Subject: Re: Net Worth of Group
I am from way back

Me three.

I was running a radio station in NBC Tower in Chicago in 1994. The Chicago Tribune Tower was about 100 yards away, and one day I got an invitation to come visit some fellows there, so I stopped by. Hidden on an upper floor in a small square room without windows there was a plus sign of cubicle walls smack in the middle, adding up to 4 work stations. It could have been a store room or worse, but a few calendars, memos, or other miscellanea were taped on the walls giving it some business-grunge hominess, and nestled in each of the four corners of the plus sign, a PC with the AOL program running, the screens glowing with the (soon to be) ubiquitous AOL splash screen.

After a demo and nice chat, they gave me a free account if I would add a “presence” of my radio station online, which I did. There was almost nothing to it; we were “all news”, no personalities, no promotions, just a non-stop faucet dribbling out a 22 minute cycle of headlines (none of which went on the app, such was the technology at the time) - but I got a free account out of it.

At the beginning AOL charged you by the minute, I lived through the switchover to monthly subscription; it didn’t matter, I had the master blaster free account of a “provider”, even though the reason for it had long since disappeared; I left the station in ‘95. Anyway, I played with the new toy and discovered (among other things) the chat room of the Motley Fool. It was fairly soon that I pulled out of my proprietary Dean Witter mutual funds, sold to me by the nice Dean Witter agent at the Dean Witter office with their high Dean Witter commissions and swell Dean Witter backend loads, and began buying my own stocks, and having discovered the addictive quality of being “on line” among my first purchases was a slug of AOL (through Charles Schwab.) I also discovered the joy of paying $29.95 for a trade instead of $140, but I digress.

I couldn’t place it exactly (well I suppose I could if I researched deep enough) but long about ‘96 or so I bought some Berkshire, probably around the time the B’s were created. I wasn’t buying in pieces big enough to get an A, but once the B’s came around (Warren’s hand was forced, I recall) I was in. I bought more along the way, although in the early days it was mostly AOL I was buying, it kept rocketing up and splitting, and I bought more, then more. Berkshire too, but in smaller numbers. A little Cisco, some Lucent, and few more traditional issues like McDonald’s and Walgreen.

Around 1999-2000 I sold every drop of the AOL (and most of the other stuff) and none of the Berkshire. I went on to buy a couple of A shares later in the 2000’s, and I’ve still never sold a single one. (I did downconvert those into B’s, the reason for which escapes me entirely.)

Tribune was an early investor in AOL - hence the grunge garage ethic of the room in the Tower, and I owe very much to that chance meeting - and to the Motley Fool for educating me that the priests of Wall Street don’t have some magical mystical goo, and of course to Warren, who has proven that you can be ethical, nice, and still be a genius in business and take your partners along with you.

He has given me quite a ride: more like a Greyhound Superliner than a 4G roller coaster, but one that I will happily lay back and enjoy, sleep well, and have an ever growing endowment for whichever charities I deign when the closing bell rings.