QuestionerIf you became aware of unethical or illegal activities at a Berkshire Hathaway-owned company, would you directly and personally intervene?
WarrenSure. We have to jump in. We have a hotline, which I think was a very good invention of, it wasn't an invention, but a good policy embodied in Sarbanes, Oxley. And, you know, that's been a plus to us. I get letters directly sometimes. And so I want to hear about problems. You know, I hope somebody else has heard about him first and already got them solved. But if they don't get solved someplace else, I want to hear about them. And we have an internal audit function, which is important at Berkshire. And anything that comes in, you know, when somebody calls in on the complaint line and says the guy works next to me has bad breath, I mean, I tend to skip over those. If anything comes in that relates to alleged bad behavior, it's going to get investigated at Berkshire. And it does. We have a letter that goes out every roughly two years. It's the only communication. I probably ought to put a copy of it in the annual report sometimes so that the shareholders see it. But it's a page and a half long. It asks the manager to tell me who, if something happened to them that night, who I should consider putting in charge of the place the next day. It doesn't mean I'll follow their advice, but I want to know their reasons and the pluses and minuses. But it starts off basically, and it says, look, we've got all the money we need. We'd like to make more money. We love making money. But we don't have a shred more of reputation than we need, and we won't trade reputation for money. The one thing we tell them that message, and then I've added a new line in this, and I say, if the reason you're doing something, the best reason you can come up with is that the other guy is doing it, it's not good enough. There must be, there's got to be some other reason besides the other fellow's doing it, or you're in trouble, and I tell them, call me if anything's questionable. If you think it's close to the line, give me a call. By saying that, nobody gives me a call because they know that the very fact that they think it's that close to the line probably tells them it's over the line. Berkshire Average out has a very good reputation, as you can tell by the ratings from major media surveys, and that is absolutely precious to us. In a sense, you people are part of the culture, too. The ideal is not to just make all the money that can legally be made without causing too much legal trouble. The idea is bigger than that. It's that we celebrate wealth only when it's been fairly one and wisely used. If that idea pervades the culture of the place, including the shareholders. We think that's very helpful to us.