Piecing Together Berkshire Hathaway's 1989 Annual Shareholders Meeting
“If someone asked me how to make the most money,” said Buffett, “I’d hold my nose and point to Wall Street.”
Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting had already come a long way by 1989.
Just a few years earlier, the headcount barely cracked a dozen. Everyone who showed up fit comfortably inside National Indemnity’s employee cafeteria. A modest gathering of true Berkshire believers who were likely all on a first name basis.
But, as the decade drew to a close, that era had well and truly ended.
On April 24, 1989, roughly a thousand Berkshire shareholders descended on the Witherspoon Concert Hall at Omaha’s Joslyn Art Museum. Cars jammed the parking lot. People pressed into the lobby. And the overflow crowded into the balcony.
All of them there to hear Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
Buffett surveyed the improbable scene. “A lot more people turn out to talk about their money than to look at old paintings,” he marveled.
For more than two hours, Berkshire’s dynamic duo held court — fielding twenty-two questions by the Omaha World-Herald’s count — and then lingered at the foot of the stage for another forty-five minutes afterwards, kibitzing with shareholders not yet ready to call it a day.
What follows is my best attempt at reconstructing this meeting — assembled from contemporary newspaper accounts and the occasional illuminating detail drawn from the excellent University of Berkshire Hathaway.
Alas, our canvas is sadly incomplete. Many questions and answers lost to time, swallowed by the passing years before anyone thought to preserve them in full.
But even a partial portrait of Buffett and Munger in their prime is worth framing.
“If I Died Tonight…”
It wouldn’t be a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting without someone raising the question of succession — and 1989 was no exception.
Buffett didn’t even flinch.
“If I died tonight,” he said, the answer was simple: “Charlie would take over and the stock would go up.” In the event that both of them kicked off, they had someone — an unnamed “third person” — in mind to step in and steward shareholders’ capital with the same values, discipline, and long-term approach that had long defined Berkshire.
But, as always, they politely declined to say who that successor might be.
In the post-meeting scrum at the foot of the stage, shareholders pressed for a name.
“It’s a mystery,” said Charlie.
And all Buffett would add is that “the name is not ‘third person’.”