I think I first clocked Warren Buffett’s (and Charlie Munger RIP’s) Berkshire Hathaway around the year 2000. I loved the story. Starting from, as the story was told back then, humble beginnings and a paper round, Warren Buffett (and Charlie – who I will stop mentioning but absolutely deserves practically half the credit) had built Berkshire into a giant.
Buy & hold – what’s not to like?
Berkshire was the holding company of an investing approach par excellence. Buy great businesses at a fair price, hold forever, reinvest dividends, job done.
The business had never paid a dividend or split the stock, which by that point had reached over $70k per (Class A) share. It had annual meetings in Omaha, its home town, which were already becoming a cult following.
There was also something about Warren Buffett’s penny pinching ways that appealed to me. He lived in his first house, he drove practically his original car. Part of his aversion to splitting the stock was the (tiny, in the scheme of things) cost of a stock split (though he did thankfully create the B shares in 1996, which are identical to A shares but a fraction of the price). He preached from the book of compound interest and his lectures were very compelling.
And yet
There was something sufficiently compelling about Berkshire Hathaway to me, as a baby FIREr back in 2000ish, that I named one of my assets after the business. That asset remains to this day, though it has sadly failed to prosper in line with the mighty BRK.
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