STREET DOGS

THIS “reminds me of the magical world of Hogwarts!” said a shareholder at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting this past weekend. To which Buffett replied: “I haven’t read Harry Potter, but I’ll take it as a compliment.” Business Insider in its commentary on the meeting says the Harry Potter reference encapsulates the whole problem with the Berkshire experience as it stands in 2016.

To quote: “The media covers Buffett a lot because while he says lots of smart and quotable things about investing and business, he is also a source of fascination. He seems to be a sort of American miracle, a folksy, down-to-earth private citizen who became very rich by doing some simple things and investing over time.”

This is only partially true. And the problem is that this sort of half-right vision of who Buffett is — in reality, a genius investor who happened to grow up in Omaha — gets conflated into questions where shareholders ask how Buffett feels being a god among men.

He doesn’t have the answers … because he doesn’t seem to think about other people that way. Things other people do don’t seem to really matter to him. Unless, of course, they run a business he might invest in or compete with.

So, the whole idea that we are going to learn something transcendent from a figure such as Buffett is to misunderstand how he became who he is.

And when you compare Buffett to a fictional character written into books to be an avatar of some moral lesson, the process of learning about investing … turns into a farcical worship of a smart person who happened to go into investing instead of, say, manufacturing or politics.

Michel Pireu — e-mail: pireum@streetdogs.co.za