Warren Buffett is well known as a nice and lovable gentleman. For decades Buffett shows that allocating capital in the game of investment can be really fun. After all, he’s in love with his job at Berkshire. So what’s the secret to Warren Buffett’s investment success?
Whenever the world’s third richest man makes his calculated investment, Warren Buffett chooses ruthless and aggressive cost-cutting CEO’s to manage his companies. That’s the key ingredient to create his $78.5 billion net worth.
Buffett is a classic success story about capitalist. On the outside he’s a nice guy, but he intentionally picked ruthlessly millionaire lieutenants to manage his extensive businesses. For instance, one of his superstar CEOs, Mark Donegan, lead a company that Buffett bought for $37 billion. As profiled by Bloomberg: “Those who know the CEO best describe a manager who’s highly effective but at times strains basic decency. These people, most of whom asked that their names not be used for fear of retaliation, say they have witnessed Donegan using profanity and violent language. One heard him threaten to stab someone in the eyes with a pencil. Another says the CEO threatened to rip an employee’s arms off so he could hit the person with the bloody stumps. On more than one occasion, the people say, he has called male employees ‘c—ts.’ His yelling could be so loud that sometimes staff would avoid that portion of the office during reviews, they say.”
To be so successful in the world of investment, Buffett carefully handpicked brutal CEOs who wring expenses out of their businesses and treat employees as numbers to squeeze out the most profit for shareholders. One of his fans questioned about how Buffett’s tough embrace of ruthless bosses was compatible with his feel-good business principles that he preached. Buffett defended his choice of those men that brought him billions by extolling the virtues of efficiency and productivity. After all, those virtues are “the all-important factor in America’s economic growth over the past 240 years,” he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.
It’s really nice to be super rich and let other guys do the dirty works.