
Warren Buffett: Buying Berkshire Hathaway Was $200 Billion Blunder - px
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Warren-Buffett-Buying-cnbc-1784378699.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=
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zach
Once I heard a story about Disney buying ABC (quotes not exact).

DreamWorks had hired some of Eisner's top guys producing TV animation and had
a deal lined up to produce a slate of shows for ABC's Saturday morning lineup,
which was a big deal in the mid-90s for a just-starting studio like
DreamWorks. Of course, when Disney bought ABC, that deal quietly came to a
end, and eventually so did DreamWorks' TV animation department.

Jeffrey Katzenberg was asked by one of his staff why he thought Disney bought
ABC. He was convinced that what Eisner most wanted was to take the ABC
Saturday morning lineup away from DreamWorks -- to torpedo one of Jeffrey's
first deals at his new company.

The staff member said, "But come on, this is business, this is a nineteen
billion dollar deal! Nobody pays billions of dollars in order to personally
screw someone over." Jeffrey laughed and replied, "No, when it's that much
money, it's _always_ personal."

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tedunangst
Your story is a little hard to follow because you have both ABC buying Disney
and Disney buying ABC.

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zach
Wow, you're right. Fixed it, thanks.

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jpwagner
He was right about the error, but wrong about it being hard to follow.

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zach
Thanks. I heard it from the person involved fifteen years ago and hadn't told
the story before, so I'm glad it still came out well.

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joshu
Or maybe he wouldn't have learned necessary and important lessons if he hadn't
bought the textile business.

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cynicalkane
Learning lessons is good, but it's preferable to not blow a significant
fraction of your net worth learning something you'd probably have learned
anyway.

~~~
jimbokun
Sometimes the lesson isn't really learned any other way.

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jonhendry
His comment about if you come back in ten years he might have another...

Is that a reference to his puts on S&P and other indexes?

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hristov
No, it is his usual humbleness. If you read his letters to the shareholders he
is always willing to admit a mistake and is always tries to dispel all of the
myths that he is some kind of an "oracle" that can see the future.

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jonhendry
Right, but his puts run for another ten years, or thereabouts.

So when that time rolls around, we'll see if his big bet on derivatives was a
mistake or not.

So I was wondering if he was alluding to that in particular.

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hieronymusN
It's nice to know that the Sage of Omaha is/was just as prone to irrational
behavior as every other CEO.

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dfranke
How is that nice to know? It'd be much more edifying if he were rich precisely
because he _doesn't_ make this kind of mistake.

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elai
Because it makes you feel that it's possible for you too to make it and still
make mistakes.

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Estragon
Success like Buffet's is so adventitious, you can't make much of counter-
factuals like that. For instance, it has probably been helpful to have his
biggest-ever emotion-driven mistake staring him in the face, day after day.

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GFischer
The link initially redirected me to the Yahoo search page (maybe because I'm
in Uruguay)

I was able to navigate to the news from there, but it's still odd (now the
link here at HN works for me).

