Charlie Munger, the billionaire real estate lawyer and Warren Buffett’s partner for nearly 60 years at Berkshire Hathaway, has died. He was 99 years old.
The Los Angeles investor died Tuesday at an unidentified California hospital, just shy of his 100th birthday on New Year’s Day, CNBC reported.
“We could not have built Berkshire Hathaway to where it is today without Charlie’s inspiration, wisdom and participation,” Buffett said in a statement.
In addition to serving as Berkshire’s vice chairman, Mr. Munger was also a real estate attorney, chairman and publisher of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a member of the Costco board of directors, a philanthropist, and an amateur architect.
Mr. Munger was Berkshire’s vice chairman and one of its largest shareholders, with a stock value of about $2.2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. According to Forbes, his net worth was approximately $2.6 billion.
Buffett credited Munger with expanding his investment strategy from prioritizing low-priced, troubled companies in hopes of making a profit to focusing on high-quality but undervalued companies.
The Nebraska native was Buffett’s right-hand man, also a Nebraska native, who said he never made a major investment decision without consulting Munger. Together, they built Berkshire Hathaway into a global powerhouse.
Berkshire, with more than $1 trillion in assets, owns companies such as See’s Candies, insurance company Geico, BNSF Railway, Fruit of the Loom and Dairy Queen. The company owns the housing brokerage firm Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices.
Charles Thomas Munger was born January 1, 1924 in Omaha to Al and Florence Munger. His father was a lawyer. His grandfather was a federal judge.
Munger never graduated from college, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1948 and then moving to California to practice real estate law.
He soon began developing real estate in partnership with Franklin Otis Booth, a member of the founding family of the Los Angeles Times.
Among their early developments was a lucrative condominium project on Booth’s grandfather’s property in Pasadena.
“I had five real estate projects,” Munger told Scott DeRue, dean of the Michigan Ross School of Business. “I did both in parallel for several years, and in just a few years I made $3 million. [to] Four million dollars. ”
In 1978, he became vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. A fusion of ideas with Buffett focused on value investing, which selects stocks that are believed to be undervalued based on a company’s long-term fundamentals.
“All smart investing is value investing, and you get more than you pay for,” Munger once said. “You have to value the business to value the stock.”
According to his critics, he had a keen eye for architecture, but not so much for design.
Munger donated hundreds of millions of dollars to top schools such as the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and Harvard Law School, often requiring them to accept Munger’s architectural designs, even though he was not formally trained as an architect. .
When Munger built the science center at Harvard-Westlake Preparatory School in Los Angeles, where he served as a board member for decades, he ensured that the women’s restrooms were larger than the men’s restrooms.
“When I go to football games or functions, there’s always a huge line outside the women’s bathroom. Who doesn’t know that they pee differently than men?” Munger said in 2019. He told the Wall Street Journal: The answer is an ordinary architect! ”
He also attempted to create a large dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called Domzilla. But after nearly two years of controversy, the school withdrew its plans for a controversial dormitory funded and designed by the homegrown billionaire. The $1.5 billion dormitory by the sea has few windows, and critics have compared it to a prison, a Soviet hotel complex, or worse.
“It’s just nonsense,” Munger said. Authentic. “ridiculous.”
The real estate attorney, who started his career in real estate before founding the Los Angeles-based law firm Munger Tolles & Olson, also seems to have some frustrations when it comes to real estate.
“A lot of real estate isn’t very good anymore,” Munger told the Financial Times in April. “We have a lot of problem office buildings, problem shopping centers and other problem properties.
“There’s a lot of suffering out there.”
Munger owned real estate in Pasadena and a relatively modest home in Hancock Park, Los Angeles. In 2021, he bought a 4,700-square-foot home for $11 million in the gated Sea Meadows community in Montecito, which he helped develop 30 years ago.
— Dana Bartholomew