Collection: Charlie Munger - #100 'All Great Companies Will Eventually Die'
[Transcript]
INTERVIEWER 00:00
But even so, in the companies that you deal with, some of them are market leaders at one point in time, and as you just suggested, some technological change or change in preferences will lead those companies to be with less of a market than they used to have for their products.
And so how does one think about this over the longterm? Because it’s an interesting –
CHARLIE MUNGER 00:23
Well, over the long term, the companies of America behave more like biology than they do anything else. And biology, all the individuals die and so do all the species, it’s just a question of time. And that’s pretty well what happens in the economy, too.
All the things that were really great when I were young have receded enormously, and new things have come up and some of them started to die. And that is what the long term investment climate is. And it does make it very interesting.
Look at what’s died. All the department stores, all the newspapers, US Steel, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil is a pale shadow of its former self. It’s just like biology.
INTERVIEWER 01:15
So –
CHARLIE MUNGER 01:15
They have their little time, and then they get clobbered.
(Source: https://youtu.be/WaDU1J91hY8)
