Warren Buffett 'Going Quiet'

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00:00Well, it's the end of an era on Wall Street. Legendary investor Warren Buffett says he is, quote,

00:04going quiet and speeding up the pace of donating some $1.3 billion to four of his family's

00:11foundations. Joining us now is Bloomberg's Alex Rajmandari, who follows Buffett closely and just

00:16wrote this story. Alex, I guess when it comes, of course, to Buffett going quiet, when it comes to

00:22the annual letters, not entirely unexpected, given that he has handed over the reins.

00:26Right, right. He's not going to write the annual letter this year. He's not going to speak at the

00:32annual meeting. These are big changes for Berkshire Hathaway. But he will keep writing those letters

00:37at Thanksgiving when he details a lot of his donations to the foundations of his late wife

00:42and his children. So we'll keep hearing from him every year. Yeah, I thought it was a bit funny.

00:47He said that his children, Susie Howard and Peter, they're in their 60s and their 70s.

00:52And Buffett said that it'd be a mistake to wager that they might all enjoy his, quote,

00:57exceptional luck in aging. The man is 95 years old. Right, right. So he's preparing for that.

01:03He says he wants to step up the pace of donations to his children so that they have his entire estate

01:10to give away after he passes away. But he cautioned something. He said, I will keep

01:17a significant amount of A-shares until shareholders are comfortable with Able as much as they were with

01:23him and Munger. So that was an interesting caution.

01:27With regards to just his general role, I mean, we all kind of know a lot of the decision-making,

01:32the investment decision-making is being made by Greg and some of the other deputies there.

01:36But he still plans to kind of be the face, I guess, as long as he's capable of doing it, right?

01:41I mean, he will be chairman, so he will be on the background. But he did say at the annual meeting

01:45when he announced this surprise that he was giving the reins to Able, he said he will have

01:52the final word on all operations and all when it came to capital deployments. So Able is definitely

01:58going to step up.

01:59You know, I was talking to someone who used to work with, Buffett, some years ago, who then struck out

02:04on her own to do her own thing. And the conversation was about the idea of how big Berkshire had gotten

02:09and the idea that sort of the original ethos of sort of finding these small sort of underappreciated

02:16companies and buying them when no one else cared about them and then building them up over the years

02:21into something big, that you can't really do that as well, if at all, when you're as large as Berkshire

02:28is with the cash pile that they have. And I do wonder if Buffett or anyone else there has articulated

02:34whether the future of Berkshire might actually not be as Berkshire Hathaway. Maybe it's something

02:40a little bit more fragmented.

02:41So that's not what Buffett says in his letter. Today he says that Berkshire has less of a chance

02:48of a massive catastrophe than other companies. He says the share is still going to capriciously

02:55behave over the next years, but he says he asks shareholders to have some trust in him.

03:00So I don't think that's the plan. It is true, however, that it's hard for him to find sizable acquisitions.

03:06And we've seen that. The cash pile kept increasing. It's $382 billion now. He says in his letter

03:12that there are opportunities coming up still. He goes to the office five days a week and goes through them.

03:17But he says given their size, it's not zero, but it's not a lot.