There’s one thing Warren Buffett seems to credit for his success more than anything else: luck.
He’s says he’s lucky to have spent most of his life in Omaha, raising a family and building a business smack in the middle of the country. He’s lucky that was born in 1930 a white, male American. He’s lucky to be alive at 95. He’s lucky, he notes, to have drawn “a ridiculously long straw at birth.”
In fact, he’s such a lucky guy that he used some form of the word 12 times in his yearly Thanksgiving letter — a missive that will become his primary mode of public communication as he steps down as chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. at the end of the year. As part of the passing of the torch, he’ll no longer write the company’s annual letter to shareholders; instead, that job will fall to his successor, Greg Abel.
Buffett crediting his success to luck is likely a bit of a letdown for the disciples who pore over his writings, looking to absorb the investing principles that turned Berkshire into an enterprise valued at more than $1 trillion. It’s not exactly a factor that can be replicated in the market.
But if you read between the lines, Buffett’s harping on the role fortune has played in his life is worth heeding. “In many cases, our leaders and the rich have received far more than their share of luck — which, too often, the recipients prefer not to acknowledge,” he writes. You can’t reproduce the elements of chance that set Buffett on his path, but you can try to live his example of never falling for your own hype or the idea that your accomplishments are all of your own making.
It’s the long-straw-in-life mindset that has driven Buffett’s philanthropy — the latest of which is his gift of more than $1.3 billion to four family foundations. In his view, his giving is returning something to a system that allowed him to build enormous amounts of wealth.
However, that attitude is falling out of favor, especially with a cohort of the Silicon Valley elite. Instead, they seem to feel that they have contributed more to society through their world-saving technology than they ever received or hope to get back.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has summed up this philosophy best, writing in his 2023 blog post The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, “Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic, by a 50:1 ratio. Who gets more value from a new technology, the single company that makes it, or the millions or billions of people who use it to improve their lives? QED.”
This attitude is also seeping into how companies are run, as boards hand out ever-larger pay packages to CEOs who, far from acknowledging the role luck may have played in their success, insist they’ve earned every penny. Buffett notes that rather than embarrassing these richly compensated executives, pay disclosure rules have only led to envy and further inflated compensation. “What often bothers very wealthy CEOs,” he writes, “is that other CEOs are getting even richer.”
Buffett does not want those kinds of leaders in charge of Berkshire. Twice he writes in the letter that while the company’s managers will grow quite wealthy, they should not desire dynastic or “look-at-me” riches.
