Gates Likes Zuckerberg Because He is a ‘Harvard Drop-Out Like Me’

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Bill Gates told CNBC that Mark Zuckerberg reminds him of himself in “certain ways.” Meanwhile Warren Buffett says there’s a “certain similarity” between Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. “They both have this intense focus,” he tells CNBC’s Becky Quick.

Transcript:
american express. how much do you own of that for their business and no matter what anybody else thinks, they’re going to take the painting the way we’ve seen it. they’ve both done extraordinary this evenings and did it at an early age so there’s, to have an owner like that to, maybeseed some control to an owner. yeah. it can go in the wrong direction, too, as we may have seen an owation or two in recent months. go back to disney, or steve jobs. what you do see with those people is a passion. to some extent they’re not thinking solely about the money involved. they’re not getting their businesses to get extremely rich. they don’t mind getting rich and they know how to do that, too, is what they’re creating. up saw that with bill, you see it mark and when you get that, when you find out and they’ve got big ideas and the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily understand them very well when they’re doing it, you can get u can brings up those topics from before? to me one of the most interesting answers at the meeting was what came out about the buffett rule. it sounded to me like you were indicating what the white house has done with the buffett rule is different than what you would have done. i think you used the quote that it’s been butchered a bit. did you elaborate on that? i said some of the comenif i were writing a bill myself. there mention the term white house because it’s senator white house who introduced the bill is senator whitehouse of rhode island. and i wrote him a all right after — a letter after and said i’m fine with it. some of the criticism that’s come out is that it’s really a band-aid on a really bad tax system. it is a small improvement in a very bad tax system. it doesn’t cure all. in high original article i said we’ve got major problems on the expenditure side. all it does is says when you wh you’ve got 131 of the 400 largest incomes in the country that are averaging 170 million, you have a third think paying at you said you’d do it at 10 million. that’s so different from what we’re talking about here. no, no, what i said, joe, is i would do the 30% at 10 million and i’d do 35. all right, utility go up. . if i as much time trying to figure out — take your pick, social security, medicare, some way of using that mind to figure out a trillion dollar problem instead of something that would raise $40 billion over ten years, would i put my name on that thing. could rise to the level of something called the buffett anything, would i make out a much bigger, you know, solve a much big are one of our problems. i just think you don’t like these 130 people or something. no, i think here’s — like them. many of them are my friends. i just think in terms of — not anymore. no, that is not true. i know, i know. the 47 bill was scored on the basis of scored on the basis of the present system, it actually comes in at something like 170 billion. and that’s the same figuref the people who gave the 47 when tax cuts exsired. i think most republicans and most democrats know that we have to bring spending down and they know woo have toe bring up 19%. neither side wants to go first because-the-figure they’ll get — but you’re absolutely right. one of the yes was this idea that there are shareholders who don’t like your politics. is that bd for the business or started running, i did expect any employee, any director of berkshire, ion’t care what their poll six are and i don’t care what they — i remember years ago, remember there was the charitable program and you ended up shutting the program down because ultimately it became bad for business because it created it was bad for business in a small way all along. certain people would say we’re not going to buy cs candy because you’ve giver given the could easily give more money to pro-life organizations. when we quit it, it was because independent consultant who is depended upon a berkshire company were getting hurt themselves. it was not part of berkshire. they were having their live live hood threatened by a bunch of radio people blasting away at them and triping to interrupt the showings they were making and that’s sort of thing. guys, one of the big conversations we’ve freakly had around the squawk table has been centered around paul krugman, the new york times columnist. we talked about how howe he’s been pushing for main les. and listen to what he had to say about that. the crooked lawyer, that kind of thing disintegrates the body politic and affects how well these economic principles that he believes in works. that said, i think paul krugman is one of the s and most articulate people we have and he’s very often right. that gets us into a broader discussion, especially after this weekend when we see a lot of the ections in europe pointing away from austerity and toward more fiscal spending. what do you think of the idea of stimulus? have we done enough? is there more that needs to happen? we are doing of stimulus, million, more than we’re taking in. we have lot of stimulus and it’s helped the economy. do i think we should run $2 trillion? absolutely not. i think we should have a well thought ot plan and it should be very clear and very binding to bring down those deficits over time. as long as we’re running a deficit, we are still lating. okay. so enough is enough though at this point? i think we should be thinking about bringing them down — absolutely. i think we have to bring down expenditures and bring up revenue. the problem is we can’t find a way for the two political party to think it’s in their advantage to push forward on both sides of the equation. what will it take to change that? probably time. we will do the right thing in this country. we always do. it’s probably regarded as a political disadvantage for any democrat to start going out and talking aboutcutting expenditures and also a political disadvantage for republicans o talk about increasing revenues. do you think france should start talking more and spending more? what about austerity over there? do you think that they they should just accept the sin and should they go on a big canes i don’t ow, whatever, and just tax the heck out of everyone and keep spending and ad — would that work? actually, probably keynes i amly. when you don’t have the luxury of of a printy press of your own, pee can run huge deficits. but they don’t have the print epress. they the awb that we have. but drugman is constantly pointing that the idea is not working over here. i don’t see what their choices are at this point. the uncle can’t double the profligate neff you’ve’s credit card when he’s got 100 grand already owned. you don’t argue it to a few more nephews around. . no, the containment problem is huge. we’ve got a farr we have the incredible overhang in residential house and that is a — it was like 1929 but it was in houses rather than stocks. the degree to which the public was participated and it was huge, they got used to using their houses like atm machines, they flipped houses, thinking they could sell it for more andoned it was a huge issue that we worked our way out of it and we’re on recovery. even though it points out billion. it points out one of the rin readers for this, retail investors, still have a lot of concerned have they missed the biggest part of the rally? should they still be getting back into the market? i think ek waits are very attract of they may get more attractive next week. but equities producing businesses, and but who knows whether they go up or down in price tags. as to the volume, though, there’s still way too much volume in the market. i mean, it — the idea that the ownership of a company should turn over 100% in a year that, is not the way people behave with apartment houses, it’s not the way they behave with farmland but they have this another that they ought to do something every day. buy stock at a good company, don’t look at the price for wife years — so you’re not a fan of high speed training. i’m not a fan of acting training actively, becky. maybe if i didn’t i wouldn’t so fact — they got burned really blad badly when things collapsed in 2008, some of them didn’t have retirement that they needed for c kids to go to college. you look at that and say i don’t want to get burned again, i’ll going to keep my money in safer investments. i know things that bounce around in price but their purchasing power goes like that. the one thing that is not safe is the dollar in your pocket. that’s going to become worthless over time. the greatest mass et to own is your onlt if you develop your own talents — i tell the college students that. the best thing to have is to develop your own talents. the second thing is to buy into other people’s experiences. they’ll be drnging more of this and tail next week, next one or be in years. people beat themselves in the stock market. the stock market literally in the 66 on the dow to 11,47b 00. you say how can anybody not have excited at the bronx time and you get dree dee pressed at the — you’ve got to give up the idea you can decide when to buy stocks and well to sell steks. we played a side bite earlier when you talked about rats in a grainery. is it a situation we need tore wary of? think of it this way. if a group of people are sitting around playing games on computers, depending on beating quotations, which charlie would say is a form of front-running and let’s say they’re taking $10 billion a year inning a congratulate at gross profits. that $10 billion is not — it comes out matically. the company companies will continue group. it’s not good to have a siphon paying — it’s like the grainery. i want him to get the hate mail, not me. andrew, you have a question. a number of shareholders ask asked now given your size, you’ve suggested that the company in terms of its stock performance isn’t necessarily going to per the way it did. if you’re just getting into the market today, how big of a chunk of your portfolio would you have in berkshire? your answer could be 100%. it could be but what’s your answer? i’ve got 98 %. i would say we cannot do what we do d in the past. we can’t do what we did in the past but i feel very comfortable with berkshire because i think we’re constructed so that it’s very hard over a period of time not to get a reasonably decent result. but an extraordinary result is out of the question. it won’t happen. on the other hand, i think the chances of us doing better than average over a look period of time will be good. i this the chance of of us doing way worse than other people have low. should investors have a certain percentage in berkshire or stock that you would have thought looked like berkshire 15 years ago? sure. i’m not shooting for the moon. i don’t believe people getting very rick very quickly in stocks. i don’t know p they don’t know how to do, i don’t know how to do that. there’s plenty that if you buy them, there’s a high probability they’ll have made 20 in 5, 10 or 15 years. the chances are getting a balt result on burke shire. if you’re willing to — i have members of my family who have 80%, 90% of their money in berkshire. i’m not uncomfortable with that but they do not expect the get the kind of returns they’ve gotten from berkshire in the past and they won’t. you just talked about returns, pension fund returns in the past and how we’re looking a lot of them, for 7%, 8 % growth. is that a relatively good assumption? it’s not an assumption of 8% rurps and you’ve got half your monies when you are going to get 2% or 2 and a half half. when that’s so hard to do, i’m going to have to put my money in a bunch of investments and private funds that are being promoted to me and they’ve got huge management feel p fooes or something like that, it’s not going to happen. you should never buy your investments with the idea i have to get a certain return. you should not make your investments earn what you feel you need. it doesn’t work a way. the stock doesn’t think you own it. you can say i need 8% a year but the doesn’t care about that or the bottom doesn’tare about that. you should say how much can i earn and then learn to live with that number.

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