Mario Vicari

Strategist, Advocate and Advisor to Private and Family Businesses

[Investment Wisdom @InvestingCanons]

Warren Buffett:

“All these economists with 160 IQs and spending their life studying it. And can you name me one super wealthy economist who’s ever earned money out of securities? No.”

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

Amid all the predictable seething jealousy and bitter resentment to this news, I’d like to congratulate @elonmusk on an astounding achievement. He’s got there by being the most driven, creative, hard-working and ambitious business genius in history. Salut, Elon! 👏👏

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it.

But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

[Brad Gerstner @altcap]

Legend. Thank you @Gwynne_Shotwell from a grateful nation. Your unrelenting drive to put America back on top in space will never be forgotten! 🇺🇸🚀

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Thank you! 🚀🚀🚀

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Never give up

[Tony Davis @tony_davis_x]

@DavidSacks Totally agree and wrote this article on it last night

https://t.co/sAPGIoKdJj

[Mario Vicari @mariovicari]

@Matt_Pinner 20

[Mario Vicari @mariovicari]

@M_W_Palmer @ASI There are various editions of this book published and it is not clear they are all the same. Which publisher do you recommend?

[Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff]

PepsiCo spent $2.8 million last year lobbying to keep junk food eligible for food stamps. Then RFK got 18 states to ban SNAP purchases of soda, candy, and processed snacks. Within a week, PepsiCo cut Doritos, Lay's, and Tostitos prices by up to 15%. The CEO blamed "affordability." But the timing tells the real story. SNAP is a $100 billion-a-year program. According to the USDA, 20 cents of every SNAP dollar goes to junk food. Frito-Lay products appeared in 7.2% of all SNAP shopping trips.

The moment the government stopped subsidizing demand, PepsiCo had to compete on price. No regulation. No price caps. No antitrust probe. The subsidy disappeared, and the market corrected overnight.

Now consider that this same pattern — government money in, prices up — plays out in college tuition, healthcare, defense, and every other industry with a guaranteed government buyer. Federal spending is nearly a quarter of the entire economy. All of it inflating prices. All of it eroding your purchasing power.
Central banks see the same math. That's why they're dumping dollars and buying gold. The gold companies we cover in our investment research newsletter Strategic Assets are earning record profits at these prices — some trading at just 3-4x earnings.

https://t.co/rQjQPHOY0p

[Christopher Bloomstran @ChrisBloomstran]

Warren Buffett retires today, most likely in his mind at the closing bell, just minutes from now.

Congratulations to the greatest investor the world will ever know. The returns speak for themselves - Berkshire earned 6,118,651% or 19.9% annually over his 60 years running the company. The S&P 500 returned 46,491%, or 10.4%. Berkshire’s shares could decline by 99.2% and still have outperformed the market. The record is even greater when including the partnerships he ran through 1969.

However, it is not the returns but the way Warren did it that matters most; with integrity and morality - and with humility and humor. He didn’t have to teach, but he did. On behalf of so many of us, thank you, sir.

[Christopher Bloomstran @ChrisBloomstran]

Berkshire Hathaway reported very solid 3Q earnings this morning. I’m glad I’m not the analyst who downgraded Berkshire this week expecting weak earnings! 😃 Operating earnings rose 17.6% against 2024’s third quarter, properly excluding currency fluctuations on its borrowing in three foreign currencies. Most will report that operating earnings rose 33.7% The dollar rose slightly for the quarter and declined by much more a year ago.

Cash increased to $358.4 billion, NOT the $381.7 billion which most will report. The correct lower figure nets out a $23.2 billion liability for Treasury bills purchased on the last day of the quarter. Most observers simply use cash and bills reported on the asset side of the balance sheet and neglect the occasional payable. I dream of the day that Berkshire spends all of its cash on a T-bill on the last day of a quarter or year.

Firmwide assets exceeded $1.2 trillion for the first time with book value climbing to $698 billion.

Berkshire was again a net seller of common stocks, selling a net $6.1 billion for the quarter and $10.6 billion YTD.

No shares were repurchased. I’d thought they might have bought a bit when the stock retreated from its highs. At its August lows the stock was fundamentally undervalued to the same degree as when BRK last repurchased shares in 2Q 2024.

Overall profitability was terrific. Insurance underwriting was terrific. GEICO posted nearly $1.8 billion of underwriting profit, an 84.3% combined ratio (versus 81.0% last year) and 5% growth in both premiums and policies in force. Until combined ratios climb to the high 90s or breakeven for the private passenger auto insurance industry, no insurance commission will grant price increases. In other words, insurers will over earn until loss cost inflation erodes profitability back to more normal levels. BH Primary earned $506 million pretax, a solid 89.3% combined, against losses a year ago while Berkshire’s reinsurance group earned $884 million in a quarter devoid of material catastrophe losses.

Investment income predictably declined as short-term interest rates fell.

Berkshire’s manufacturing, service and retail businesses rose an impressive 8.2% for the quarter and 4.8% year to date with notable contributions from Precision Castparts and Marmon.

The railroad continues to improve with modest increases in car loadings and core pricing gains. Room remains on improving operations and overhead.

The only real weak spot across Berkshire’s main subsidiaries was in the energy business, where an additional $100 million accrual for 2020’s PacifiCorp wildfire litigation, increasing operating expenses and a lower tax benefit combined to harm reported results.

Overall solid albeit quiet quarter. The recent small (for Berkshire) $9.7 billion announced acquisition of OxyChem from Occidental is a nice bolt-on deal, essentially paying about 10x mid-cycle free cash earnings for well-maintained chlor alkali assets.

With one quarter remaining until Warren passes the baton to Greg Abel, Berkshire is in good shape and in good hands.

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas has released a video of how how AI and humanoid robots will change the world.

[Mario Vicari @mariovicari]

@ChrisBloomstran Great analysis - Thanks!

[Mario Vicari @mariovicari]

@MindshopOnline @EmilyMindshop Congrats Emily!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

🕵️‍♂️

[Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd]

.@elonmusk: "One of the biggest fraud holes we've uncovered ... is that the government can give money to a so called nonprofit ... They then give themselves ... insane salaries, expense everything, buy jets and homes ... on the taxpayer dime ... This is happening at scale."

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

🎯🎯

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

https://t.co/6kreKPOn0N

[Ford Coleman @fordcoleman_]

The Airbnb Résumé That Broke the Internet.

Nina threw out her resume and created something so genius, it impressed top execs and sparked a global conversation.

Here's how she stunned the CEO of Airbnb: