The Berkshire Hathaway CEO, with business partner Charlie Munger, spent hours this weekend discussing life and career choices
3 min
The question was a philosophical one: How should you avoid major mistakes in business and life?
Warren Buffett, the 92-year-old chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, paused briefly.
“You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it,” Mr. Buffett said. “It’s not that complicated.”
At Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting on Saturday, an event that draws thousands to Omaha, Neb., each spring, Mr. Buffett and his longtime business partner, Charlie Munger, spent hours weighing in on topics as varied as the recent banking turmoil to artificial intelligence and the future of the U.S. As is typical at such gatherings, the executives also doled out plenty of advice on management practices, career choices and how to enjoy a good life.
In prior years, Mr. Munger has heaped scorn on consultants, compensation specialists and what he described as make-work activities inside U.S. companies. This weekend, he directed his ire at wealth managers.
“Having a huge proportion of the young and brilliant people all going into wealth management is a crazy development in terms of its natural consequences for American civilisation,” Mr. Munger said. “We don’t need as many wealth managers as we have.”
He added: “I don’t think a bunch of bankers, all of whom are trying to get rich, leads to good things.”
Mr. Buffett, for his part, said he wanted to see greater accountability inside banks, saying that the recent crisis in the industry illustrated why executives and board members should face consequences if a business encounters problems.
“If the CEO gets the bank in trouble, both the CEO and the directors should suffer,” Mr. Buffett said. “You’ve got to have the penalties hit the people that cause the problems, and if they took risks that they shouldn’t have, it needs to fall on them if you’re going to change how people are going to behave in the future.”
Over hours of questions from investors and others, the two billionaires often peppered their answers with recommendations on how to navigate business. Mr. Buffett advised that people pay attention to how others might try to manipulate them.
He also encouraged those in attendance to resist the temptation to criticise or vilify others.
“I’ve never known anybody that was basically kind that died without friends,” Mr. Buffett said. “And I’ve known plenty of people with money that have died without friends.”
Mr. Munger said that success comes from steering clear of toxic people.
“The great lesson of life is get them the hell out of your life—and do it fast,” Mr. Munger said.
When hiring some of his top leaders over the years, Mr. Buffett said he has tried to suss out someone’s talents and not focus on whether they attended a prestigious institution.
“I have never looked at where anybody went to school in terms of hiring,” Mr. Buffett said. “If somebody mails me a résumé or something, I don’t care where they went to school.”
One of Mr. Buffett’s top lieutenants, Ajit Jain, studied at Harvard Business School, “but he isn’t Ajit because he went to those schools,” Mr. Buffett said.
Mr. Buffett graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and later studied under the legendary value investor Benjamin Graham at Columbia University. Mr. Munger, who is 99 years old, studied mathematics at the University of Michigan and meteorology at the California Institute of Technology, and went on to earn a law degree from Harvard University.
On artificial intelligence, Mr. Buffett said he had been impressed at generative AI’s abilities to summarise legal opinions and potentially take on other tasks, though he said he also worried about its potential consequences. “It can do all kinds of things, and when something can do all kinds of things, I get a little bit worried because I know we won’t be able to uninvent it,” Mr. Buffett said.
Mr. Munger said he was skeptical of some of the hype around artificial intelligence. “I think old-fashioned intelligence works pretty well,” he said.
Near the end of the meeting, an audience member asked the two billionaires to weigh in on Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO who took control of the social-media platform Twitter last year.
Mr. Buffett called Mr. Musk a “brilliant, brilliant guy,” who had a much different approach in dreaming about the future than the Berkshire executives. Mr. Buffett has often said he takes a hands-off approach to managing Berkshire’s subsidiaries, which range from the insurer Geico to the restaurant chain Dairy Queen. Mr. Musk is known for weighing in on the details at his companies.
“He would not have achieved what he has in life if he hadn’t tried for unreasonably extreme objectives,” Mr. Munger said of Mr. Musk. “He likes taking on the impossible job and doing it. We’re different: Warren and I are looking for the easy job.”
Mr. Buffett said he didn’t want to compete against Mr. Musk, to which Mr. Munger added: “We don’t want that much failure.”
Mr. Musk tweeted Saturday that he appreciated the “kind words from Warren & Charlie.”
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Rugged coastal drives and fireside drams define a slow, indulgent journey through Scotland’s far north.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
