WarrenHow does Berkshire Hathaway add value to the various wholly owned companies in the manufacturing services and retail division? We enable terrific managers to spend, in many cases, to spend a greater percentage of their time and energies on what they do best and what they like to do best and what is the most productive for owners, then would be the case without our ownership. We give them a very rational owner who expects them to spend all of their time focused on what counts for the business and eliminates the distractions that often come with running a business, particularly a publicly owned business. I would guess that the CEOs of most public companies waste a third of their time at least in all kinds of things they do. that really don't add a thing to the business, in many cases subtract because they're trying to please various constituencies and waste their time with them that take the company backwards. But we eliminate all of that. So we simply can create an ownership. We think we can create the best ownership environment, frankly, that can exist other than maybe owning it 100% yourself for any business. And that happens to also go along with how we like to lead to. our lives because we don't want to run around and attend a lot of meetings and do all of these things that people do. And that's, that can be a significant plus. I think, I think that Geico has probably grown a fair amount faster as a subsidiary of Berkshire than it would have if it remained an independent company, although it was a hell of an independent company, and would have continued to be one. But I think billions and billions of dollars will be added to the value of GEICO over and above what would have happened if it had remained a public company. Not because, as I put in the report, we haven't taught the management one thing about the classification of insurance risks or how to run better ads or anything of the sort. We've just let them spend 100% of their time focused on what counts. And that is a rare occurrence in American business. Charlie?
CharlieYeah, just not having a vast headquarters staff to tell those subsidiaries what to do. That helps most of the kind of subsidiaries that we buy. They are not looking for a lot of people looking over their shoulder from headquarters and a lot of unnecessary flights back and forth and so on. So I would say most of what we do, or at least a great part of what we do, is just not interfere in a counterproductive way. And that non-interference has enormous value, at least with the kind of managers and and the kind of businesses that have joined us.