If you expect perfection in your spouse or in your friends or in companies you’re not going to find it.
SPACs
The SPACs generally have to spend their money in two years, as I understand it. If you have to buy a business in two years, you put a gun to my head and said you’ve got to buy a business in two years, I’d buy one but it wouldn’t be much of one. If you’re running money from somebody else and you get a fee and you get the upside and you don’t have the downside, you’re going to buy something.
Coca-Cola
If you gave me $100 billion and said take away the soft drink leadership of Coca-Cola in the world, I’d give it back to you and say it can’t be done.
Prices
Prices don’t tell me anything about a business
Elephants
If you want to shoot rare, fast-moving elephants, you should always carry a loaded gun.
Borrowing
You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
Wrong kind of soil
I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later. I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well – disproportionately well.
Policy of candor
Despite our policy of candor, we will discuss our activities in marketable securities only to the extent legally required. Good investment ideas are rare, valuable and subject to competitive appropriation just as good product or business acquisition ideas are.
Dealmaking
Talking to Time Magazine a few years back, Peter Drucker got to the heart of things : “I will tell you a secret : dealmaking beats working. Dealmaking is exciting and fun, and working is grubby. Running anything is primarily an enormous amount of grubby detail work… dealmaking is romantic, sexy. That’s why you have deals that make no sense.
Subnormal profitability
I won’t close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable.