Todd Combs on Charlie Munger's Legacy || Q&A Transcript (2024)
"Charlie didn’t have any noise. He just didn’t have any noise. It was all signal."
Shortly before the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting in May, investment manager Todd Combs hopped on the Value Investing with Legends podcast to discuss the many lessons and insights that he learned from Charlie Munger.
Over the past few weeks, I transcribed (and lightly annotated) his remarks for posterity and future study.
A few notes:
Each transcript is done entirely by hand — with no AI or software assistance — so any and all mistakes are my own.
I added footnotes — 18 in all — to provide additional information at relevant points. Hopefully, these will prove useful to readers.
The full transcript is available to all paid supporters. Free subscribers have access to the first 2,000-ish words. (That’s longer than the typical Kingswell article.)
I’ve tried to do my best to ensure that no one feels short-changed.
I summarized some of the questions to save space. All of Todd’s answers are transcribed verbatim.
Become a paid supporter today and receive immediate access to this transcript — along with twelve other annotated transcripts full of wit and wisdom from the top names at Berkshire Hathaway.
Now, without further ado, here is the complete transcript of Todd Combs’s interview on Value Investing with Legends from earlier this year…
Michael Mauboussin: Welcome to a new edition of the Value Investing with Legends podcast. My name is Michael Mauboussin1 and I’m an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and a faculty member at the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing. I’m here with my co-host, Tano Santos, the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management & Finance at Columbia Business School and the faculty director at the Heilbrunn Center. Hi Tano, how are you today?
Tano Santos: I’m doing great.
MM: I understand that you have a group of students and alumni in Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. It’s going to be a little bit different this year, isn’t it?
TS: It’s going to be a bit different. It’s going to be a bit sadder. On the side of Columbia, as you know, every year we hold the Omaha dinner formally known as the “From Graham to Buffett and Beyond” dinner.2 We do it every year at the Berkshire shareholder meeting. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see old friends, students, alums — and, yes, many of the students come and attend the shareholder meeting. We organize a little get-together for them and alums. Warren actually was kind enough to show up and meet them one year not that long ago — so it’s always a lot of fun.
MM: In this episode, we’re going to do something different. We’re going to take some time to celebrate the life and contributions of Charlie Munger. Munger, who was the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, died in late November 2023, just a month shy of his 100th birthday. He was an extraordinary man who made an indelible mark on Berkshire Hathaway and, indeed, the whole investment world.
In a very touching tribute to Munger in the 2023 annual report, Warren Buffett called Charlie the “architect” of the present Berkshire Hathaway and he, Warren Buffett, acted as the general contractor to carry out the day-to-day construction of Charlie’s vision.3
To help us honor Charlie Munger’s memory, we are delighted to welcome Todd Combs, an investment officer at Berkshire Hathaway and chairman, president, and CEO of GEICO. Prior to joining Berkshire Hathaway in 2010, Mr. Combs was the CEO and managing member of Castle Point Capital Management, an investment partnership he founded in 2005. Mr. Combs also serves on multiple boards of directors including that of JPMorgan.4 Importantly, from our point of view, Todd is a graduate of the Columbia Business School.
Welcome, Todd! Thank you very much for being here. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your reflections on the incredible life of Charlie Munger.
Todd Combs: Thanks so much. It’s great to be here.
MM: Perhaps we can just start at the top. Can you tell the story of how you first met Charlie Munger and your first impressions of meeting him in person?
TC: Yeah. Thanks so much, Michael and Tano. I met him in the summer of 2010. I had been running a partnership for about five years, through the Global Financial Crisis, and we had done quite well.5 I was going to purchase an insurance company and I wouldn’t even begin to say try to emulate Berkshire Hathaway, but it certainly [would have been similar] with respect to long-term capital and not having monthly results and so forth. And, obviously, Warren has talked extensively about the concept of float.
I met Charlie in the summer of 2010 at The California Club. I had a 7 a.m. breakfast — which I was obviously very nervous about — and he was completely charming and disarming. So much so that we sat there for six or so hours. It ran all the way through lunch. They had gone and cleared all the breakfast tables and were serving lunch, so we had one-and-a-half meals or what have you and talked about everything — from investing, a lot, he’s obviously quite a renaissance man. We talked a lot about the sciences and just life in general. So that’s how we met.6
MM: As a follow-up to that, were you surprised that he was interested and happy to talk about life as well as investing? Were you anticipating that he would just talk about investing?
TC: That’s a good follow-up because I was a little surprised. I had the same exposure everyone else had to him at that point via the Daily Journal and Berkshire meetings, so I was not surprised in his breadth and depth and bandwidth. Obviously, everyone’s very familiar and can see that — it’s part of what endears [him to us] — but I was surprised that we talked a lot about family. My kids were young then and I asked him about a lot of advice and what his lessons were for raising his children, so we talked extensively about that.
He not only had a deep reservoir of knowledge on all of these topics, but he also genuinely cared. He would ask me questions. It wasn’t him just pontificating or lecturing or what have you. It was very much a two-way conversation. That probably took me [by surprise] as much as anything.
MM: After you had that conversation, did he call up Warren and say, “I’ve got a guy you’ve got to talk to for us to consider hiring!”?
TC: Interestingly, I don’t know exactly when he first called Warren. I’ve oddly never talked to them about this. I went home and he said, “Let’s stay in touch.” That’s how we kind of ended the six or so hour session — and I kind of assumed that I might never hear from him again. It was just a nice, natural way to end the conversation.
And, about a week later, I was sitting in my office in Connecticut where I was still running my fund and he called. Costco had just reported results and even though I was running a financial services fund, I actually had looked at them because I looked at a lot of things. We sat and we talked on the phone for a couple hours at least.
At the end of that, he said, “It would be great to meet you again in person. Do you have plans to be out [in California]?” I usually got out to California once a year or something like that, I was sitting in Greenwich, Connecticut. So, obviously, I made plans to go see him again. It was a week or two later that I got back out there. And same thing — we did a five or six hour deal at The California Club.
And, long story short, we then ended up talking over the phone and meeting in person [several more times] — and one of those times, probably late that summer, he said, “You should give Warren a call. You’ve really got to meet Warren.” So I kind of assumed, at that point, that somewhere in the interim from the beginning to that point he had spoken to Warren.7
TS: One of the things that is striking about Charlie Munger’s interviews is that he really thinks about the question he’s being asked — and he answers the question he’s being asked. You may not like the answer, but he would answer it. He thought about it and he evaluated the question on its merits. It was a wonderful intellectual attitude that he had. I thought it was impressive.