Transcription
Warren, we have a little surprise there for you. If you look up to the right, you'll see a jersey and a number worn appropriately. It's number 60 for 60 years as our CEO of Berkshire. Equally, it's being uh it's placed beside Charlie's jersey, number 45. Charlie was with Brookshire for 45 years. Obviously, our vice chairman and a treasured partner of Warren and it's just reflective of a great partnership. Thank you, Warren. That's been 100% successful. Greg is doing uh everything I did and then some. And he's doing it better in all cases. and he's got he's he's the right person. So that decision we score 100% on Yeah.
Thank you, Warren. If if Tim would take a vow and our shareholders would say thanks to him that Tim is right by me took over about 14 years ago when we made our investment and turned over 10% of the resources of Birkshire. We were turning it over to Tim. He's turned that into 185 billion or something pre-tax. But Tim has announced that he's uh retiring as well. That's that's an announcement that's just been made in the last couple of years. And so I think it's appropriate.
Station one. Hi, my name is uh Warren Warren from Omaha and I want to know just so I have something to tell my fellow shareholders, why should they hold their Bergkshire shares for the long term? We're not going to do AI for the sake of AI. You can spend a lot of money in this area and we need to know what we're trying to achieve and do we see a valued proposition uh for the businesses.
It is very difficult to get people to sit back and do nothing. When I recruit people, my motives of R&D, I tell them right up front, I said I tell them your job is to say no. You will get bombarded with deals day in and day out, but your base case is just say no. I said every now and then you will come across a deal that will hit you with a 2x4 and it'll be screaming money. That's when you come to me and we'll make a decision whether to do it or not. It isn't our ideal surrounding area or environment I should say uh in terms of deploying cash for Bircher but in terms of how we got the right management we got the right arrangement and uh you know we can pick our spots and and nobody can tell us what to do exactly and so sometimes we're doing nothing but other other times we get quite active I mean time to buy things is when nobody else will answer their phones you know everybody else talks about their wonderful trading departments and everything just try them out. Sometimes when uh markets are collapsing, they don't answer the phones. I mean, and the quantity of those things is just incredible. So, we've never had people in a more gambling mood than now, but that doesn't mean that investing is terrible. It it does mean that uh that prices for an awful lot of things will look very solid. I mean they, you know, they had a squeeze and and then enable us some of the hold things. Well, this has been around for 50 years, but just this past week uh uh and uh we have lots more regulation and everything now, but uh but people spend their time figuring out how to get around the rules rather than follow the rules. And that's just a challenge. The number one rule I give them is just give them the golden rule to other more people are reading a 2,000 year old book about how to behave than anything that anybody's coming up with lately. Uh if the whole world lived by the golden rule, it would be such a more wonderful society.