How Warren Buffett Keeps Score kingswell.io/p/how-warren-bu…

Steve Jobs: "The people that are really good want to work with the best people they can find. Hopefully, people that are even better than them." "If you work with people who are better than you, then you really grow."

Warren Buffett: "In 1962, when I set up our office, I put seven items on the wall. Our art budget was $7. I went down to the library and, for $1 each, I made photocopies of [important newspaper] pages from financial history." "Those seven days that I put up on the wall... Life in financial markets has got no relation to sigmas. If everybody that operated in financial markets had never had any concept of standard errors and so on, they would be a lot better off."

Chris Davis: "Part of our duty in managing outside client money is not just to maximize performance — it's also to try to minimize the consequences that come from self-inflicted bad investment behavior." (The 100 Year Thinkers || 2026)

Warren Buffett: "Our preference at Berkshire is to keep buying big operating businesses. We like owning equities. We'll make money in equities as an alternative — but in terms of building Berkshire for the long term, we just like adding big chunks of earning power from operating businesses which we are going to keep forever. None of the stocks [we own] are forever, but they're generally for very long terms." (CNBC || 2014)

Apple CEO John Ternus: "Design has always been at the core of this company. Our respect for the user and for building products that are helpful and beneficial to people, that is job one." "The opportunities and the products, that stuff will change and evolve as new technologies come — but the way we work, I don't want that to change."

Adam Patti of VistaShares on Berkshire Hathaway and AI. "They wrote one of the biggest financing checks of the AI buildout last quarter — about $10 billion — to support Google's efforts on data centers." "Electricity is the bottleneck [for AI]. Whoever wins the model race, every data center needs electricity — and Berkshire sells it to them. Berkshire Hathaway Energy has around 9,000 MW of data center load contracted right now — either in service currently or being constructed."

Mohnish Pabrai: "I'm always looking at what is hated and unloved. Usually, you will get a lot of mispricing on something hated and unloved." "Basically, when the world is running away from coal, we need to run towards coal." (h/t @myfirstmilpod)

Warren Buffett: "You should look for a very, very low expense way of participating in securities." "Keeping costs to a minimum is enormously important in investing. If you're in effect paying out 1-2% annually of your portfolio, that's a big, big tax that you don't have to pay."

Berkshire Hathaway director Chris Davis: "By and large, if you have the right business, the biggest mistake you make is selling it. You trim it at first [because] it looks so expensive compared to what you paid for it. You want the psychic pleasure of locking in that gain ... and you continue to cut your flowers and water your weeds." (The 100 Year Thinkers || 2026)

Berkshire Hathaway's stock price is up ~8% so far this month. "The market spent a year pricing Berkshire without Buffett," Adam Patti of VistaShares told CNBC yesterday, "and I think it has finally decided that Abel can, in fact, run it." "Berkshire is on its upswing now. Typically, what we see is Berkshire is a coiled spring. When it comes back, it comes back fast and furious."

Warren Buffett on putting his wife's inheritance into a low-cost index fund. "I laid out what I thought the average person — who's not an expert on stocks — should do. My widow will not be an expert on stocks. I want to be sure that she gets a decent result. She doesn't need to get a sensational result." "I've told the trustee to put 90% of it in an S&P 500 index fund and 10% in short-term governments. She'll do fine with that. Anybody will do fine with that. It's low-cost, it's in a bunch of wonderful businesses, and that takes care of itself."

Charlie Munger: "How do these super-smart people with all these degrees in higher mathematics end up doing these dumb things? I think it's explainable by the old proverb that to a man with a hammer, every problem looks pretty much like a nail. They've learned these techniques and they just twist the problem so [it] fits the solution — which is not the way to do it."

Warren Buffett: "People should forget about calling it the stock market. It's American business." "The stock market offers you so many opportunities. Thousands and thousands of different businesses. You don't have to be an expert on every one of them. You don't have to be an expert on 10% of them even. You just have to have some conviction that either a given company or a group of companies are likely to earn more money 5 or 10 or 20 years from now than they're earning now. And that is not a difficult decision to come to."

Li Lu on the six timeless principles of value investing. (1) "Stock is a piece of ownership, not a piece of paper to trade around." (2) "The market is there to serve you, not to instruct you." (3) "Investing is about predicting the future — which is inherently unpredictable — therefore you always want to require a margin of safety that helps you protect the downside." (4) "The most important [part] of a circle of competence is knowing the edge of it. Understanding the edge is as important as understanding what is inside the [circle]." (5) "You've got to fish where the fish are." (6) "Wealth, in the end, is really the percentage ownership of global purchasing power. What is really important is what you can buy with [that wealth]." (Columbia University || 2026)

Charlie Munger: "Many of my children have worked out well — and I've had very little to do with it. It's simply amazing to me, as a parent, to note how much is sort of pre-ordained. The shy baby is the shy adult. The booming, obnoxious, domineering baby is the booming, domineering, obnoxious adult. I have never found a way to fix that. I can be cheerful about it, but I can't fix it. I can change my reaction, but I can't change the outcome." (CNBC || 2019)

Warren Buffett: "[Risk] is top of mind, always, around Berkshire. Your returns, in 99 years out of 100, will probably be penalized by us being excessively conservative — and, 1 year out of 100, we'll survive when some other people won't."

Mohnish Pabrai on the irreplaceable genius of Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman Ajit Jain.

Warren Buffett: "I don't want to play in a game where I think the other guys have got an advantage over me. I could spend all my time thinking about technology for the next year and I wouldn't be the 100th or the 1,000th or the 10,000th smartest guy in the country in looking at those businesses. That is a seven- or eight-foot bar that I can't clear. There are people who can clear it, but I can't clear it. And no matter how [much] I train, I can't clear it." (Berkshire Hathaway AGM || 1998)