Subject: Re: Berkshire future returns
I kind of hate these discussions because it is of course impossible to know and you could take almost any period of time to skew it in whatever direction you wish to argue. It does however serve a useful purpose in getting the opposite opinion of the bull case which Berkshire shareholders (and me in particular) are certainly prone to.

With that said my guess is 8-10% long term. One thing that is completely unknown is future purchases that move the needle upward. With $377B in cash there will almost certainly be many purchases that do just that and I have a sneaking suspicion that Greg will be better at this than Warren. Let's be honest, late Warren purchases have not been very good and even with the poor recent track record the stock has appreciated at an acceptable clip long term. That's what investing in a well run company can do for you! Even the mistakes aren't all that bad when you're sitting on piles of cash.

Greg has beefed up legal which I assume is to take a keener eye at future purchases which Warren really didn't do. And while Warren was great at analyzing numbers & could move with speed the bottom line is the results in buying fully owned businesses have not been great the past 5-10 years. Perhaps I'm just hopeful Greg will be better but it is a different skillset than just buying undervalued equities which was really Warren's specialty. I think Greg will be better looking under the hood going in and fixing things up as an operator when the companies are under our umbrella. I know the CEO of one of our subs very well who reported to Greg and he was pretty glowing about Greg's ability to process all aspects of his business and identify areas for improvement.

One last thing, I know Greg has gone out of his way to talk about keeping our culture which for us as long term shareholders is vitally important but I think he will get us out of businesses that just aren't working, which Warren pretty much would never do. And we actually have some early proof of this with Greg's exiting of KHC.