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Posted by saimiam 5 days ago

Warren Buffett Steps Down as Berkshire Chairman, Names Son to Replace Him(www.nytimes.com)
323 points | 219 commentspage 3
SanjayMehta 4 days ago|
"It's not nepotism when I (or Soros) do it."
hugodan 4 days ago||
good old meritocracy
shevy-java 4 days ago||
Family Dynasty of Billionaires. The Dallas TV series was quite good, Larry Hagman as villain - but compared to the real world billionaires, Larry roleplaying as J. R. was a saint compared to what in reality is going on. Can we finally admit that the Epstein network was: a) much bigger than originally known or assumed, and b) not the only criminal abuse network? I mean we already see how much dirt is covered by Trump here. Now imagine we would have real investigations. How much would be revealed ...
dupli 4 days ago||
[dead]
bunabhucan 4 days ago||
[dead]
bicepjai 4 days ago||
[flagged]
black_13 4 days ago||
[dead]
dominotw 4 days ago||
Warren Jong-il
mrlonglong 4 days ago||
Nepo dynasty.

It'll all burn eventually.

program_whiz 4 days ago|
Yes, it could happen:

1. The next generation has been groomed by Buffet Himself, passing on as much knowledge as he can, but of course, this successor didn't create the fortune, doesn't appreciate it as much, and doesn't have as strong of judgement. However, he is surrounded by the old guard and wise mentors. But as those wither away, he is unable to determine who the worthy successors in his circle should be, slowly the inner circle begins to weaken too.

2. The next successor gets an even less effective set of principles from the first, only knowing off-hand how the money was made in the first place, they are a manager only. They also have no idea how the original people were selected or what makes a good inner circle. Soon it devolves into yes-men and people who seem superficially qualified to manage things.

3. The next successor has little no skills, other than showing up to meetings and going with what advisors say. Because the decision making of the original Buffet mentality has been so diluted, they only know superficial / surface understanding, akin to anyone who read the short books on the subject. They don't know how to do the deep diligence that made BH great. The inner circle is all sycophants, climbers, and clingers. Bad investments, debacles, and poor judgment create losses. Investors begin to panic sell, soon the BH stock crashes in value, losing 90% of the fortune.

And so on... Not hard to see how its like handing off a complex but successful open source project to your progeny instead of the most qualified developers. Pretty soon, its just an unmaintainable mess. They don't understand why things are the way they are, maybe they aren't as good a programmer as great grandpa. They definitely don't know how to hire and keep the best talent that originally built the thing. Pretty soon complexity budget and community good will are exhausted, people move to something newer and more dynamic.

mgfist 4 days ago|||
It probably will happen over time as entropy does its thing, but the structure is different than what you describe.

For one, Howard is not the successor, Greg Abel is. Howard is a Stewart of culture, but he is not the leader.

He also isn’t inheriting Buffetts fortune so the generational rot won’t be the same.

Next, both Greg and Howard have been at Berkshire for decades, and however is next up will likely be similar. So there is time to pass on the values.

Laslty, Berkshire is a decentralized company. The company itself has less than 50 employees. All of the companies they own have their own leadership structures and cultures, and Berkshire does not burden itself in managing it. This makes the successor problem a lot easier

foobarian 4 days ago||||
At least the next generations past 2-3 probably won't have the genetic problems we saw with the Habsburgs
mrlonglong 4 days ago|||
Hard concur, and I bet every single one of these who downvoted are nepobabies themselves.
kittikitti 4 days ago|
People take what he does and says as gospel so knowing he went with monarchy tier nepotism is going to be very annoying.
eviks 4 days ago|
Or it could be very beneficial - you don't need to know anything about finance to judge the quality of this particular decision, so it's easier to cast doubt on other gospels
kittikitti 4 days ago||
The decision was not based on competency so I can judge based on the factors that were considered. It's clear that this was done because of nepotism and I struggle to find other reasons. While you can hide behind ambiguity (it _could_ be very beneficial) there is no indication that it is at this time.