Every year tens of thousands of shareholders in Berkshire Hathaway descend on Omaha, Nebraska for the “Woodstock for capitalists.” The rock stars they’ve come to see are two elderly giants of value investing, Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger. What exactly is the appeal?
To find out, Paul D. Glader, an associate professor of Journalism, Media and Entrepreneurship at The King’s College in New York, joined the crowds at the “church of Warren Buffet.” Glader writes about his experience for the inaugural entry in “Acton Longform,” our new feature writing project that “gives readers and journalists the space they need for stories about how we live today.”
Roughly 42,000 citizens and investors worldwide descend on Omaha, Neb., for one weekend every May to hear the homespun wisdom and gospel of wealth from 87-year-old billionaire and legendary investor Warren Buffett and his sidekick, 94-year-old Charlie Munger. As many as 5,000 Chinese Americans and mainland Chinese attended this past May. While corporate annual meetings are normally boring affairs, Buffett and Munger, have turned theirs into a festival of creativity that include ad agency quality videos, Saturday Night Live style skits and one-line zingers such as Munger calling cryptocurrencies “turds.”
