QuestionerHow do you attract and retain a shareholder base, particularly when many of the same behavioral tendencies that produce mispriced securities, also produced fleet-footed shareholders? Thank you.
WarrenYeah, the interesting thing about marketable securities is that basically anybody can buy them. I mean, you might elect to join somebody in buying a McDonald's franchise or a farm or an apartment house or something. But if you're running a public company, you can have anybody from, you know, from Osama bin Laden to the Pope as your shareholder. I mean, you don't elect them, they elect you. Now, if you want a shareholder body that is going to be in sync with you, it's important that, in my view, it's important that you let them know exactly what sort of sort of institution you plan to run. And we've got the annual reports, we've got television interviews, we've got various ways of conveying to people what kind of a place Berkshire is. And to some that says come in and to others that says stay out. Phil Fisher wrote a great book on investing back in the very early 1960s. And he described the situation this way. He said, look, you can have a restaurant And it can say French food. And if you have French food inside, you know, people are going to, you're going to get a satisfied and returning clientele. And you can have another one that says hamburgers. But what you can't do is have hamburgers on the outside, on the marquee, and deliver French food inside. And so many companies sort of try and promise everything to everybody. Their investor relations department tells them that any shareholder they can get interested, you know, they want. But we want people who think the way we do. And we don't, we think on balance, we won't disappoint them too much. But if we get a bunch of people to think that the earnings next quarter are going to be up 10% for some reason, and that's the reason they own the stock, we're going to have a lot of disappointed people. And our, our goal in life is not to spend our time associating with people that are going to be disappointed with us. And if it's our, it's our fault, if we give out the right, wrong advertisement. So we try to advertise what we are, and then we try to deliver on that. And I do think we have the best group of shareholders in the world, you know, among large publicly traded companies. And I think it's because we've got people that basically look into buying a business, becoming our partners over the years, and they know we'll treat them like partners, and they, in turn, give us a lot of comfort. and having a stable shareholder base and a good feeling about just just running the whole place.