Inversion & sitting still
Buffett's partner and the sharper tongue: pay up for quality, avoid stupidity rather than seek brilliance, and let a handful of decisions a decade do all the work. He kept his fortune deliberately small by giving steadily and never optimizing for the scoreboard.
Net worth at passing (est.)
Estimatedyearly estimates from public reporting · risk pane = rolling volatility, the standard deviation of annual growth wealth managers useThe allocation
Estimatedmodeled from public reporting — a wealth manager's sketch, not a statementThe lifetime position
Returns
EstimatedThe pre-Berkshire record
Legacy profile — the playbook is the product now
Portfolio highlights
public & private — widely reported positions; weights are member-gated- Berkshire Hathawaypublic
The lifetime position
- Costcopublic
'The perfect business'
- Himalaya Capitalfund
Li Lu's China vehicle
Private allocations
best public information — stakes and terms mostly undisclosedHis trusted outside manager, Li Lu
The pillars
- Invert, always invert — avoid the dumb mistake first
- A great business at a fair price beats a fair business at a great price
- Sit on your hands: activity is the enemy of returns
Signature moves
- Talked Buffett out of cigar-butts and into quality — the pivot that built modern Berkshire
- Daily Journal's bank-stock plunge at the 2009 bottom, executed in his 80s
The tax playbook
Editorialstrategies widely reported around Munger — never tax adviceGive the appreciated stock, keep the basis story simple
Decades of gifting Berkshire shares to universities and family — appreciated stock out the door with no realization, exactly the Buffett pattern at smaller scale.
Hold forever, step-up at the end
Sixty years of essentially never selling Berkshire meant sixty years of untaxed compounding — the estate's step-up closed the loop on one of the great deferred-gain runs.
Compiled from public reporting on structures these investors are widely reported to use. Tax outcomes depend entirely on individual circumstances — this is background reading, not tax advice.
On the wire
tracked filings & reports — live from SEC EDGAR and pressLoading the wire…
Recent moves
from public filings & press — quarter-level, not live data- ARCHIVEArchive
Died November 2023 at 99 — 33 days short of a century of compounding
- SIGNAL2023
Final CNBC interviews: warned on banks' commercial real estate, praised BYD one last time
Sources
Where this profile's information comes from — filings first.
This profile is an editorial summary compiled from public sources. Allocation, return, and prediction figures are MODELED ESTIMATES — informed guesses, not verified data; predictions are illustrative scenarios only. No affiliation with or endorsement by Charlie Munger is implied, and nothing on this page is investment advice.