It was 5 AM. I sat bolt upright in bed, and I smiled ear to ear. That’s because today was the most important day of my life. It was a day I had been waiting for for more than a decade. A pinch-me kind of day. A day where nothing could go wrong.
I quickly showered, dressed, and tiptoed out of my house, so as not to wake my two young sons. The only sound amid the darkness of the morning was the idling of the SUV waiting for me at the end of my driveway, and the click-click-click of my suitcase along the cobblestone walk.
I was giddy with excitement as the driver took exit 26 to the airport, and probably would have remained that way if I hadn’t peered down at my phone to check my email. There, buried between a hundred messages from CEOs and bankers and lawyers I employed, was a single, simple Google Alert with my name on it: “Andrew Wilkinson.” When I clicked on the alert, popping it open in my phone’s browser, in the title of an article, next to my name, was a word I had never seen attributed to me before.
It was a word that made me feel nauseous and euphoric all at once.
A word that could only be attributed to around three thousand people on the planet. A term that could get you knighted by the queen or a date with a celebrity—or maybe inspire a violent protest outside of your home. It was a word that was used as a compliment or a vicious diss, depending on the room. Discussion of it consumed the nightly news, the halls of Congress, trolls on Twitter, and dripped vitriol or admiration from almost everyone who uttered it.
The word that sat next to my name was billionaire.
It made me feel exposed. Like I was standing amid a crowd and someone had thrown a bucket of crimson paint over me and now everyone was staring, wondering who I was and what I’d done to deserve this.
Just a few years earlier, when I was in my early twenties, I’d had the same unsettling feeling when someone had labeled me with another, less intense, designation—that one being millionaire—but it seems I’d surpassed that number, some 750-odd times over, and according to a journalist’s sloppy accounting, that m was now a b.
“Andrew Wilkinson, Billionaire.”
Now it was rattling around in my head like a loose marble as I hopped out of the SUV and aboard the jet waiting for me, a Bombardier Challenger 605, with plush beige leather seats and ornate wooden accents. A little living room in the sky.
“How’s it going?” my business partner, Chris, asked as I slumped into the seat across from him. “Excited? Stressed? Petrified?”
“I’m good,” I said, forcing a smile.
“You all right?” he asked, noticing something was up.
“A little wigged out that someone has just called me a billionaire on the internet.”
“Oh, come on,” he said with a grin. “You’ve been called worse things.” We both laughed as the plane began to taxi along the runway.
In reality, I wasn’t a billionaire, yet. But I was close. I could feel the word’s hot breath on my neck. It wasn’t a matter of if, at this point, just a matter of when. The label—that word—was making up ground, and of course I wanted it to catch me. I wanted to win the Olympic Gold of business, whatever that meant.
As we took off, I looked out at the coast of Vancouver Island below. At the specks of people milling about. A couple of kayakers on little boats the color of condiments floated across the glacial sound; a bicyclist swept along the water’s edge between the Amabilis fir trees and the black cottonwoods. From above, we all look like little dots, trundling across the earth, trying to do our own unique thing. Write a play; start a business; have a family. As our altitude continued upward—now two thousand, three thousand, four thousand feet—I wondered what these people on the edge of the island were thinking about at that moment. I imagined some of them worrying about a promotion at work, reaching the next rung of their own ladder; another one stressing about getting a new, bigger, better house; another doing the books of their café, hopeful they could grow their profits this year. I knew that, somewhere down there, some of those worries belonged to people who worked for me: a programmer at one of our software companies; a journalist at the online news outlet I owned; a chef at one of our restaurants.
And I wondered if any of them were truly happy.
In truth, I knew I wasn’t, even with all the money I had.
I’d noticed a trend among many of the people I had met over the past few years, where, in business circles, someone would ask the question: “What’s your number?” What’s the number you’d need to see in your bank account to feel as though you had “enough”? It was a gaudy question, for sure, but it was a question that I found fascinating. That’s because everyone—and I mean everyone—irrespective of where they sat on the pecking order of success, answered the question in almost the exact same way: they would be happy if only they were able to “double” what they already had. The person with $500,000 in the bank would feel secure once they had $1 million. Someone with $1 million in savings just needed two. The person with two just needed four, and so on, all the way up to the people worth ten times that, who just needed an extra zero on the end of their net worth.
As much as I hated to admit it, this was surely true for me. For as long as I could remember, I had dreamed of being called a billionaire. There wasn’t a good reason I wanted this title. I wanted to get rich for animal reasons. Because I remembered how it felt to be broke. The feeling of my gut clenching when I tried to buy a coffee with my credit card, muttering under my breath, praying I didn’t hear the shrill beep of shame—DECLINED!—which happened more times than I cared to remember.
I was terrified of not having enough. Of this sensation that burned into my stomach like an ulcer, making me grit my teeth. For a long time, I couldn’t stop the feeling. I was too young to even know how. It was an undercurrent of anxiety pulsing through me.
The first time I felt this feeling abate wasn’t because of therapy or a Klonopin, but rather a summer vacation with my family to Savary Island, a remote sliver of land off the coast of Vancouver. The island doesn’t have cars or even electricity, and when you arrive by boat, visitors have to lug their bags along steep and windy pathways to reach their hotel or cabin. I distinctly remember watching a family of five struggle with their suitcases along a dirt path, puffing and panting as they went, a kid plowing into his father who’d stopped to put down a bag and catch his breath. Which is when I had an idea. I rounded up my younger brothers and our cousins and told them I would pay each of them five pieces of candy per bag they carried. Then, I hung out on the dock as new boats came in, and I offered weary travelers my sales pitch.
“Why not enjoy a leisurely stroll while we carry your bags? We’ll take them from dock to door for ten bucks.”
Like sea-level Sherpas, we’d load up and hike across the island, visions of penny candy propelling us forward. We’d drop the payload and immediately head to the general store, gorging ourselves on fuzzy peaches and licorice, with a few dollars profit left over for me. Holding that money in my hand, even though it was just a few dollars, was a salve to me.
My journey into the business world had begun.
When I got a little older, I started babysitting. Flipping burgers. Selling computers. Finding every conceivable way to stack up dollars.
By the time I was in middle school, I would drop my backpack at the door, run to the VCR, and for the three hundredth time slide in a copy of Pirates of Silicon Valley—a horrendously cheesy made-for-TV movie about Steve Jobs where I studied every move Jobs, Gates, and Wozniak made. I slept next to a dog-eared copy of The Journey Is the Reward, an eighties biography of Jobs, and when my class made a time capsule and I was asked to write a letter to my future self, I confidently predicted that, by 2035, I would be running Apple Computer (and married to Lindsay Finch, my fourth-grade crush) and included extensive directions on how to operate the company.
It was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with making money. By the time I was in my early twenties and running my own company, I scratched business ideas on scraps of paper sprinkled around my office and in the margins of books. I shouted voice reminders into my steering wheel, to be garbled by Siri for later. I kept a meticulous database of ideas. Tasks. Next actions. Things to invest in. Deals to do. People to do business with. Books to read. Businesses to start. Then, I whipped myself like a packhorse. Harnessing my anxiety and using it to tick off my endless list of to-dos. After doing this for long enough, a method emerged from the madness and it started working. The people at the bank started calling me “Mr. Wilkinson” and offering me stately looking credit cards that landed on the table with a satisfying metal thunk.
Then the money came. And came and came and came.
But in my mind—regardless of my bank balance—I was still a dust bowl farmer, trying to stave off starvation and stock up for the winter. Sowing backup crops and stuffing the cellar with savorless root vegetables to feed my family. I needed more businesses, more employees, more stocks, more cash flow. More, more, more. And yet a sense of abundance, of enough, always managed to elude me. I’d often caught glimpses of it in the rearview mirror of my life, reflecting on past concerns, wondering, Why was I so stressed about money?, even as I fretted over my current financial situation. I just couldn’t see the bigger picture in the anxious present moment.
In this moment, gaining altitude, what I needed to unclench the pit in my gut was to hit that number with nine zeros at the end of it. A number so unfathomably large that I couldn’t possibly feel this way anymore.
What I didn’t yet know was that this trip—the business deal Chris and I were about to potentially do—was going to make that number official. And let me finally relax.
As my hometown of Victoria disappeared below the clouds, at thirty-five years old, as this number drew closer and closer, it struck me how much my life had changed since I’d been raised in this sleepy Canadian town with my parents and two younger brothers. Despite being the oldest, I was the shortest at six foot three. All three of us had smooth dark brown hair and the same frantic, bouncing walk—always in a rush to get where we were going, driven by a bubble of anxiety. A mild curve in my spine—scoliosis since birth—caused my head to subtly tilt to the left, giving the impression that I was enthralled by whatever someone was telling me, head always cocked just so, even if I was bored out of my mind.
My childhood began in the larger city of Vancouver, about fifty miles from where we would eventually settle, in Victoria. Our affluent childhood street had been so quiet you didn’t need to lock the front door. Just steps from a huge park on Vancouver’s west side, the oak-lined road was filled with chirping birds and free-range children playing street hockey, building forts, and biking in roving packs. But unlike my neighbors, who had flat-screen TVs and rec rooms that would put a Toys “R” Us to shame, money had always been a trigger word in our house. Our bank account rarely grew past five digits and sometimes dwindled to three.
This was my secret. My mission, accordingly, became to fit in with these well-heeled aliens. I longed to have the Jonathan Taylor Thomas haircut, Etnies skate shoes, always untied, and low-slung Tommy Hilfiger jeans. Instead, I’d scour the bargain bins at Winners, sorting through last year’s brands and cobbling together my costume, a simulacrum of wealth. If you squinted, I looked the part, but it was a thin veneer. I felt like a pauper compared to my exorbitantly wealthy friends’ families, however ridiculous the comparison.
It grated on me.
I wanted to snatch the silver spoon out of their mouths, melt it down, and use the money to transform our lives: a photo of my family grinning with the Disney castle in the distance. Sun-baked skin. Pooka shell necklaces. Swimming with dolphins in Maui. Unfathomable wonders.
But let’s be real, this isn’t a Charles Dickens tale. I grew up middle class. We weren’t living on food stamps and our rent always got paid. I had a loving family, and there was always food on the dinner table. There was just never a feeling of abundance. Of safety. My parents stretched a dollar a long way. The subsequent result was a quiet, simmering anxiety stoked by a daily four-word refrain: “We can’t afford that,” about anything my friends did. It had a visceral psychological impact on me. The desire for more was constant, some Freudian lizard brain-like impulse stuck on a loop. That, and the muffled Charlie Brown voices of my parents arguing about bills.
Thankfully, that was all in the past, or at least that’s what I thought. I told myself it was a million lifetimes ago from where I sat now, safe in my cocoon, a private jet heading to Los Angeles to do the most important business deal of my life.
On the plane I looked across at Chris, who was hidden behind a copy of the Wall Street Journal, a glass of Diet Coke bubbling away in the cupholder at his side.
“What do you think he’s going to be like?” I asked.
“Well, he says the secret to a happy life is low expectations, so let’s assume he’s going to be a humongous jerk,” he quipped with a chuckle.
The “he” we were talking about was Charlie Munger, a man who had been one of my business idols for over a decade, and the reason for this exciting and also petrifying trip.
I knew everything about Munger: how he had grown up just five blocks from his far more famous business partner, Warren Buffett, in Omaha, Nebraska; how, when they were young, he had worked at a local grocery store Buffett’s grandfather ran (somehow, the two men never met); and how, years later, in 1959, when they had met at a dinner party, they had become fast friends and eventually business partners at Berkshire Hathaway. Fast-forward to today, and Berkshire is in the top ten of the Fortune 500 list of the biggest businesses in America, a lofty place it has occupied for the last twelve years. Munger is worth several billion; Buffett, who is the CEO, ten times his partner. They are considered two of the greatest business minds of the past century.
When Chris and I started our company, Tiny, we had said that if we could pick just one person that we’d want to meet it would be Charlie Munger. We had even commissioned bronze busts of Munger and Buffett, then placed them on the fireplace mantel at our office. Some of the people who visited us and didn’t know who these men were asked, “Are those your grandpas?” But many instantly recognized our heroes and were equally enamored, inquiring if we could make a bust for them, too. (Given that I saw everything as a potential business idea, I noticed so many people wanted busts of Munger and Buffett that we spun this into a side business that still makes tens of thousands of dollars a year.)
I could tell you the companies Munger and Buffett had acquired in any order: by revenue, industry, or alphabetically: Acme Brick Company, Benjamin Moore, BNSF Railway, Dairy Queen, Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO…I could keep going, but you get the point. If there was a version of Jeopardy! just about Munger and Buffett’s holdings, I’d be the contest’s Ken Jennings.
“Berkshire Hathaway owns 5.6 percent of this company.”
“What is Apple?!”
“Berkshire Hathaway owns 26 perc—”
“What is Kraft Heinz?!”
I’d read every book about these titans, mainlining their investing wisdom like an addict obsessed with the next fix. (“The big money is not in the buying or selling, but in the waiting.”) I could carol their quotes like a theater kid can recite their favorite scene in Hamilton, intonations and all. (“It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”) I could even recount the play-by-play of their returns on investment like a sports buff reliving the final inning of a World Series game. (Berkshire Hathaway’s stock increased by a mind-boggling 1,800,000 percent between 1964 and 2014.)
But I didn’t want to be a spectator, merely able to recite the company’s history. I wanted to play the game. I wanted someone else to recite my own company’s history one day.
For as long as I can remember, I had wanted to be someone. Someone who had enough.
A Jobs. A Disney. A Buffett. A Munger.
While I wasn’t even close to these leviathans, I had been successful by any sane measure. Our company, which we had built from the ground up, owned more than thirty different businesses, had over a thousand employees, and generated hundreds of millions in revenue. Our little empire consisted of a seemingly random assortment of businesses of all sizes, each scratching a different itch, something we’d gotten interested in along the way during our nearly twenty years in business.
When a mutual friend introduced us to Munger, he had told us that he had a technology business he might need our help with. We had jumped at the chance and immediately made plans for a visit. This was, after all, the moment my entire life had been leading up to, and I was going to seize it.
When we landed in Los Angeles, a large blacked-out SUV was waiting for us on the tarmac. We climbed inside, and the driver took us to our hotel to freshen up. We had flown in our “uniform,” jeans and T-shirts, but decided to change into a “ninety-year-old-appropriate” outfit, as we joked, which we guessed was khakis, Oxford shirts, and some sort of comfortable thick-padded footwear, perhaps with Velcro.
On the drive over to Munger’s house for dinner, Chris and I discussed our plan. Chris had been my business partner for over a decade, and he was so adept at understanding my thinking that we were now able to start and finish each other’s sentences, I assumed just like Munger and Buffett. I’d met Chris, of all places, at the local TD Bank, where I was a customer, after my first business, MetaLab, which designed apps for Silicon Valley startups, had taken off.
Back then, in 2009, I’d stopped by my local bank branch on Douglas Street to get a new business credit card, and the teller had told me that a financial advisor, a “Mr. Sparling,” would like to say hello. When I was introduced to Mr. Sparling, I was struck by how young he was. He looked more like the son of Mr. Sparling than the advisor himself. He had a boyish face devoid of facial hair and was wearing an ill-fitting suit that hung off his small frame. He was infectiously friendly, almost obnoxiously so, with a down-home charm, and, after a brief conversation and noticing his office was covered with plaques that proclaimed him one of the bank’s top employees, I blurted out, just going with my gut, “Would you ever leave the bank? I need to hire a CFO.”
A decade or so later, and here we were, running a billion-dollar company and about to have dinner with one of our mutual business idols, Charlie Munger.
“Whatever idea he has, we just have to play it cool,” I said as we turned onto Munger’s street.
“Yup,” Chris said. “Hear him out and then evaluate.” We wanted to be respectful, but not fawning.
I’d seen billionaires’ homes before, having gone to meetings with investors or suitors of businesses I had bought and sold in the past, and their (multiple) homes are often gargantuan, covered with art and sculptures that you would normally see in a museum; manned with a battalion of harried staffers and driveways as long as a city block; almost always filled with rows of shiny quarter- and half-a-million-dollar cars. Some have helipads. Munger lived more like a wealthy dentist, or a small-time media mogul whose movies had gone straight to cable, not someone who was worth more than the GDP of Monaco.
The house was tucked away on a quiet side street in Hancock Park, one of Los Angeles’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Though the homes on this street were worth millions, you wouldn’t think this of his particular home, a modest single-story bungalow, barely taking up three thousand square feet within its exterior walls. It was whitewashed stucco with a terra-cotta tile roof typical of the neighborhood. A simple path of stepping stones led from the sidewalk to the double front door, which was painted a cheerful yellow and featured an old-fashioned brass door knocker. The front yard was small, with just enough room for a few rosebushes and a single palm tree swaying gently in the breeze. An old-fashioned white picket fence surrounded the perimeter. Clearly, Munger had opted to keep things simple.
I could hear my heart pounding in my chest as Chris and I stepped out of the car at dusk, walked along the brick pathway, and approached the front door. I pressed the bell, and we waited.
I felt like I was on a first date with my celebrity crush, perspiring profusely, rehearsing my introduction in my head, and overwhelmed by the tingling anticipation of what the night might bring. I took a deep breath of the warm summer air and tried to take in the moment. The floral honey smell of the purple jacaranda tree in the yard. The far-away sounds of Los Angeles. I looked around, now noticing the blinking red lights of the security cameras pointed at our faces and, a moment later, like a grand reveal on the stage at a theater, the door opened and a man in his mid-forties greeted us with a warm smile.
“Welcome,” he said. “I’m Oscar, Mr. Munger’s assistant. Please come in.” As we stepped into the entry, Oscar directed us toward the study where he told us Munger was waiting.
As we were guided down the hall, I looked around to take in every morsel I could. The walls were filled with books—new and old—decadent wallpaper in the dining room and a calm color palette of beige curtains and comfortable chairs. His artworks were not Picassos or Rembrandts (which Munger could easily afford) but small pretty oils and prints. There were thoughtful mementos everywhere: a couple of porcelain ducks in the living room, oriental bowls on bookshelves, a sterling silver tea set in the dining room, various gifts and photos from a long and storied career. It resembled what I imagine someone’s wealthy grandparents’ house would look like. The only sign that a billionaire lived here was that array of security cameras perched on the front wall, like birds, aimed at the front of the property.
When we entered the study, filled from floor to ceiling with old books, Munger was sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair, his legs crossed, a huge pile of books stacked on the table beside him, with two giant halogen lights beaming down on him like he was a sculpture in an art gallery. He had, I later learned, lost one of his eyes during a botched cataract surgery years earlier, and the lights helped him read.
He was sitting across from Andrew Marks, the mutual friend who had set up the dinner, and who introduced us.
“Charlie,” Marks politely interrupted, “these are my friends Andrew and Chris. They have a mini–Berkshire Hathaway focused on tech companies up in Canada.”
“Hello,” Munger said as he peered up at us. I was struck by how much he looked like the bust on the mantel in my office, shocked, even, at the likeness, with that almost perfectly round face, a thin sliver of silver hair, and thick wire-framed glasses.
“Great to meet you, Charlie,” I said, excitedly. “We’re huge fans.”
Chris, full of equal enthusiasm, overlapped what I had just said. “Huge fans. Great to meet you, Charlie.” (It was as if we were the co-creators of one giant palindrome of a sentence.)
Munger was ninety-seven, but it quickly became clear that he was as lucid as ever.
We chatted briefly in the study, and then we were shown to the dining room, with tapestry-like wallpaper made up of green and pink flowers. As we found our seats, I was relieved to see Chris and I had dressed appropriately, as Munger was wearing gray suit pants, a green checkered shirt, and his own style of what I assumed were thick-padded Dexter shoes—a company I knew Berkshire Hathaway had acquired for $433 million in 1993.
Here, Munger held court and was almost exactly how I’d imagined he would be. Brilliant. Funny. Sharp.
He was full of salient one-liners that could have been thought up by a team of writers somewhere but that he was clearly just plucking out of his own brain. “Being in a business with bad economics is like being the shuttlecock in someone else’s badminton game,” he said as he took a bite of his steak. “When you understand how hard a problem is, it’s half solved,” he proffered as string beans dangled from his fork. In another aphorism, between bites of his mixed green salad, he exclaimed to me and Chris: “You only have to be right once to become very rich.”
These weren’t just one-liners that meant nothing to him; they meant everything. They were formulas and strings and values to live by that could reap an ever-compounding 1,800,000 percent return on your investment. He was a walking, talking encyclopedia of not just how to get rich, but of how the system worked, and how it could yield high-quality goods and services for everyone, no matter where you sit on the financial ladder. And while he was insanely rich, he preferred to live like he was not.
Decades earlier, he explained, when he had made his first million dollars, he didn’t spend a penny, but instead reinvested every dime while he continued to live off his average annual salary. Things hadn’t changed too much. He told us that, up until the last few years, he had flown to each Costco board meeting economy on Alaska Airlines, despite the fact that Berkshire owned not just one, but a fleet of thousands of private jets via their ownership of NetJets. When I commented on his green shirt in passing, saying how I liked it, he lit up with excitement, then, gesturing to his shirt, remarked, “I’ve been getting these flannel shirts from L.L. Bean for years. But the last time I checked, they were at $59.95 each! I decided to compare prices at Costco and found a nice flannel shirt for $49.99. My nephew then showed me AliExpress, we compared prices, and found that you can get two packs of flannel shirts for only $34.99!” (We later learned that the massive gold watch he was wearing was actually not gold at all, but a $30 “special” he had proudly found online.)
Over the years, I’ve met people who pretended not to care about their wealth, who wore thousand-dollar plain white T-shirts or drove a twenty-year-old Honda Fit to their secret private jet, but it seemed that he truly didn’t care about any of the luxuries. He simply loved learning, then applying his knowledge by betting heavily when the odds were in his favor. More about the intellectual pursuit than the private jet.
One of the things I’d also observed over the years about business tycoons, especially those in Silicon Valley, is that while they were all clearly brilliant in their own way, many of them often acted as though they had the answer to everything. Elon Musk, who is a genius when it comes to electric cars and rockets, has espoused on social media his expertise on everything from global monetary policy (something he clearly knows very little about) to epidemiology and the machinations of viruses (something he knows even less about). Steve Jobs, who a generation of entrepreneurs grew up idolizing, myself included, understood consumer electronics and marketing better than anyone on the planet, but he was so resolute in his own genius that he thought he knew more about his own cancer than his team of oncologists, and tried to treat his pancreatic cancer on his own fruit diet. Which, of course, failed.
When it came to Munger, though, what I found so strikingly different about him was that while he was clearly an oracle when it came to investing and capitalism and his areas of interest, including science and psychology, he wasn’t resolute or opinionated on other topics. He was even humble about not being a know-it-all on investing, noting that there were some businesses he didn’t feel comfortable speculating upon. One of his favorite refrains when discussing a complex topic was simply to say, “It’s hard,” with a shrug—the debating equivalent of folding your hand—before moving on to the next topic.
He didn’t need to have the answers to everything; he stuck to what he called his “circle of competence,” the areas in which he was an expert. In fact, he told us that he preferred to avoid stupidity instead of trying to be intelligent. In the age of social media and Wikipedia, a lot of people act like they know the answer to nearly everything. But when politics came up with Munger, he refrained from offering any firm viewpoint, only positing that politics writ large is simply too difficult to understand without devoting your life to it. “It’s a mistake to be deeply ideological about almost anything,” he said. “It’s better to have doubt.”
Of course, that didn’t mean he wasn’t broad. Especially when it came to business. Halfway through our dinner, a guy about my age burst into the house through a back door. He spoke a mile a minute, like he’d just chugged five Red Bulls.
“Charlie! We need to get that offer in,” he yelled, while nodding a frantic hello to the rest of us.
He ran Charlie through the math on what seemed to be some sort of real estate deal. Munger sat calmly listening as he listed off metrics I could barely follow:
“Location.”
“Doors.”
“Rent.”
“Good,” said Munger, after a moment. “Go ahead.”
The young man picked up his phone and began shouting terms into it as he strode out. And as quickly as he appeared, he was gone. The whole interaction took maybe sixty seconds.
Seeing the confused looks on our faces, Munger explained that this young man was one of his business partners, Avi Mayer, and he had just approved a multimillion-dollar deal to buy a building and that they owned apartment buildings together. Avi’s story was a remarkable one. It turned out that in the early 2000s, Avi, a neighborhood teenager, had shown up at Munger’s door with a Hebrew Bible, hoping to convert Munger to Judaism. While he had proved unsuccessful at converting Munger, the two had hit it off and Munger began to mentor him. Over time, they began purchasing buildings together. Now, a few years later, they owned thousands of apartment units worth over a billion dollars. Not too shabby for a side project started in his nineties with a neighborhood kid.
After that, we moved to the living room, where we were served strawberry shortcake for dessert and where the talk transitioned to us.
“So,” Munger said as he looked at me and Chris, “tell me about your business. Andrew Marks says you’re very smart.”
By chance, Chris had ended up sitting across from Munger, and so he was the one that took the lead, and while he was always confident in a business deal, given the audience, he somehow felt the need to stand up to explain our business strategy and the kinds of companies we liked to acquire. Munger barely flinched as Chris ran through our revenue and growth numbers, all of which were phenomenal by anyone’s standards. It was almost as if Chris were talking to a stone statue.
As Chris concluded, sitting down again, Munger simply said one word: “Good.”
Then, it was clearly my turn.
I stayed seated as I told Munger how I had always been entrepreneurial, and how in high school I was making thousands of dollars a week running an Apple news website out of my bedroom. How I dropped out of journalism school after three months and, while making $6.50 an hour as a barista, started MetaLab, which designed apps, and which, within the first few years, was making millions of dollars in revenue. “Then, Chris and I discovered you and Warren, and your investing philosophies,” I said, “which changed the course of our careers.”
Here, Chris took over once more, like we were a less funny Penn and Teller showing how a magic trick worked onstage. “Before long, we were buying up technology businesses. Not the kind favored by venture capitalists, the kind of companies some people would perceive as boring,” he said. “We like to joke that we own the dry cleaners and auto dealerships of the internet. Simple, profitable businesses that do something the world needs, purchased at a fair price. The founder either stays on, or we work together to find a new CEO, and then we just leave the company alone and hold forever, similar to what you do at Berkshire.”
I noticed as we were talking that Munger was still a stone statue. I couldn’t tell if he was unimpressed, or bored, or what.
Nothing seemed to faze him. He sat, arms crossed, head tilted downward, eyes staring away from us, almost as if we had just done a style of interpretive dance that he was still taking in and unsure how he felt about it. He was almost totally impassive in his demeanor. Then, I said something that seemed to catch his attention.
“We really like being quiet and private up in Canada,” I said, as Munger listened. “We don’t do many interviews.” Munger didn’t blink an eye. “And we have no intent on ever going public.”
This caught his attention.
“You guys seem smart, but being public has its benefits,” he said, leaning in.
“Why?” Chris asked. “Doesn’t it create a slew of problems?”
“No, no, no,” Munger said. “It creates a slew of opportunities.”
He started to rattle through a long list of reasons why being a public company can be ideal. He explained that “the man who taught Warren how to invest” at Columbia University was Benjamin Graham, who described the stock market as “Mr. Market,” a character whose mood swings depended on the news, the weather, and just about anything else that would put him in a good or bad mood. “Sometimes Mr. Market is fearful and undervalues your company. Other times, he’s euphoric, sending your stock to the moon, far beyond any sane valuation,” Munger explained. “This creates opportunities for investors. It gives you the ability to buy back your shares at a great price, or to use them to buy other companies. Being public is wonderful, if you do it right. The key is to avoid thinking about it too much, being honest and diligent, and slowly building a reputation for doing the right thing.”
This was all fascinating, even if I knew most of it from my years of reading about Berkshire Hathaway, but then Munger said something that made me almost fall out of my chair.
“Well, I have a problem you may find interesting. The majority of the Munger family’s wealth is in Berkshire Hathaway, but in the seventies my friend and I acquired a legal publishing business. Like most newspapers of the time, it made ungodly sums of cash, but since the early 2000s, it has been in decline. That company still exists, and it’s a public company called the Daily Journal Corporation, and I’m chairman. With the traditional publishing business in decline, we bought a legal software business, and that’s the future of the business. We also took some windfall profits from the publishing business during the financial crisis, and I bought some stocks that have since grown considerably. But I have a big problem.”
He waited for a beat, as if we were actors on a stage, reading from a script, and it was our line of dialogue.
“What’s the problem?” Chris and I asked at the same time, leaning forward.
“I’m too damned old! I’m ninety-seven, and the CEO is eighty-three!”
We all laughed.
Then, something happened that we hadn’t expected. First, he went very quiet—he was thinking, calculating, doing some sort of algebraic equation, and then he looked at us and said, “You know, there’s another way for you to go public.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Well, somebody needs to take over for us at Daily Journal. We could just merge our companies and you two could take the reins. You have all these wonderful technology businesses, and we have hundreds of millions of dollars that need investing and a software business that could use your expertise,” Munger said.
At that moment, it was as if someone had pressed a giant PAUSE button in my mind. Did Charlie Munger just say “merge” and “our” and “companies”? I had known flying down here that he wanted to talk to us about us helping him with his software business. I figured this was like Charlie asking his web whiz nephew for computer help. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that he would suggest merging our companies together.
I was shocked.
If you would have gone back in time a decade earlier and told me that ten years from now, in this very moment, I’d be sitting in Charlie Munger’s dining room, across from him in his $34.99 plaid shirt, and that, between bites of cake, he would ask me if I wanted to merge my company with his as peers, I’d have suggested you might need to check yourself into an institution. Forget going back a decade. Even just an hour earlier, as I took a deep breath on Munger’s front stoop, if you’d have told me this is where our dinner would end up, I would have told you to cut back on the ayahuasca ceremonies.
But here we were.
I scrambled to formulate an appropriate reply. “This sounds very interesting,” I said to Munger, smoothing my dessert napkin with shaking hands and trying to act as calm and collected as possible, when all I really wanted to do was jump on the table and scream euphoric expletives. Chris, who was clearly in the same shocked mindset as I was, went briefly catatonic, like someone had just punched him in the face and he wasn’t sure how to respond.
Munger looked between us like we were two bronze statues sitting on his mantel. “So?” he asked, pulling us both back into reality.
“How, um, how do you imagine it would be structured?” Chris asked.
Munger went on to outline how such a deal could work. For example, Chris and I might become majority owners of the new company, and Munger and the other Daily Journal shareholders would own the rest of the combined company. We’d be the public face of it; he’d stay on the board and coach us through it. We’d run all of the day-to-day operations, and we’d be able to enjoy the benefits of being a public company without the headaches of actually going public. He concluded by telling us to think it over.
As we left Munger’s house, we were giddy. Not only had we just dined with one of our business heroes, not only had he let us sip from the pool of his ninety-seven years of prophetic wisdom, but he also wanted to explore the idea of us, two random guys from Victoria, Canada, to take over the business he’d helped build. To pass the baton to us.
There, on Munger’s driveway, Chris and I jumped into the air and high-fived, like we were Maverick and Goose in the first Top Gun.
“Holy shit,” I said to Chris as we got in the car. “We’re going into business with Charlie Fucking Munger.”
At least, that’s what we thought was going to happen.