Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Munger was famous for his quote "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there."
Legendary investor Charles Munger died Tuesday at 99 years of age. But he can't really be dead. Because he has a book coming out on Amazon in a week. Munger died at a Los Angeles area hospital, after a short, undisclosed illness. He met Warren Buffet in 1959 at an Omaha dinner party, and was his lifelong investing partner.
“Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger” will be released on Amazon.com on December 5, 2023.
Munger was famous for his quote "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there." This thinking was inspired by the German mathematician Carl Jacobi who often solved difficult problems by following a simple strategy: man muss immer umkehren (or loosely translated, "invert, always invert.")
"[Jacobi] knew that it is in the nature of things that many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backward," Munger counsels. "Indeed, many problems can't be solved forward."
Munger was critical of cryptocurrencies, referring to Bitcoin in particular as "noxious poison". Munger also compared Robinhood to gambling, saying that its success is due to "people who know how to take advantage essentially of the gambling instincts of, not only American public, worldwide public" and further explained why he thinks individual investments without commission is tantamount to gambling. "If you cater to those gambling chips, when people have money in their pocket for the first time, and you tell them they can make 30 or 40 or 50 trades a day, and you're not charging them any commission, but you're selling their order flow or whatever, I hope we don't have more of it."
He has also said the use of cryptocurrency should be banned and said it was "beneath contempt"; that bitcoin was "stupid, "immoral," and "disgusting" and that "'It's like somebody else is trading turds and you decide, 'I can't be left out'"; and that it was like a venereal disease, among other things.
Munger was born in Omaha, Nebraska. As a teenager, he worked at Buffett and Son, a grocery store owned by Warren Buffett's grandfather, Ernest P. Buffett. His father, Alfred Case Munger, was a lawyer. His grandfather was Thomas Charles Munger, a U.S. district court judge and state representative.
He enrolled in the University of Michigan, where he studied mathematics. During his time in college, he joined the fraternity Sigma Phi Society. In early 1943, a few days after his 19th birthday, he dropped out of college to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, where he became a second lieutenant.[6] After receiving a high score on the Army General Classification Test, he was ordered to study meteorology at Caltech in Pasadena, California, the town he was to make his home.
Through the GI Bill Munger took a number of advanced courses through several universities. When he applied to his father's alma mater, Harvard Law School, the dean of admissions rejected him because Munger had not completed an undergraduate degree. However, the dean relented after a call from Roscoe Pound, the former dean of Harvard Law and a Munger family friend. Munger excelled in law school, graduating magna cum laude with a J.D. in 1948. At Harvard, he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.
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