Full Q&A session with the world’s richest man and most successful investor and his partner. Plus some of the non-boring Q&A pre-amble left in as it covered the vote on right to issue shares and Warren explaining it. Work syncing the audio was necessary! It still slightly slows over time, but with several re-syncs, it is close as we can get it.
Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc, Also read Lear Capital: Financial Products You Should Avoid?
1996 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting - Q&A: Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger
Transcript
We have a very large crowd today. I hope everybody has found a seat either in this main room or in the three overflow rooms. I think we can handle around 50 400 and historically 62 percent or just about exactly 62 percent every year of the people who request tickets of have come to the meeting and if that percentage holds true today we we have just filled the rooms and we will have a problem in the future which we haven't figured out the answer to yet but we've got another year the way we'll run the meeting is that we'll get the the business out of the way out of the way at the start and we'll talk about the Glaspie issuance then too. So it'll take a little longer than that historically has been the case and then we'll have Q and A for until about noon. We'll have a short break at noon. There'll be sandwiches outside which you can buy. And Charlie and I will have a couple of sandwiches up here at the podium and then we will stay around until about 3:00 o'clock to answer more questions and at that time after noon I'm sure everybody in the overflow rooms will be able to find a seat here in the main room. But people have come from great distances to attend this meeting. So we really want to give everyone a chance to get their questions asked and Charlie and I are delighted to do what we will have to break it up at 3:00. No matter what. But we'll be delighted to stick around.
You can leave anytime obviously as I've explained in the past it's a much better form to leave while Charlie is talking but the feel free to do that knowing you'll get a chance to do it and mass. We have buses available to take you to if you have any money left at all after yesterday to to take you to other other other business establishments of Berkshire locally. So that will be the plan I will I hope everyone does get their questions answered. We've got a system where we we break this room into six zones and we have a couple of zones in other rooms and then this afternoon everybody will will be able to be here in the main room. So that is the procedure and I'm sure you recognize Charlie Munger the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway who also I had not seen that movie before and showed. I think Mark was afraid to show it to us. But in any event we will go on. I thought you might be interested. This is a list of people that came in for tickets and we had in addition to 99 from Canada. And of course the U.S. We had Australia the Channel Islands England Greece Hong Kong Israel Portugal Puerto Rico Singapore Sweden and Switzerland. I'm not sure all of those people are with us today but but they did send for tickets and I've met a number that did come in from a distance. So with that introduction I will call the meeting to order. I'm Warren Buffett chairman of the board of directors and I do welcome you to this meeting I hope everybody has a good time this weekend.
And I'd like to introduce the directors in addition to myself and to Charlie now. You don't get quite your money's worth this year from our director. Collectively they've lost 100 pounds since last our last meeting. I think they've been trying to live on the director's face from the and Eries designate the company's current common stock as Class A common stock and to make each share of Class A common stock convertible into 30 shares of the New Class B stock at the option of the holder. I think before we get into moving that motion I think this would be a good time to have a discussion and take your questions regarding the issuance of the Class B and I should give you a little background I think many of you know the background on this but over the years we've we've had probably half a dozen people one time or another propose that the creation of an all Berkshire investment company or unit trusts in other words an entity that would hold nothing but Berkshire stock and then would parcel out its own shares in smaller denomination pieces to the public and we have generally discourage that because we felt that.
