I will retire right away if I had 10 millions. Maybe 50 millions if I was younger than 40.
The work/retirement dichotomy is such a weird and peculiar artifact of the 1950s US middle-class nuclear-family milieu.
That's gone.
For the rest of us, it's just...live your life, until you don't.
(viz. Below the fold: "Buffett remains as chair...")
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.
That doesn't sound very positive to me. Perhaps OP has a point
but I could get a home near a major airport like 10 mins from SFO, and so with working out and eating consuming 4 hours and sleeping 6 hours a day and 2 hour of spouse time. I legit have 12 hours a day to work everyday. I could easily do that in a sustainable manner 6 days a week, and spending Sunday relaxing by helping out in my parent's farm and then relaxing in the evening before going back to work next week.
Seems like an ideal life for me. The only difference from today is the extra 3 hours I spend in traffic and an average 1 hour daily in running errands. And extra work on Saturday like fetching groceries, looking after my home, fixing stuff etc.
If I get money, I could save that 4 hour of my life and dedicate it to working on something I really like.
Don’t apply the morality of a worker to a top capitalist
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 novel experiences. Those neurons will turn to dust soon anyway, and it'll be like it never even happened. Why spend so much time fretting over it?
Spend time with family, but trying to rack up on restaurants and things and places and visits - meh, it's just simulation and squirts of neurotransmitters. Ephemeral. They leave no trace. It all fades to emptiness.
I'm not saying be completely stoic. But don't overdose on pleasure and thrill and novelty. Over indexing that way cuts down on impact.
Building never stops, even when you do. Laying a foundation shapes human behavior at scale. Leads to more shoulders being stood upon. Higher order effects.
Every single person I admire made an impact.
I'm not my genes that I was built from or the genes that I might pass down. I'm the ideas and deeds of a short life that hopefully left lasting impact and caused second order effects.
Build what? The next big ad serving platform? The next mass surveillance platform? New ways to squeeze money out of people? You’re right we all die so nothing matters, why would what you build matter more than the relationships you make, the good feelings you create? Build, but build art. Build something that will change peoples minds, make them feel good, make them want to change the world.
Do not conflate building something to make some guy richer, as just as or more important than spending time with family or creating true art.
For folks with the ability to make truckloads of money and then give it away to good causes, that is going to be the best choice v trying to add value in the world to make themselves feel better.
Imagine if I said "there are so many more worthwhile things to do than painting" if some famous artist retired.
— Voltaire
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.
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.
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.
You could argue he was retired and just continuing his hobby.
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.
They're sophisticated government contractors. They've insulated themselves from the wiles of the market.
Arguably the entire market is heavily overvalued now, though, so while his strategies are probably no longer optimal, they'll probably continue to work out well enough at least until the next big correction.
Ben Graham
But I don't know what we can do about it when government has been captured by people with vested interests in not fixing anything.
It feels like things have to get bad enough to get people to actually rise up. Not like, revolution or anything, but real protest (and enough political awakening to understand that they are being fed culture war bullshit to distract them from the class war they should be waging).
How Buffett did it?
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.thea...
tldr; he was leveraged with good stocks
We've got people drinking 600 calorie frappucinos before they touch a bite of food.
Is this Stockholm Syndrome?
Buffett didn’t get, for example, a small loan of a million dollars to start. He’s been working at this longer than probably anyone what will ever read this comment has been alive.
He doesn’t care about the money in the sense I feel you’re implying.
Nobody is perfect, and holding anyone to that standard sets an impossible threshold.
I don’t know how familiar you are with Warren Buffett, but I would encourage you to dig into his Wikipedia page at least, however accurate we think that is these days.
Life imitates art, I suppose.
Ontologically he is just a single old dude with few real skills having lived a life of affluence.
He sits high in the political hierarchy of the day, has personally achieved little more than that. Been bailed out by that political hierarchy. His wealth is a politically correct hallucination. He has no Scrooge McDuck vault of treasure. We all been conditioned to believe his name in the digital ledger has a much bigger float value associated with it.
All he has built is a Halo effect; he's an aura farmer. His hands have not seen the work that provided his clothes or food. His accomplishments being ephemeral political narrative may have effectively never happened.
He's not exactly curing cancer but i could think of a lot more underhanded ways to make billions. I think he is above average ethically relative to his billionaire peers.
I don't know to what extent Buffet does it. Nor does our current quasi-fascist society where the government is highly embedded with industry and regulating who is the winner and who is the loser and then taxing/inflating the working class to make sure they stay afloat.
But in the idealistic version of America, it is supposed to be a place where becoming a billionaire means you are not just producing billions of profit for yourself, but billions of value for others. That every deal, both sides are better off. This is what we aspire to, the whole ideal towards voluntary trade and capitalism as a method a tide that rises almost all boats and at the very least doesn't involve sinking another boat lower.
THAT SAID...
My uncle (he's 98) had a passing acquaintance with Buffett during their overlap at Penn, and in the one econ class they shared, he remarked having heard Buffett say in almost salivating eagerness as he rubbed his hands that if only there could be another Great Depression, he would make a killing. The dude has value investing in his DNA beyond anything else, I truly believe. But he's argued for changing complex and unfair taxation, and always been a good citizen as far as I can tell. I think if all of Wall Street were like him, the world would be a much better place.
In fact he had his main residence in Switzerland and was filthy rich which is a bit of a hard swallow especially in Sweden, a country still very much affected by the "Law of Jante".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
A reporter that was doing a documentary about his wealth asked him once directly when stepping out of his old Volvo and Kamprad kinda lost it; it was a big kerfuffle at the time on the telly.
For those paying attention it was really revealing about the true nature of the man (let me add he was a young Nazi back in the day).
Most people came to his defense like the red-blooded capitalist gentleman commenting below about Buffet being a 100% American.
The older generation still swallow the farce hook, line and sinker. For the rest of us it's pretty clear it was a well thought-out facade to placate the plebeians to sell more cheap furniture.
Buffet had an active and direct role in making this happen. He supported and advocated for monopoly, and profited from it.
He lived a lavish life that included opulent mansions and private jets, and used his resources to deftly drive a media narrative of himself as a regular guy, with apparent success as your post demonstrates.
Or are you saying the general environment of high finance supports this?
No doubt he had more money than he needed but if this is referring to his preference for coka-cola and apple stock / any stocks with the ability to set their own prices because of market dominance, I feel like that’s not a totally fair criticism.
Now there are few of these and it is hard to do.
I don't know enough to know whether it is right or wrong. but I think that is what I read.
That said, the turnaround 'mission' you mention about still happens, but is more associated with private equity than Berkshire.
Although it doesn't seem that way, there are lot of companies that have become large recently, it is best time ever historically for companies to be able to grow large quickly much more so than 50 years ago in the early days of BH.
There are 1000+ unicorns today, about 50 of the fortune 500 are founded > 2000, a large number of companies that have chosen to remain private with revenues in excess of >$10B like Stripe or SpaceX etc
While it is true that lot of the action has been in sectors BH has never been comfortable holding large assets in such as SaaS, new fin-tech(i.e. crypto etc), or gig econ(Airbnb/Uber etc), social media(tiktok et al.) etc, that doesn't mean the principles are no longer needed or there aren't opportunities to take stake in these now mature companies and drive value.
Don’t worship buffet, but study him. The Acquired podcast on him is a great jumping off point.
ravenstine•1h ago
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!
Cheezmeister•1h ago
Respect.
scotty79•45m ago
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 his fame and market interest in him simmering over six decades inatead burning out in one bright flash.
irishcoffee•22m ago
That sure does trivialize him. If that was your goal, you nailed it.
I personally don’t think that’s a fair take, but I’ve no interest in trying to change your mind.
scotty79•7m ago
Pretty much. I'm always interested what's left once I reject te ususal narratives that people keep repeating to each other. I find this kind of excercise insightful and satisfying.
While in every working thing there's myriad of significant details, the main engine of operation is usually just one usually quite straightforward thing. I like making attempts at recognizing those main things. I'm sometimes wrong but even when I am I find satisfaction that I tried instead just repeating some selection of what other people said.
paxys•41m ago
zeroonetwothree•23m ago
Of course, no one knows the future so who knows if this will continue.
phil21•18m ago
Sort of like holding boring dividend stocks without the dividend.
user3939382•24m ago