it — he means hold until the sun burns out. He looks for companies with a real unfair advantage over competitors.

Something that protects them from being wiped out. He calls it a "moat" — like the water around a castle.

Think Coca-Cola. Everyone knows it.

Nobody can replicate it. He puts a LOT of money into a small number of bets — usually his top five holdings make up over 70% of everything.

Most fund managers would have a panic attack at that level of concentration. Buffett calls it being convicted.

His old mentor Graham taught him to hunt for cheap, beaten-down companies and flip them fast. Charlie Munger, his business partner for 45+ years, talked him out of that.

Munger said: just buy the best businesses you can find and never sell. Buffett admits that shift made him hundreds of billions of dollars.

Charlie Munger

Munger's whole thing is mental models. The idea is simple: instead of being an expert in one field, you learn the core concepts from as many different fields as possible — psychology, biology, physics, economics, history — and then use that whole toolkit to think about problems.

He calls it a latticework of mental models. It sounds like a self-help concept.

It's actually how he consistently made better decisions than almost everyone around him. On investing, he pushed Buffett away from his old mentor's approach — which was basically "find dirt-cheap companies and flip them fast" — toward something more durable: find the best businesses in the world and hold them forever.

The key word he uses is moat. A business so dominant that competitors can't touch it.

Think Coca-Cola. He was also deeply influenced by psychology, particularly the ways humans reliably fool themselves.

He gave a famous talk called "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment" listing 25 ways our brains get things wrong. Reading it once will change how you make decisions.

Warren Buffett

Rule No. 1: Never lose money.

Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No.

1. Buy businesses, not stocks — the distinction matters more than most investors realize.

Let compounding do the heavy lifting and get out of its way. Never use debt to invest.

Be fearful when others are greedy, greedy when others are fearful. Time in the market destroys timing the market in every long enough data set.

For most people, a low-cost S&P 500 index fund will outperform almost any active strategy, including most professional money managers — including, he's said, what most of his estate will go into after he's gone.

Charlie Munger

Invert. Always invert.

That's his most famous rule — borrowed from the mathematician Jacobi. Instead of asking "how do I succeed?" ask "what would guarantee failure, and then avoid those things." It sounds obvious.

Almost nobody actually does it. He believes the secret to a good life and good investing is the same: figure out what you want to avoid, avoid it relentlessly, and most good things follow.

On wealth: getting rich isn't the hard part — keeping it is. Most people blow up by using borrowed money, getting greedy at the top, or panicking at the bottom.

Don't do those things. On decisions: only make the big bet when you're very sure.

Be patient for a long time, then move fast when the opportunity is obvious.

Warren Buffett

Buffett's whole thing is: do so much homework that the risk basically disappears. He doesn't diversify across 500 stocks to protect himself — he researches 10 companies so deeply that he's more confident about those 10 than most people are about anything.

He never borrows money to invest. Ever.

He keeps a mountain of cash at Berkshire — over $100 billion sitting around doing nothing — specifically so he can swoop in when everyone else is panicking and selling cheap. He once called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction" back in 2002.

Wall Street laughed. Then 2008 happened and Wall Street stopped laughing.

He doesn't predict where the stock market is going. He predicts whether a business will still be dominant in 20 years.

That's it.

Charlie Munger

Munger's approach to risk: don't take risks you don't understand, and don't take risks you don't need to. He kept things simple.

He concentrated into a small number of businesses he understood deeply. He never used borrowed money.

He kept large cash reserves. His view on diversification was almost the opposite of what most financial advisors tell you — he thought spreading money across 50 stocks was an admission that you hadn't done enough homework.

If you've done the work, you concentrate. If you haven't, maybe don't invest at all.

Warren Buffett

Despite a $120B net worth, Buffett still lives in the same gray stucco house in Omaha he bought in 1958 for $31,500. He drives himself to work.

Breakfast is McDonald's — he orders based on his mood: $2.61, $2.95, or $3.17. He plays bridge obsessively, often online with Bill Gates.

He drinks multiple Cokes a day (Berkshire owns a large stake in Coca-Cola; coincidence is left as an exercise to the reader). He has pledged to give away more than 99% of his wealth, primarily to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and his children's foundations.

He takes a $100,000 annual salary from Berkshire. He does not own a smartphone.

Charlie Munger

Munger lived in the same house in Los Angeles for most of his adult life. He was famously frugal — not in a miserable way, but in a "I genuinely don't care about most things money buys" way.

He flew commercial until fairly recently. He read obsessively.

He described himself as a book with legs. His children joked that he was more interesting to talk to than almost anyone alive, but would only engage on topics he found intellectually stimulating.

He donated massively to education — hundreds of millions to Harvard Law School, the University of Michigan, and other institutions, often with very specific conditions attached. He designed buildings as a hobby and funded their construction himself.

He died at 99 worth around $2.6 billion — extraordinary by any measure, and somehow modest given he sat next to one of the richest men in history for 45 years.

Warren Buffett

Apple. Berkshire started buying Apple in 2016 — late by any tech investor's standard, from a man who spent decades insisting he didn't understand technology.

By 2023, the position had grown to over $170 billion, returning more than 800%. Buffett called it the best business he'd ever seen and admitted he should have bought it earlier.

Honorable mention: American Express in 1963 during the Great Salad Oil Scandal, when he put 40% of the Buffett Partnership into AmEx at distressed prices while the rest of Wall Street was running away.

Charlie Munger

See's Candies. In 1972, Munger convinced a reluctant Buffett to pay what seemed like an expensive price — $25 million — for a California candy company.

Buffett thought it was too much. Munger held firm.

See's has since generated over $2 billion in profit for Berkshire, basically funding dozens of other acquisitions. It also taught Buffett the single most important lesson of his career: paying a fair price for a great business beats getting a cheap price for a mediocre one.

That one deal changed the entire direction of Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffett

Buying Berkshire Hathaway. He bought it in 1962 as a cigar butt — a cheap, dying textile company — and then kept it instead of winding it down into a clean insurance holding company.

The C-corp structure meant decades of tax drag. He has estimated this single mistake — triggered partly by spite after the owner tried to lowball him on a buyout — cost Berkshire and its shareholders roughly $200 billion over 50 years.

He also admits missing Google and Amazon, both of which he understood well enough to buy and simply didn't.

Charlie Munger

Munger is famous for avoiding mistakes more than for making spectacular wins — his whole philosophy is about not doing stupid things. But he's admitted to a few.

He said Berkshire was too slow to move into BYD, China's electric vehicle company, despite knowing it was exceptional for years before they finally bought in. He also held too much Wesco Financial for too long when the money could have been put to better use elsewhere.

His most honest self-criticism: he wished he had moved faster when the evidence was already clear. For a man who spent his career warning others about psychological biases, he wasn't immune to them.

Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1930. He bought his first stock at age 11 — three shares of a company called Cities Service.

He paid $114. He was eleven.

By 14, he owned a 40-acre farm and had filed his first tax return. He applied to Harvard Business School and got rejected.

Best thing that ever happened to him, honestly. He ended up at Columbia instead, where he met Benjamin Graham — the guy who basically invented the idea of buying undervalued stocks.

After graduating in 1951, Buffett started his own investment partnership in Omaha with $105,000 from family and friends. He turned that into something much bigger, compounding at around 30% per year for over a decade.

Then in 1969, he shut it down and quietly took over a dying Massachusetts textile company he had bought partly out of spite. That company was Berkshire Hathaway.

What happened next is the greatest investing run in history — and it started with a grudge.

Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger grew up in Omaha — same city as Buffett, but they didn't know each other yet. His father was a lawyer.

So was his grandfather. Charlie became one too, but he was clearly more interested in figuring out how the world worked than in courtrooms.

He studied math at the University of Michigan, got drafted into World War II, trained as a meteorologist, and somehow ended up at Harvard Law School without ever finishing an undergraduate degree. Harvard took him anyway.

He graduated in 1948 and moved to California to practice law. He was good at it.

He was also quietly building a real estate business on the side that made him more money than law ever did. He and Buffett met at a dinner in Omaha in 1959.

Munger was 35. Buffett was 28.

By the end of the night, Buffett was trying to convince Munger to go into investing full time. It took about a decade.

Munger ran his own investment partnership from 1962 to 1975 — returned 24% annually while the market did 6.4%. Then he fully merged his career with Buffett's at Berkshire, where he stayed until his death in 2023.

Warren Buffett

His main vehicle is Berkshire Hathaway — a company he took over in 1965 when it was a dying textile mill. He basically gutted the textile business and turned the whole thing into a giant money machine that owns other businesses.

Today it's one of the most valuable companies on earth. On the stock side, his biggest bet is Apple — worth over $175 billion at its peak.

He also owns huge chunks of Bank of America, Coca-Cola (since 1988 — he really doesn't sell), American Express, and Chevron. Then there are the companies Berkshire owns outright.

GEICO, one of the biggest car insurers in America. Burlington Northern Santa Fe, a massive railroad.

Dairy Queen, See's Candies, Duracell. Basically a random collection of boring, cash-generating businesses that he loves precisely because they're boring.

His first fund — Buffett Partnership Ltd. — ran from 1956 to 1969.

He returned around 30% per year while the market did 8.6%. Then he shut it down, said he couldn't find enough cheap stocks, and walked away at the top.

Charlie Munger

Munger's main stage was Berkshire Hathaway, where he served as Vice Chairman from 1978 until he died. His role was hard to define on paper — he didn't run a fund or manage a portfolio.

What he actually did was talk to Buffett. That was worth a trillion dollars.

Before Berkshire, he ran his own investment partnership from 1962 to 1975 that crushed the market. He also controlled Wesco Financial, a small insurance and financial company he ran as a personal Berkshire subsidiary from 1973 to 2011, until Berkshire fully absorbed it.

Outside finance, he was obsessed with architecture — he personally designed several buildings, including a dormitory at the University of Michigan that his own architecture school rejected for violating design principles. He funded it anyway.

Warren Buffett

University of Nebraska–Lincoln (B.S. in Business Administration, 1950).

Columbia Business School (M.S. in Economics, 1951) — the only school that mattered, where he studied under Benjamin Graham and got his only A+.

He also spent two years at the Wharton School before transferring. Harvard Business School rejected him.

He's described that rejection as one of the luckiest things that ever happened to him.

Charlie Munger

University of Michigan, mathematics — left for World War II without graduating. US Army Air Corps, meteorology training.

Harvard Law School, JD 1948 — admitted without an undergraduate degree, which Harvard is apparently capable of when it wants to be.