Originally asked
Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017
Vox's fixed 9 Questions format asks this verbatim across respondents.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 17 June 2017 source ↗
I’m prone to overexplaining things –- when my own understanding of them is shaky. The better I know something, the shorter my prose.
Ironically, though, this is also the purchase in which I made my biggest mistake - of a kind, however, never recognized on financial statements. We paid $600 million in 1989 for Gillette preferred shares that were convertible into 48 million (split-adjusted) common shares. Taking an alternative route with the $600 million, I probably could have purchased 60 million shares of common from the company. The market on the common was then about $10.50, and given that this would have been a huge private placement carrying important restrictions, I probably could have bought the stock at a discount of at least 5%. I can't be sure about this, but it's likely that Gillette's management would have been just as happy to have Berkshire opt for common. But I was far too clever to do that.
I question everything. This is also my greatest intellectual habit.
Impatience. My mind moves rapidly.
I disagree with virtually everything I’ve ever seen on Fox News, but I watch it anyway.
Lisa Randall, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Zeynep Tufekci, Warren Buffett, Courtney Maum, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Search the directory for somebody in particular.