On Charlie Munger

Image credit: Photo by Nick Webb, May 5, 2010 (Flickr)

Charlie Munger, the blunt and brilliant vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., isn’t big on small talk. My first encounter with him was in 2004 at the Sunday brunch Warren Buffett used to hold at Berkshire’s annual meeting. I was getting something at a buffet table, and Mr. Munger walked up and began ladling food onto his plate. I introduced myself and held out my hand: “I’m the guy who just revised the Graham book.” He looked at me for a split second through his thick eyeglasses, said “You did a good job,” then walked away. A few years ago, he sent me handwritten notes about two speeches I had given, one after reading “Fat Tails, Thin Ice,” and one after “Behavioral Finance: What Good Is It, Anyway?”Â Then, in 2014, he gave me a startlingly frank interview at the annual meeting of Daily Journal Co., the publishing firm of which he is chairman. And, in April 2019, my colleague Nicole Friedman and I interviewed him over dinner at his Los Angeles home. He had turned 95 years old on January 1st and had the intellectual energy of people one-third his age. At about 10:30 p.m., after he’d been talking for more than four hours, Nicole and I started to feel we were fading just a bit — but he was just getting started. He spoke to us for six hours in all, finishing only a few minutes before midnight.

It’s a shame more investing and business leaders don’t have his candor and moral clarity.

Here, I’ve gathered books I’ve read and articles I’ve written that Munger fans might enjoy.