Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Links

"There have been...several times I had 75 percent of my net worth in one situation.... You will see things that it would be a mistake — if you’re working with smaller sums — it would be a mistake not to have half your net worth in. You really do, sometimes in securities, see things that are lead-pipe cinches. And you’re not going to see them often and they’re not going to be talking about them on television or anything of the sort, but there will be some extraordinary things happen in a lifetime where you can put 75 percent of your net worth or something like that in a given situation.... There’s quite a few people in this room that have close to a hundred percent of their net worth in Berkshire, and some of them have had it for 40 or more years. Berkshire was not in a cinch category. It was in the strong probability category, I think. But I saw things in 2002 in the junk bond field. I saw things in the equity markets. If you could have bought Cap Cities with Tom Murphy running it in 1974, it was selling at a third or a fourth what the properties were worth and you had the best manager in the world running the place and you had a business that was pretty damn good even if the manager wasn’t. You could have put a hundred percent of your net worth in there and not worry. You could put a hundred percent of your net worth in Coca-Cola, earlier than when we bought it, but certainly around the time we bought it, and that would not have been a dangerous position." --Warren Buffett (2008)

Warren Buffett Protege to Leave Berkshire, Start Own Firm ($) (LINK)
Tracy Britt Cool says she wants to work with companies ‘too small for Berkshire’
Q&A with Brandes: Why Look for Opportunities Overseas? [H/T @MebFaber] (LINK)

‘This Is Not the Way Everybody Behaves.’ How Adam Neumann’s Over-the-Top Style Built WeWork. ($) (LINK)
The skills that helped fuel We Co.’s breakneck growth are piling up as potential liabilities as the company prepares to go public
Is the Price of Gold Manipulated? (2018 video w/ Grant Williams) (LINK)

How billionaire philanthropy provides reproductive health care when politicians won’t [H/T @NicoleFriedman] (LINK)
This is how we’ve arrived at a point where Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the biggest philanthropists in the world, are the leading providers of access to contraception worldwide, and Buffett is the leading provider of abortion access for poor women in the U.S.
The Case for Being a Multi-Hyphenate - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

Use ancient remains more wisely [H/T @edyong209] (LINK)

How Ancient DNA Can Help Recast Colonial History - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Book of the day: That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea