Warren Buffett Steps Down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO After Six Decades

There's no Buffett's strategy. Market buys whatever Buffett's company bought. That's how he got unusual gains.

Moment of fame stretched over 60 year of clipping coupons off of that initial fame.

The thing that made it possible was that he was content with his performance and never tried to one up himself. He kept hus fame and market interest in himself simmering over six decades inatead burning out in one bright flash.

BRK more or less tracks the S&P 500 and the overall stock market. There isn't some genius trading strategy in there. Buffett himself tells everyone who will listen to buy and hold a diversified index fund for a long period of time.

> In any case, I hope Warren can experience not working at all in the few years he likely has left after being alive for over 1/3 of his country's existence!

Honestly I struggle to understand the desire of folks earning an income to wish the best for folks who have literally never struggled in their lives. This hero worship of billionaires is bizarre in the extreme. Warren Buffet earned his billions on investments from friends and family that the vast, vast majority of people have zero access to. But people keep acting as if he is some sort of genius because he was able to grow an equivalent of $1MM in investments from friends and family at a time when basically every single fucking industry in the country was growing at crazy rates. Capital begets capital. Wake me up when someone actually comes from rags and doesn't just try to weave that into their propaganda.

I don't know the guy, but by all indications he is even-keeled, low-stress, conscientious but come what may. Given his nationality and net-worth, I'd wager that Warren is a centenarian in waiting, unless and until he chooses to invest in the afterlife. Whichever comes first.

Respect.

Last I heard he had a couple guys working for him who sound extremely smart and explained it’s almost impossible to beat the S&P but they try.

Their work is their enjoyment. Buffett would've been investing even in "retirement," so to him, work and retirement are functionally the same.

This is merely your failure to imagine it. Maybe they enjoy it, maybe they have a specific goal they want to achieve, have some sort of obsession, maybe they feel duty to all the people they lead and relief on them, think they are making the world better so they feel compelled to continue working, are mad with power and enjoy lording over other people. There are many many reasons why one would work after being financially secure, and they're all equally valid as a personal motivator.

And, anyways, I think you say this now, but if you were to get those 10 millions you would probably change your tune. A lot of people would find some other project to dedicate their energy. Especially the kind of people that make stuff happen.

We all die on the same order of magnitude.

We all have pleasure and suffering along the same couple of orders of magnitude.

In geological timespans, none of the fun you had will matter. Even a year from now, your memories are just wistful nostalgia (perhaps a psychological detriment!) And that's if your brain architecture is even set up to recall senses and events well (not everyone can).

My view is that the intellectual pursuit is more fulfilling than a world simulating traversal of experiences. Those neurons will turn to dust soon anyway.

Spend time with family, but trying to rack up on restaurants and things and places and visits. Meh, it's just simulation and ephemeral.

Building never stops.

Can you imagine reading and researching the world on your retirement? Because that's what people like him do, except they mainly focus on 10-K statements. Those are genuinely interesting to read once you learn to skip boilerplate and go for the content.

I agree with you. There are so many more worthwhile things to do than investing. I would also retire immediately with that kind of money and focus on creating real value in the world

He sat around talking to people, reading, betting on stocks/financial markets, playing games and occasionally buying a business.... that is many peoples dream retirement.

I'm at that point now, debating when I'll retire. We only live once and I'm not sure if I should continue working. I've reached financial freedom at a pretty young age. It's a daily debate in my mind when to call it quits, but I've never not worked and it's difficult to make the change. What I'm missing in life is time and that's what work takes from me and is the driving force behind my desire to retire -- time to do other things in life.

Work life is quite a lot different for a working-stiff than it is for a CEO. In large part, their company is an extension of themselves. Work whatever hours you want to. Private plane to take you wherever you want to go for free, if you can come up with a work-related excuse to go there (with no need to justify not coming back for weeks). Multiple folks acting more-or-less as your personal assistants. An office bigger than your house, filled with anything you want in it, on the company's dime. A big pool of cash you can order the company to throw at whatever interests you. etc.

I would probably be Software Engineering even if my employer didn't pay me to. As evidence, note that it's new year's eve and I'm writing patches (and waiting for tests) during my holidays for someone else's FOSS project I'm contributing to :).

I my employer didn't pay me, I'd stop working on their projects. But in the meantime, I enjoy my profession (at least most of the time) and get paid. If I had enough money then I'd stop working on what my management wants and work on stuff that I want to work on. And I have to imagine that at this point, Buffet is also doing whatever he wants to.

It provides purpose. Many people who retire early after doing all the random stuff they thought would be cool would likely find themselves isolated and decaying without purpose.

I get you, but maybe you wouldn't be able to retire.

It was that quest for more that made them even get to that 10 or 50 million you talk about.

If they didn't have that personality for more, they likely would have stopped way sooner.

He's just wired differently. He spent his spare time reading financial statements.

You could argue he was retired and just continuing his hobby.

If you are really enjoying your life, why would you change it to something that you wouldn't enjoy?

Warren Buffett also retried at a younger age. In a 1969 letter to partners he wrote, “I intend to give all limited partners the required formal notice of my intention to retire”. But life had other plans…

According to him he was doing what he liked.

> I will never undertand this people that live all their life working, when they clearly have the chance to retire much sooner.

Some people just love what they do. In addition to people loving what they do, there are also people who don't like to do nothing: travelling, reading, sipping pina coladas in the pool in Florida, painting, playing videogames all day long etc. is not for everyone.

And there are even people who fit both: they love what they do and they have moreover absolutely no interest in retiring and "doing nothing".

EDIT: also some people are action junkies that must be working. A friend of mine is working a full-time regular job and is also a voluntary firefighter, responding to emergencies during week-ends etc. He doesn't do it for the little additional money it brings: he does it because he loves to be helpful.

Retiring simply means doing something else. For him, whatever that was must have been less fun.

If your number is on the order of $10 million, I suspect that no, you wouldn't, because you haven't thought hard enough about retirement and how to achieve and keep it with a satisfying lifestyle to realize that you don't need nearly so much (or at least most people, maybe you have a need for very fancy things, I won't judge). And requiring $50 million at a younger age? What's the logic in that? The younger you are the lower you can set your number, because if you end up being wrong either about the feasibility or about your mental state from not having a job, you still have time to fix things or even pivot to a new career. (You also get more years of compound interest.) I quit my BigCo job 5 years ago just before my 30th birthday with ~$500k across VFIAX and VGT, I've been "retired" since and that amount has grown considerably. I'm still quite happy not working for someone, while still being reasonably confident I could get a programming job again if a need or desire arose, and there's always the possibility of going a bit crazy and burning through it all to self-fund hiring some employees of my own to make a go at a business.

It's not hard for me to understand why people keep working even if I don't want to be that way. There are so many reasons. Some people just really like having a job, or think of it as a moral duty (and themselves as doing good by fulfilling that obligation), or some get their self-worth from having a job, or some like being occupied by work when they know that without it they'd just rot, or many of them actually like their work a lot more than they dislike it and pay above some threshold is just "nice". If you're particularly good at your job, too, there's a lot of joy in doing things you're good at, no matter what kind of job it is. Some have expensive tastes or have made expensive compromises or have fallen on expensive bad luck that all can need ongoing funding. Some want to make or support things and need capital to do so. Some just see life as a game, and money going up is their source of happiness and sign of winning. There's all sorts of minds and preferences in this world.

What would you do though? My brain needs problems to solve. Maybe I'd just grow my own food. But if I didn't like that and just bought food I'd get bored very quickly.

Charlie’s will explains their mindset:

https://youtu.be/FvRT15EayG0

Can you imagine a singer who will continue singing even after getting 50 million ?

To some people, their careers are interesting in and of itself, beyond money.

This applies to many professions: scientists, CEOs, writers, painters.

What does retiring even means when

- you enjoy it AND

- you do not have a "boss" telling you what to do AND

- it makes you more "popular" because the World you live in associate a higher number with your "value" in society

Why would you even stop? It's not about having enough to survive.

He did exactly what he wanted to do. That's all you need to know. To each their own.

HN seems allergic to discussing the reality of power dynamics IME.

Being in charge of Berkshire hathaway is a very powerful and respected, revered, coveted, admired. Retired is just retired. As folksy as he presented I suspect Buffet very much enjoyed weilding that power which he could not likely ever get elsewhere.

I get the sense that he arranged things so that he didn't have to work all that hard, he didn't do any short-term trading requiring constant attention and his work was done at his portfolio companies as soon as they had management he trusted.

For a lucky few of us, our job is something we might do unpaid if we had our needs addressed already. It's fun!

I like travel, I like relaxing at home. But I don't know if it's what I'd want to do all the time. I like having some pull, driving me towards a greater goal.

When what you do depends on having power and you are above a certain level it's either up or down and out.

As a retired person I’ve always been curious about this. I questioned a friend who is multiple FU money rich. He said he just love his job, and he’s in a position to work the way he wants to work.

Not my cup of tea (and Die with Zero book explains the common sense on this) but I get why though. There is tons of status attached to it, lots of people don’t know what to do with themselves, a lot of identity ( especially in US) attached to the work.

It wasn't really work for him I think. He enjoyed the vast majority of what he did. Not all of us get to be so lucky. Does an artist or writer retire if they love their art?

“Everything must end; meanwhile we must amuse ourselves.”

— Voltaire

I totally get it. You need a purpose to be happy. If you enjoy your work and get a sense of fulfillment from it, why should you stop?

When you are the boss work is a lot less unpleasant than when you are an employee. When you are at the highest level in the organization and also the major shareholder, you can shape your work environment and and workday in a way that you like it.

He worked for 60 years because he liked doing it, and as he became more successful, the job just getting more pleasant for him.

I cannot speak for him but from reading his annual reports and various writings and listening to the occasional interview, it seems that he enjoyed working much more than anything he would do while being retired.

You can call this great american work ethic, and that is part of it, but the other part of it is that when you are the boss you can kind of remove most unpleasant parts of your job and leave only the parts that are the most fun and interesting for you.

I like to say if I could retire today; I would do the same thing I do now, just without a boss telling me to do it. I love what I do.

Buffet's strategy assumes a rational market, so I wouldn't expect it to work as well in an environment where stock market valuations are increasingly vibes-based and often wildly inflated by circumstances that should be illegal (like selling X to xAI to generate a voodoo valuation).

Musk and Zuckerberg, investing it's not their main thing they happen to have shares in companies they're CEO of, and their main activities it's managing them not investing

> relatively unsophisticated investors like Musk and Zuckerburg

They're sophisticated government contractors. They've insulated themselves from the wiles of the market.

Musk and Zuckerberg are primarily entrepreneurs, not investors.

Buffett's Alpha: http://docs.lhpedersen.com/BuffettsAlpha.pdf

tldr; he was leveraged with good stocks

That link isn't loading up for me.

I always salute at the McDonalds drive-thru.

Sorry, a person who life is built around greed is no hero.