Money is no longer needed to make money · Transcript · BuffettMungerGPT

WarrenI believe, and I don't think it's sufficiently appreciated, I believe that the, probably the five largest American companies by market cap, they have a market value of over $2.5 trillion, and that $2.5 trillion is a big number. That's probably getting up close to 10% of the whole market cap of the United States. And if you take those five companies, essentially you could run them with no economic. equity capital at all. None. That is a very different world than when Andrew Carnegie was building a steel mill and then using the earrings to build another steel mill and getting very rich in the process. Rockefeller was building refineries and buying tank cars and other. Generally speaking, over for a very long time in our capitalism, growing and earning large amounts of money required considerable reinvestment of capital and large amounts of equity capital. Railroads being a good example, that world has really changed, and I don't think people quite appreciate the difference. You literally don't need any money to run the five companies that are worth collectively more than $2.5 trillion. And who have outpaced any number of those names that were familiar if you looked at the Fortune 500 list 30 or 40 years ago, you know, whether it was Exxon or General Motors or you name it.