Berkshire Hathaway No. 2 Infringes On Warren Buffett's Territory
Among the many things Warren Buffett is known for-- being an extremely successful investor, (supposedly!) loving Cherry Coke, living in the same house he bought in 1957 for $31,500-- one stands out from the crowd: his penchant for mixing folksy business wisdom with aberrant sex fetish. A short list of topics on which Buffett has injected his trademark style include: undervalued stocks ("I like an oversexed guy in a whorehouse"), Bear Stearns ("It’s like a woman taking off half her clothes and asking, ‘Should I continue?’ Even if you’re a 90-year-old eunuch, you let ‘em finish."), the stimulus package ("First stimulus package was sort of like taking half a tablet of Viagra and having also a bunch of candy mixed in"), why people sell companies to Berkshire ("You can sell it to Berkshire, and we’ll put it in the Metropolitan Museum; it’ll have a 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.") and bridge ("If I’m playing bridge and a naked woman walks by, I don’t ever see her...don't test me on that!"). So it was probably only a matter of time until it rubbed off on his business partner, Charlie Munger, and yet this still sort of feels like someone is stepping on someone else's toes:
Billionaire Charles Munger, who dismissed Ernst & Young LLP as auditor of his Daily Journal Corp., compared the accounting firm to a misguided physician. “They were like the doctor who wanted to cure the nosebleed by fishing around in the groin,” Munger, 90, said today at the annual meeting of the publishing company in Los Angeles. Munger, who is best known as Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), is also chairman of Daily Journal.
Munger Likens Auditor to Doctor Prodding Groin to Treat Nose [Bloomberg]