off this weekend’s big shareholder meeting. can i ask a question, becky? yeah, yeah, yeah. jump in, joe. i’ve got a shopping list here of some companies. because i don’t understand you sometimes. i’m bored with ketchup. they’re great businesses the things you buy. i understand that. i’m just trying to get you to expand your universe a little. and i still don’t understand. i’m not talking newspapers. but big media. and i’ve got a list of companies that tell you why you have never gotten that interested. do you like disney? you have theme parks, movies, cable. you have comcast, the parent here. you’ve got news corp., viacom, cbs, time warner, even google or facebook. this is the future, warren. i know sometimes you think you don’t understand technology. but what makes you hesitant to do something that’s so ubiquitous. and as we get more advanced as a culture media gets bigger and bigger as a percentage of where we spend our leisure time doing? no question it’s going to get bigger. i just don’t know if i look out 10 years which of those companies you named will be doing the best. it is an industry subject to a lot of change. it’s much easier for me to predict it will be doing well in 10 years. some undoubtedly outperformed. it’s just i don’t know which ones. if you don’t know, how is anybody else supposed to know? do you think you are like an old dog with new tricks or something? does someone know how this is going to work itself out? anyone on the planet that knows how it’s going to — sure. really? sure. there are all kinds of people a lot smarter about those companies than i am. that doesn’t bother me. as long as i can make money with ketchup and coca-cola and i don’t think i know which of that list that you ran off, there will be a couple big winners in that list and a couple surprisingly on the down side. you know enough about the history of the stock market to look at the tech companies that have fallen by the wayside, for example. but who knows? who does know? there are people in our office that would buy some of those companies. directv both todd and ted put money in. one of them put money in viacom. warren, do you feel any better — do you feel any different about ibm? they have had a couple tough quarters. i think we’ll be right about ibm. i said at the meeting in terms of the certainty of conviction, i feel more certainty in terms of where coca-cola will be in 10 years or highs for that matter than i do about ibm. but i feel enough conviction to put a lot of money in it. and i like very much their financial policies. i like their position in the world. but i don’t think it’s as bulletproof as something like coca-cola. you said the other day that you have bought mor ibm shares, though, right? pardon me? you said you have bought more ibm shares this year. yeah. we bought a few, yeah. i’m trying to understand. i don’t know what the landscape looks like. warren probably doesn’t necessarily. does it look like the pipes, warren, eventually become more commodotized? people have been saying content is king forever. and then it’s hard — content is a creative area. it’s so hard. it’s so specific to the people running it or the people that you bring in that are creative. i guess that makes it difficult too if you’re going to invest just in content, that’s hard. yeah. and you don’t know whether to keep the distribution. andrew brings up the disenter mediation of all of these technologies. well, distribution was incredibly valuable when there were the three big networks. you could run a test pattern on one of them and get a reasonable audience practically. when it was limited — when distribution was limited, it was really valuable. there were a couple of big vhs stations in the big markets and the profit margins were fantastic. but as distribution became more ubiquitous, content is where the money is. it will always be where the money is. sports players will make millions of dollars a year. you can remember when dimaggio was playing for 25,000 a year or the sort. distribution fact guys the value of content. and you want to be — unfortunately, i don’t have any talent, so i can’t cash in on that. talent usually gets its share of the revenues. if you own distribution and there’s very little in the way of competition for your distribution you can make a lot of money. that was shown by what the networks and the tv stations did in the past. you know, this was a big weekend at berkshire. there were a number of events that took place. joe, you know andrew was out here. the new issue this year was the 5k race that brooks running shoes put on sunday. warren, you showed up for it. i participated in a big way. i shot off the gun. but you showed up. andrew told us he was going to show up. so we were there waiting to shoot him. there’s warren shooting off the gun. i was not there. i said there was no way i was getting up early. is that burke? steve burke did show up for the race. andrew didn’t. steve did very, very well.
