I attended last weekend’s 2019 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder meeting. During the well-known portion of the day when Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett field questions from shareholders, I was disheartened by the sheer number of questions that not so subtly asked Munger and Buffett about their deaths (questions they’ve been receiving for three decades now, or over half of a typical American’s working career), the underperformance of some particular Berkshire subsidiary against a competitor, and complaints about Berkshire Hathaway’s $110 billion cash hoard.
You would swear that Berkshire’s cash pile is burning a hole in some of these shareholder’s pockets.
What Buffett has made clear throughout his management of Berkshire Hathaway is that he does not care about Berkshire’s outperformance against the S&P 500 Index over a particular period, but rather, that he grows Berkshire’s “intrinsic value” at the highest rate possible and hopefully this will exceed the performance of … Read the rest of this article!