저자: 미상 · 외국인
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워런 버핏의 투자 철학과 버크셔 해서웨이의 성장 과정을 다룬 해설. 가치투자, 해자(moat), 보험사 플로트 활용, 찰리 멍거와의 파트너십을 소개하고, 2025년 말 은퇴 후 그렉 에이블이 CEO를 맡는 승계 상황과 현금 3000억 달러 이상 보유 등 향후 과제를 짚음. 과거 성과 설명 위주이며 특정 자산의 1~3개월 가격 방향 예측은 없음.
다듬은 글
If investors had a Hall of Fame, Warren Buffett would occupy his own wing People from all over the planet, look up to him, read his biography, hop on a plane to go see him talk. He took a failing textile mill and turned it into a trillion dollar conglomerate. It has insurance companies, Dairy Queen, railroads and energy businesses.
For decades, Buffett's investment savvy has led Berkshire Hathaway to beat benchmarks. One of the biggest asset managers today, which is Vanguard. The entire philosophy is: no one's really gonna be able to beat the market. So you might as well not even try. Well, okay, no one besides Warren Buffett.
If you look at the total returns, Berkshire blows the S&P 500 away. The legendary investor, Warren Buffett. So when the 95-year-old announced he would retire at the end of 2025... Greg should become the Chief Executive Officer of the company. It marked the end of an era at Berkshire Hathaway, and left everyone with one massive question.
Warren Buffett is one of the richest people on earth, but his lifestyle doesn't exactly scream it. He lives in Omaha. He lives in the same house. He's lived for many, many years. He goes to McDonalds in Omaha. A lot of people around the city know him. He's paid just 100k and has been paid that amount for years.
That's very refreshing when you think about the landscape today. So what's the backstory? Well, Buffett's childhood fascination with money led him to Columbia Business School where he studied under a renowned educator. Benjamin Graham was a financial analyst considered to be the father of value investing.
Value investing is really this idea that you're not just betting on some fluke in the market. You're really looking at what you think it's worth versus what the value that the market is providing. Ideally, you want to buy a company that you think is undervalued and that it's going to rise in many years, but that requires a lot of due diligence that requires you to make sure you actually understand how the business works.
I'm not buying 'em 'cause I think they're gonna go up next year. I'm buying 'em 'cause I think they'll be worth quite a bit more money 10 years or 20 years from now. Investment after investment. That strategy came to define Berkshire Hathaway, But let's see it in action by focusing on just one. American Express is an investment that he's had for decades, and when he bought it, the stock price was a bit down because of a scandal at the time, but he saw the value of Americans that kept swiping the Amex all over the place.
That was back in the 1960s. But look at this, Berkshire's current Amex Holding was largely assembled here in the 1990s for about $1.3 billion. Since then, Buffett's largely left that core stake intact, but Amex's market value has soared in the years since making his 22% holding worth tens of billions of dollars.
He was interested because the company has a good moat. By moat, he means some competitive advantage against other companies in the business. For Amex, that moat is a mix of its premium brand, affluent cardholders and a network built around their spending power. Another kind of edge you can have over your competitors is regulation.
Think about the energy business. A lot of those have advantages that a competitor couldn't come in and easily take the market share. That's really helped his business sustain itself. He's built up companies that are not so easy to replicate, But perhaps the most underappreciated force behind Berkshire's Rise is its insurance business.
They're not always the companies that are gonna draw the hype from stockholders, but it's actually been a force that's built up Berkshire a lot. The insurance business provides us with float and float is money that we hold that doesn't belong to us. The way it works is it has a very large insurance arm that has a lot of money from policy holders.
They have to invest it to reap some benefits and make sure that they can pay claims afterwards. Berkshire Hathaway has been ramping that up to the max, buying a lot of insurance companies and using that money, the float, to invest afterwards. This is actually one of the hottest plays in the investment world right now with a lot of private equity and alternative asset managers either buying or having relationships with insurers.
While Buffet has been the face of Berkshire Hathaway, he long had a sidekick, both conveniently available as lovingly hand-rendered plushies. Charlie Munger passed away in 2023, but the dynamic he had with Buffett for many years was one of the main draws of Berkshire. They were a unique pair. If you saw them sitting together at the Berkshire annual meeting, they would banter.
I predict Charlie's gonna talk about Costco. Go ahead, Charlie. Well, Costco of course is a- Munger was fundamental to Buffett's investing thesis. At the start of his career, Buffett was very into this idea of cigar butt investing, in which you would take a company, you'd take one last puff and you'd get what you could out of it before it sort of faltered.
And Charlie was one who really reshaped his thinking into thinking about companies that had a longer term advantage. He went from buying companies that were, you know, not very famous like Berkshire Hathaway, a textile mill that was struggling to taking stakes into Coca-Cola or Bank of America. Not that this approach is always a sure thing.
One is IBM. When he bought his stake in the early 2010, he said afterwards that it was a big mistake. He didn't see how IBM was about to lose the turn of the industry towards cloud computing. He also orchestrated the merger of Kraft and Heinz about 10 years ago. It just hasn't gone to plan. Part of that is down to changing consumer tastes, consumers wanting healthier things.
Part of that is down to inflation. And Buffett commented recently that while he didn't think the merger in hindsight was a great idea, he doesn't think that undoing it is gonna fix the company's problems. And lately Buffett has struggled finding companies he wants to invest in, leaving Berkshire with a record amount of cash.
It is so much easier to make very successful bets when you're managing a hundred million, 200 million. He's now got a cash pile that's more than $300 billion. And finding a place to put that capital to work is getting really difficult. He doesn't like to have money that is sitting around and not earning more money.
Higher interest rates these past few years have turned that cash pile into a nice income generator. But it is gonna get harder and harder to deploy that level of capital the bigger it gets. So this is the Berkshire Hathaway Greg Abel is inheriting as the company's new CEO, although sadly we don't have a plushie of him.
He led Berkshire's energy business for so many years. But it is tricky. Warren Buffett has not only been a very good investor, but he's also pretty charismatic. That's part of the reason that so many investors have always made that trek to Omaha. Despite the cost, despite the distance. Abel will also be taking charge at a time when Buffett's hallmark strategy is being tested.
It is tough to be a value investor when what's really lifting the stock market is high-growth companies. The tech companies valuation might be really high compared to sort of what the underlying assets are. While Buffett has bet on technology in recent years, his misses on those opportunities will always sort of linger The change in leadership also risks reviving a longstanding debate.
A conglomerate is not a thing that has stuck around. We've seen many conglomerates such as GE fall apart in recent years and sort of be split up. Buffett's presence at Berkshire won't be disappearing overnight. He'll remain as chairman and I think his influence will still be felt by the company. He's a major shareholder of the firm and while he is slowly divesting that stake and giving it to his children's foundations, I think his legacy will long be felt.
But Abel will be taking over many of his duties, including the writing of Berkshire's annual letter to shareholders. This is a big change because Buffett fans have been poring over that letter over the years because it's full of witticisms, investment advice, pearls of wisdom. There's also the fact that he's not going to be taking Q&A at the annual meeting next May in Omaha.
Welcome to Berkshire Hathaway. He was talking for four to five hours every year and taking questions from people that follow him all over the planet. That is gonna be a big change because Buffett's personality isn't matched in the investment world.
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