Apr

7

Dear Collab,

I put money where my mouth is and shorted some nice brk /b the other day and with the luck of the Irish, finally his bubble has burst to my credit. Amazing how little it takes for your friends to turn on you. We can take second fiddle to no one on being the most prevalent detractors. I am hopeful that these transgressions are not the tip of an iceberg, and doubt that everything is corrupt from the top. When the head might be considered a faker or poseur, every one might desire to pull the wool on everyone else's eye. It's also the natural consequence of buying all these firms without any infrastructure and buying companies based on a 5 minute balance sheet review and getting a feel for the executives' integrity over a coke or big mac. An owner of a business needs incentives. And when Warren precludes that the incentives can be displaced into fraud. In retrospect when W. said "my trigger finger is still very itchy", the very sexual utterance of a depraved egomaniac, the handwriting was on the wall, as he took a tour of India to ferret out other acquisitions that his European travel agents arranged. Let us hope the "agents" did not take a cut on that one also.

A quote of Warren's that captures everything about him is this:

"You can sell your business to Berkshire, and we'll put in in the Metropolitan Museum; it'll have wing all by itself, it'll be there forever. Or you can sell it to some porn shop operator, and he'll take the painting and he'll make the boobs a little bigger and he'll stick it up in the window, and some other guy will come along in a raincoat, and he'll buy it".

How could everyone have been conned to think that only he can give a business a good home, and that the fake notion that they will leave everything the same after selling to him is not a snare and delusion. Who else could have said that and not been escorted off his stage by his family or partners immediately for his own protection. I could see Beethoven or Verdi saying it, but fortunately a concertmaster or his assistant Schindler was always around to escort Beethoven off when he broke the pianos or was 10 measures behind the orchestra because of his hearing or choleric temper.


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