Charlie Munger: The Investment Opportunity of a Lifetime | Collection: Charlie Munger #309

[Transcript]

BECKY QUICK

In a previous shareholder meeting back around 2018, you spoke about BYD and said Journal Technologies is not quite BYD, but added that — by the way, it might work out just like BYD. Now a few years on, do you still find Journal Technologies can turn out similar to BYD?

CHARLIE MUNGER

Well, it won’t be as fast. That I guarantee you, and I won’t be as great — I can also practically guarantee that. BYD is one of the most remarkable venture capital-type successes in the history of the world. He was the eighth son of a peasant. He had an older brother who recognized that his younger brother was a genius. And the older brother sacrificed himself to get this peasant son into some good engineering school, and he became an engineering professor and then an entrepreneur. And how many times you get a story like that? And imagine buying a little bankrupt auto company in China and turning it into something that this year, they’re going to sell more electrical cars than anybody else in the world, at a time when electrical cars are hot. And — it’s a remarkable story, but again, a very unusual human being Wang Chuanfu. And by the way, in his case, it wouldn’t have happened if Wang Chuanfu hadn’t been so unusual.

BECKY QUICK

Unusual how?

CHARLIE MUNGER

He’s a goddamn genius — he's damn genius. And he’s been thinking about the right things, 17 hours a day all his life. He’s a workaholic and he can do things that ordinary human beings can’t do.

BECKY QUICK

Is that the favorite stock you ever purchased? BYD or Costco?

CHARLIE MUNGER

Well, I would say — Yes, I have never helped do anything at Berkshire that was as good as BYD, and I only did it once. (Laughs) Our $270,000 investment there is worth about $8 billion now or maybe $9 billion. That’s a pretty good rate of return.

BECKY QUICK

Yeah. It’s more than pretty good.

CHARLIE MUNGER

Yes. We don’t do it all the time. We do it once in a lifetime. Now we have had some others successes, too, but — but I don’t think hardly anything like that. We made one better investment. You know what it was? We paid an executive recruiter to get us an employee, and he came out with Ajit Jain. The return that Ajit has made us compared to the amount we paid the executive recruiter. That was our best investment at Berkshire, which was paying an executive recruitment firm to get us Ajit Jain. But again, only happened once.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/9VVPO3KWj3A?feature=share)

---

[YAPSS Takeaway]

Great opportunity don't come everyday.