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Charlie Munger was no sidekick, said Beth Kowitt in Bloomberg. The legendary businessman, who died last week at age 99, was best known as the longtime vice chairman at Berkshire Hathaway. But he was more than Warren Buffett’s No. 2. “He was the ultimate second banana.” That might not sound like a compliment, but it is. A second banana, a great business journalist once explained, is someone who “passed up the glories of the top job” to pursue the challenge of “the hands-on running” of a company. “When it comes down to it, a second banana is a CEO’s equal partner rather than a lackey,” and that describes Munger to a T. He “wasn’t a yes man” — Buffett used to call him the “abominable no-man” — “but he also wasn’t a rival or a threat.” He was a counterweight to Buffett in ideology, strategy and management approach. Their daily phone calls helped build Berkshire into a $780 billion company. More CEOs should be lucky enough to find a partner like that.
Munger is responsible for getting Buffett “to rethink his entire philosophy of investing,” said James Surowiecki in Fast Company. “Buffett had grown up as a disciple of Benjamin Graham” and his principles of bargain hunting for undervalued companies. Munger pushed Buffett to look instead for “great businesses,” which would lead to Berkshire’s phenomenal track record with stocks such as Coca-Cola, Costco and Apple. Like Lennon and McCartney or Mantle and Maris, they had complementary strengths, said The Economist. Buffett is the “master of the plain and simple,” whereas Munger was “a complex thinker.” But he was also “honest, realistic, profoundly curious, and unfettered by conventional thinking.” Above all else, he valued the trustworthiness of business leaders, despised accounting gimmickry, and referred to Bitcoin as “rat poison.”
Munger also never stopped working, said Jason Zweig in The Wall Street Journal. “He may well have been the busiest near-centenarian in business history.” In addition to being vice chairman at Berkshire, he was chairman of the legal publisher Daily Journal, a director at Costco, and a partner in one of Southern California’s biggest apartment developers. “In his spare time, Munger still indulged his hobby of designing architectural projects,” although not every idea was a success. His radical design for a college dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was abandoned earlier this year after the consulting architect resigned in protest over Munger’s plan to have digital screens in place of most windows.
The question now is how Berkshire moves forward, said Eric Platt and Harriet Agnew in the Financial Times. Buffett is 93. There are two vice-chairs, “Greg Abel and Ajit Jain, who run its operating businesses and insurance unit, respectively.” Buffett has already indicated that Abel, 61, is the company’s heir apparent. “Beyond such practical considerations, Berkshire followers are also focused on the personal impact on Buffett after losing his right-hand man.” On the first trading day after Munger died, Berkshire’s shares barely moved, falling only half a percentage point. That’s exactly “the kind of reaction that the two men had long wanted,” and a testament to their lasting principles.
This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.
The legendary businessman dies at the age of 99
