7 Best Questions from the 2024 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting (Must Watch)

I don't regard Utah as, uh, being unfriendly to the idea of utilities being treated fairly. Charlie? [Laughter] [Applause]

I had actually checked myself a couple of times already, but I'll slip again. Each year, tens of thousands of Warren Buffett disciples make the pilgrimage to Omaha, Nebraska, to listen to Buffett answer questions for hours. During these Q&A sessions, Buffett shares his thoughts on everything from the stock market to the economy, and even his advice on how to get rich and live a successful life.

I spent an entire day listening to the session and putting this video together to share with you the seven very best, most impactful questions that you need to hear from this year's meeting. By the way, number seven is my personal favorite. Enjoy!

My name is Andrew N. Cas, and I'm wondering if you had one more day with Charlie, what would you do with him?

Well, it's kind of interesting because, in effect, I did that one more day. I mean, it wasn't a full day or anything. We always lived in a way where we were happy with what we were doing every day. I mean, Charlie liked learning. He liked, as I mentioned, the movie. He liked a wide variety of things, so he was much broader than I was. But I didn't have any great desire to be as broad as he was, and he didn't have any great desire to be as narrow as me. But we had a lot of fun doing anything.

You may find it kind of interesting; we had as much fun — perhaps even more, to some extent — with things that failed because then we really had to work and work our way out of them. In a sense, there's more fun having somebody that's your partner and digging your way out of a foxhole than just sitting there and watching an idea that you got 10 years ago just continually produce more and more profit.

So it wasn’t he really fooled me, though. He went to 99.9 years. If you pick two guys, you know he publicly said he never did a day of exercise except where it was required when he was in the Army. He never did a day of voluntary exercise. He never thought about what he ate.

We started every day, and Charlie is interested in more things than I was, but we never had any doubts about the other person, period. So if I'd had another day with him, we’d probably have done the same thing we were doing in the earlier days, and we wouldn't have wanted to know that we only had one day.

There’s a great advantage in not knowing what day you're going to die. Charlie always said, “You know, just tell me where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.”

Well, let’s start. Just given what you mentioned, there was some news that came out in the 10-Q this morning. It shows that Berkshire sold another 115 million shares of Apple in this last quarter. That's Berkshire's largest holding.

And I think in that vein, we'll start with a question from Sherman Lamb; he is a 27-year-old Berkshire Hathaway Class B shareholder from Malaysia, and he asks: Last year you mentioned Coca-Cola and American Express being Berkshire's two long-duration partial ownership positions. You spent some time talking about the virtues of both these wonderful businesses in your recent shareholder letter.

I noticed that you have excluded Apple from this group of businesses. Have you or your investment manager's views of the economics of Apple's business or its attractiveness as an investment changed since Berkshire first invested in 2016?

No, but we have sold shares, and I would say that at the end of the year, I would think it extremely likely that Apple is the largest common stock holding we have.

Now, one interesting thing is that Charlie and I looked at common stocks or marketable equities, or the things that people love to look at as being businesses. So when we own a Dairy Queen or we own whatever it may be, we look at that as a business. When we own Coca-Cola or American Express or Apple, we look at that as a business.

Now we can buy really wonderful companies in the market as businesses. We can't buy all of them. I mean, we can't buy 90% or 80% or anything like that. But when we look at Coca-Cola and American Express and Apple, we look at them as businesses.

Now, there are differences in tax factors, there are differences in manager responsibility, a whole bunch of things. But in terms of deploying your money, we always look at every stock as a business. We have no way, no attempt made to predict markets. We have no attempt made to pick stocks.

I went through many, many years doing the wrong thing. I got interested in stocks very early, and I was fascinated by — I wasn't wasting my time because I was reading every book possible and everything else. But finally, I picked up a copy of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. There were a few sentences in there that said, much more eloquently than I can say it, if you look at stocks as a business and treat the market as something that doesn’t tell you — isn’t there to instruct you, but it’s there to serve you, you’ll do a lot better over time than if you try to take charts and listen to people talk about moving averages and look at the pronouncements and all of that sort of thing.

That made a lot of sense to me. The way I’ve been allowed to deploy it — Charlie and I talked about this, of course, constantly — it’s changed over the years. The amount of capital we have and kind has changed and all of that. But the basic principle was laid out by Ben Graham in that book which I picked up for a couple of dollars, and which basically said to me, “You’ve been wasting your time. Now maybe you can use what you’ve learned or been reading about and put it to better use.”

Then Charlie came along and told me how to put it to even better use. That's sort of the story of why we own American Express, which is a wonderful business, we own Coca-Cola, which is a wonderful business, and we own Apple, which is an even better business.

We will own, unless something really extraordinary happens, we’ll own Apple, American Express, and Coca-Cola when Greg takes over this place. It’s such a simple approach that it’s almost deceptive. Most things, if you keep working harder and harder at it, you learn a little more math or you learn a little more physics. But in investments, you don’t really have to do that. You really have to have your mind set properly.

We will end up, unless something dramatic happens that really changes capital allocation strategies, we will have Apple as our largest investment. But I don’t mind at all, under current conditions, building the cash position.

I think when I look at the alternative of what’s available in the equity markets, and I look at the composition of what’s going on in the world, we find it quite attractive.

This question is from Johan Halen, who writes: You're sitting on $168 billion of cash, which he told us today is now more than $182 billion. His questions are: one, what is Buffett waiting for? And two, why not at least deploy some of it?

Well, I think that’s pretty easy to answer. I don’t think anybody sitting at this table has any idea of how to use it effectively; therefore, we don’t use it. Now, at 5.4%, but we wouldn’t use it if it was at 1%.

Don’t tell the Federal Reserve that. We only swing at pitches we like. If anybody tried to swing at every pitch or felt that because they hadn’t swung at a pitch for the last two pitches they ought to swing at the third one or something like that — there are times, obviously, but I would say this: I would not like to be running $10 billion. Now, $10 million I think we could — I think Charlie or I could earn high returns on because I think there are just a few things that happen on a very, very small scale.

But if we had $10 billion, I wouldn’t basically see many more opportunities than we found. Now, it’s true that something like Japan — we could have done if the company had had a $30 or $40 billion, and we’d make great returns on equity, but if I saw one of those now for Berkshire, it isn’t like I’ve got a hunger strike or something like that going on.

It’s just that things aren’t attractive, and there are certain ways that can change, and we’ll see whether they do. Selling some of the Apple shares in order to build up your cash supply has had a lot of people wondering where you see opportunities or what might be coming or market valuation.

So I’ll ask this question from Foster Taylor. At the 1999 annual meeting, you mentioned that if you owned all of America’s 500 businesses, you would be making $334 billion while paying $10.5 trillion. You emphasized that this was not a good return on investment. Today, by my math, the S&P 500 has a market capitalization of around $44 trillion with profits of around $1.45 trillion. This is a very similar return on investment to the 1999 levels.

Do you see similarities in the market today and the 1999 levels?

Well, one thing has changed dramatically — well, from 1990 misinterpreted on the 1999, but there have been times in my life that have been a wash and so many opportunities that I could have invested everything by nightfall, and then there are other times when the year goes well — not in the early days, but now we haven’t seen anything that makes sense, that moves the needle.

Now, we’ve made small acquisitions during the year. Our companies have made acquisitions. Greg and I may talk about something that involves a $300 million purchase or something like that, and if it fits well enough, we do it. If our managers see things that fit them, we want to look at them because our managers do not have necessarily the same equations in mind that we do.

But there are some managers which we would have to just say, you know, whatever you decide to do — and then there are other managers that wouldn’t know how to allocate capital particularly. They don’t have to be able to be great capital allocators; if they happen to be great at serving customers and understand their own industry and all of that, they can be great managers. A good many of them are capital allocators, and others are not.

This is not a time when the phone is going to be ringing often. But there are times, Charlie and I — we miss a lot of things. What we really regretted was missing something that would not be very big. We never worried about missing something that we didn’t understand.

I mean, I don’t really think of whether it’s similar to 1999 because I’m not that good on chronology anyway. Unless something really dramatic happened at the time — I mean, I remember things from 2008 much better than I remember whether something happened in 2015 or 1987.

Well, 1987 I remember because of October 19th, but I just don’t think that way. I just look at what I could do every day. In my particular case, it would be going through the 20,000 pages. Since we were talking about railroads, you know, I went through the Moody’s Transportation manual a couple of times. That was 1,500 or 2,000 pages — probably 1,500 pages.

I found all kinds of interesting things when I was 20 or 21, and I don’t imagine there’s anybody here that knows about the Green Bay and Western Railroad Company. But there were hundreds and hundreds of railroad companies, and I liked to read about every one of them.

The Green Bay and Western in those days — everybody had a nickname for railroads. I mean, that was just what Northern Pacific was, the Nipper. Phoebe Snow was one of them in the East that used to go up to Cornell. The Green Bay and Western was known as Grab Baggage and Walk. GBNW had a bond that was actually the common stock, and they had a common stock that was actually a bond. That could lead to unusual things, but they wouldn’t lead to unusual things that would work for you with many millions of dollars.

But if you collected a whole bunch of those, which I set out to do — and actually that’s what impressed Charlie when I first met him because I knew all the details of all these little companies on the West Coast that he thought I would never have heard of, but I knew about the Los Angeles Athletic Club or whatever it might be. He thought he was the only one that knew about that, and it became an instant point of connection.

So to answer your question, I don’t know what the equivalent of Moody’s manuals or anything would be now, but I would try and know everything about everything small. I would find something with a million dollars you could earn 50% a year. But you have to be in love with the subject; you can’t just be in love with the money.

You really got to just find it, you know, essentially like people find other things in other fields because they just love looking for it. A biologist looks for something because they want to find something.

I don’t know how the human brain works that much, and I don’t think anybody understands too well how the human brain works. But there are different people that just find it exciting to expand their knowledge in a given area. I know great bridge players. I know great chess players. Actually, a spouse came to Al and met Mrs. B.

Meeting a lot of people that are unbelievably smart in their own arena and do some unbelievably dumb things in other areas. All I know is the human brain is complicated. It’s best when you find out what your brain is really suited for, and then you just excel from that point. That’s what I would be doing if I had a small amount of money and I wanted to make 50% a year, but I also wanted to just play the game.

Hi, Mr. Buffett. It’s me, live from China, Hong Kong. I’m running my last listing company called FOP, and we are so grateful that you’ve learned from you, and you really inspire us. My question is, besides the electrical car company BYD, under what circumstances would you reinvest and reconsider investing in Hong Kong and Chinese companies? Thank you.

Our primary investments will always be in the United States. The companies we invest in the United States — American Express does business around the world, and no company hardly does business around the world like Coca-Cola. I mean, the preferred soft drink may be like 170 or 180 out of 200 countries. Those are rough approximations from a few years back, probably.

But the degree of acceptance worldwide is almost unmatched. I can't really think of any company that has it. American Express has a position; credit card bill, which I think is extremely strong. The reasons for that is one of the directors that introduced a few minutes ago, Ken Chenault, but it has strengthened dramatically over the last 20 years for a lot of reasons.

So we will — the BYD investment we made the commitment in Japan, which I did 5 years ago, and that was just overwhelmingly compelling, extraordinarily compelling. We bought it as fast as we could, and we spent a year, and you know, we got a few percent of our assets in five very big companies.

But that’s the problem of being our size. But you won’t find us making a lot of investments outside the United States, although we’re participating through these other companies in the world economy. But I understand the United States' rules, weaknesses, strengths, whatever it may be.

I don’t have the same feeling for economies generally out around the world. I don’t pick up on other cultures extremely well. And the lucky thing is I don’t have to because I don’t live in some tiny little country that doesn’t have a big economy.

But an economy already that has, after starting out with half a percent of the world’s population, has ended up with well over 20% of the world’s output in an amazingly short period of time. So we will be American-oriented. If we do something really big, it’s extremely likely to be in the United States.

What advice would you like to share today that you believe everyone needs to hear?

If I had one piece of advice, I would try to — well, and you’re lucky you live in this country because it’s just a start with — because you’ve got opportunities here that wouldn’t exist in much of the world. But I would like to really sort of use Charlie’s advice of thinking how you like your obituary to read and then start selecting the educational paths, the social paths, you know, whatever fits your particular situation in terms of associating.

And perhaps certainly in my day, I would have been marrying the person that would best help you do that. Well, Charlie would say you are offering some similar benefit to the partner. The opportunity in this country is, you know, just basically limitless. That when you think of going back, not that many centuries, nothing really happened.

What has happened in the last 200 years with the combination of the Industrial Revolution and whether it’s science or education or health or — you name it — we are so lucky to be born when we were.

The people in this room and many of us were lucky enough to be born in the United States as well. You're entering the best world that's ever existed, and you want to find the people to share it with and the activities to participate in that fit you.

If you get lucky, like Charlie and I did, you find things that interest you young. But if you don’t find them right away, you keep looking.

I always tell students, find the job that you would like to have if you didn’t need a job. Sometimes you can find that very early; sometimes you go through various experiences. But don’t forget you actually are trying to do and there’s no place to do it like this country. Find the person that you like to share your life with in many cases, and, you know, sometimes you get lucky and do that early; sometimes you make mistakes.

In a very, very general way, I would try to figure out how you’d want to look back on your life and think about yourself, and start today to go on the path that leads to that goal. Expect some difficulties along the way, but if you’re thinking that way, you're more likely to get there.