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you know you get a lot of praise deservedly as an investor and as a board member but I want to begin by talking to you a little bit about your life as a CEO because people forget that you are a CEO and an enormous ly successful one so I thought I would begin by asking you about what makes a successful CEO and particularly not just because you were successful but because one thing I admire about you is that in your acquisitions you know who is a successful CEO and you acquire the person as well as the business yeah so what do you look for well we have a kind of a special kind of business because I mean it's been built on buying businesses and you know we started with the textile business that was destined for failure forty five years ago so Berkshire has been put together in a way that sort of fits me but I also think it fits a successful business model and I don't like committees I don't like you know there are all kinds of things I don't like so I get rid of them and and and create a model that I think will work but that doesn't have the things in it that I don't like and as we bought businesses over the years and we now have 70 odd businesses almost always the person who sells to me is the person who's going to be running it subsequently and I'm handing them a lot of money and they're handing me a stock certificate and the next morning they have to forget that they handed me the stock certificate basically they have to still feel they own the business so when I look at them I look into their eyes and try and figure out whether they they love the money or they love the business and if they everybody likes money but if they don't love the business I can't put that into it if they're going to end them so we have no contracts at Berkshire with you know and we just don't have contracts we count on people loving the business and then my job is to make sure that that I don't do anything that that in effect kills that love of the business we have CEOs that have never come to Omaha you know and we've never had a meeting of them here it just it just isn't the way we run they knew how to run the business before I bought it they're gonna know how to run the business afterwards well that's not something you can tell from the balance sheet that's something that you get down from I guess the the twinkle in their eye it's and so that's something that you can only tell really from talking yeah yeah it really is I mean it's why we've never bought a single company of these 70 something from an LBO operator I mean they don't love the business I mean they you know it's a vehicle to buy today and sell you know many tomorrow's from now and and and they may dress up the accounting and they may do that you know leverage it up and that sort of thing but they're they're they're thinking about they have an exit strategy we don't have an exit strategy we have an entrance strategy and that is it what you know it's it's it's like a Catholic marriage it's opposed it's gonna last forever well that that brings me to I think one of the most interesting things about Berkshire which is that you say and this is just a stunning statistic that most of your shareholders say they're gonna hold your stock until they die you can pass it on to their kids and most of the CEOs I talk to as I'm sure you know complain that their investors have got the attention span of a mayfly but they but they go out and select for that I mean if if if I were running a church and I had 500 seats in it I would not be out trying to get people all the time to replace the people in the president seats I would be trying to keep the people that are in those seats happy so they're back next Sunday and the Sunday thereafter so we don't want to attract every investor we want to attract people who look at Berkshire the same way they look at buying a farm or they buy an apartment house when you buy a farm you don't think I'm gonna flip this next week or that the earnings are gonna be up this quarter for the farm or anything of the sort or you know it looks like it's gonna rain tomorrow or any of that sort of thing you buy it because you expect to certainly yield from the property and you hope you have an honest tenant farmer to runner than you expect that over time farming productivity will get better because of new fertilizers and that sort of thing and you have no idea of selling it that's the kind of intent we want with the people with by Berkshire that they're buying into a business it's like a partnership and we regard it as a partnership it in a sense it came out of a partnership because both of my partner's Charlie Munger and I we we had partnerships that owned the securities that were then distributed to our partners and we don't look at those people out there with as somebody who's to be pleased for this quarter or next quarter and or care whether we split the or increase a dividend or make rosy projections or anything we want them there because they join with us we've got 99% of my money in Berkshire Hathaway Charlie has a very very high percentage we don't care about getting salaries or options or anything of the sort we want to do well when our shareholders do well and I think they sense that and our holding period is forever so why shouldn't their holding period be forever we want the shareholders to understand we like our shareholders they don't always like us necessarily we want them informed we want our products we want but most of all we want them to our principles and you know we're not going to be but we're gonna make all kinds of mistakes but but we've got a yardstick of performance on the inside cover of the of the a report and that doesn't change I mean it's gone you know we've had it there for 45 years or so that there aren't partners and we're going to treat them like that
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