Buffett and Munger on Success, Toxicity and Elon Musk
The Berkshire Hathaway CEO, with business partner Charlie Munger, spent hours this weekend discussing life and career choices
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The question was a philosophical one: How should you avoid major mistakes in business and life?
Warren Buffett, the 92-year-old chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, paused briefly.
“You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it,” Mr. Buffett said. “It’s not that complicated.”
At Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting on Saturday, an event that draws thousands to Omaha, Neb., each spring, Mr. Buffett and his longtime business partner, Charlie Munger, spent hours weighing in on topics as varied as the recent banking turmoil to artificial intelligence and the future of the U.S. As is typical at such gatherings, the executives also doled out plenty of advice on management practices, career choices and how to enjoy a good life.
In prior years, Mr. Munger has heaped scorn on consultants, compensation specialists and what he described as make-work activities inside U.S. companies. This weekend, he directed his ire at wealth managers.
“Having a huge proportion of the young and brilliant people all going into wealth management is a crazy development in terms of its natural consequences for American civilisation,” Mr. Munger said. “We don’t need as many wealth managers as we have.”
He added: “I don’t think a bunch of bankers, all of whom are trying to get rich, leads to good things.”
Mr. Buffett, for his part, said he wanted to see greater accountability inside banks, saying that the recent crisis in the industry illustrated why executives and board members should face consequences if a business encounters problems.
“If the CEO gets the bank in trouble, both the CEO and the directors should suffer,” Mr. Buffett said. “You’ve got to have the penalties hit the people that cause the problems, and if they took risks that they shouldn’t have, it needs to fall on them if you’re going to change how people are going to behave in the future.”
Over hours of questions from investors and others, the two billionaires often peppered their answers with recommendations on how to navigate business. Mr. Buffett advised that people pay attention to how others might try to manipulate them.
He also encouraged those in attendance to resist the temptation to criticise or vilify others.
“I’ve never known anybody that was basically kind that died without friends,” Mr. Buffett said. “And I’ve known plenty of people with money that have died without friends.”
Mr. Munger said that success comes from steering clear of toxic people.
“The great lesson of life is get them the hell out of your life—and do it fast,” Mr. Munger said.
When hiring some of his top leaders over the years, Mr. Buffett said he has tried to suss out someone’s talents and not focus on whether they attended a prestigious institution.
“I have never looked at where anybody went to school in terms of hiring,” Mr. Buffett said. “If somebody mails me a résumé or something, I don’t care where they went to school.”
One of Mr. Buffett’s top lieutenants, Ajit Jain, studied at Harvard Business School, “but he isn’t Ajit because he went to those schools,” Mr. Buffett said.
Mr. Buffett graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and later studied under the legendary value investor Benjamin Graham at Columbia University. Mr. Munger, who is 99 years old, studied mathematics at the University of Michigan and meteorology at the California Institute of Technology, and went on to earn a law degree from Harvard University.
On artificial intelligence, Mr. Buffett said he had been impressed at generative AI’s abilities to summarise legal opinions and potentially take on other tasks, though he said he also worried about its potential consequences. “It can do all kinds of things, and when something can do all kinds of things, I get a little bit worried because I know we won’t be able to uninvent it,” Mr. Buffett said.
Mr. Munger said he was skeptical of some of the hype around artificial intelligence. “I think old-fashioned intelligence works pretty well,” he said.
Near the end of the meeting, an audience member asked the two billionaires to weigh in on Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO who took control of the social-media platform Twitter last year.
Mr. Buffett called Mr. Musk a “brilliant, brilliant guy,” who had a much different approach in dreaming about the future than the Berkshire executives. Mr. Buffett has often said he takes a hands-off approach to managing Berkshire’s subsidiaries, which range from the insurer Geico to the restaurant chain Dairy Queen. Mr. Musk is known for weighing in on the details at his companies.
“He would not have achieved what he has in life if he hadn’t tried for unreasonably extreme objectives,” Mr. Munger said of Mr. Musk. “He likes taking on the impossible job and doing it. We’re different: Warren and I are looking for the easy job.”
Mr. Buffett said he didn’t want to compete against Mr. Musk, to which Mr. Munger added: “We don’t want that much failure.”
Mr. Musk tweeted Saturday that he appreciated the “kind words from Warren & Charlie.”
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The Federal Budget may have softened some of its proposed tax reforms, but it has exposed a bigger issue: too many families are relying on wealth structures that no longer reflect the realities of modern life.
3 min
For many Australians, the 2026 Federal Budget initially felt like a direct challenge to the way wealth is created, held and transferred between generations.
The headlines were immediate: changes to capital gains tax, reforms to discretionary trusts, restrictions on negative gearing and increased scrutiny of investment structures. Unsurprisingly, affluent families, business owners and investors began asking the same question:
Is the way we hold our wealth still fit for purpose?
In recent days, the government has announced several significant amendments following industry consultation and public feedback, including exempting testamentary trusts from the proposed 30 per cent minimum tax and expanding capital gains tax concessions for small businesses.
The backdown is welcome. But it also highlights something much bigger.
This Budget has accelerated a conversation that many Australian families have been postponing for years.
The conversation is not really about tax. It is about wealth stewardship.
For decades, Australians have built wealth through businesses, property, investments and careful long-term planning. Yet many families have not revisited the legal structures surrounding those assets in years, sometimes decades.
We often see clients who have spent years building significant wealth, only to discover their legal arrangements no longer reflect their current circumstances.
Their children are now adults. They may own multiple properties.
They may have sold a business, entered a second marriage, become grandparents or accumulated digital assets that did not exist when their original estate plans were prepared.
The trust that distributes income may need to be reconsidered. The bucket company may no longer be so attractive.
The Budget has simply exposed a reality that already existed: wealth structures cannot remain static while life continues to evolve.
Importantly, trusts themselves are not the issue.
Trusts are legitimate planning tools that provide flexibility, protection and continuity. When used appropriately, they allow families to adapt to changing circumstances over time.
And neither is tax the issue, really. Getting the fundamentals right is more important for long-term, sustainable wealth than a few favourable tax treatments around the edges.
The real issue is complacency.
Too often, families create structures and assume the job is done. It isn’t.
Estate planning is no longer a document you sign once and file away in a drawer. It is an ongoing process that should evolve alongside your life.
We are also seeing a broader shift in how Australians define wealth itself. It is no longer just the family home and an investment portfolio.
Modern wealth includes businesses, digital assets, cryptocurrency, intellectual property, frequent flyer points and increasingly complex family arrangements.
At the same time, Australians are living longer than ever before, meaning wealth may need to support multiple generations simultaneously. This creates new responsibilities and new risks.
How do you help your children enter the property market without exposing family wealth to relationship breakdowns?
How do you structure wealth so that it remains a source of opportunity rather than future conflict?
These are the questions families should be asking now.
The recent debate surrounding testamentary trusts also serves as an important reminder that policy decisions can have unintended consequences for vulnerable Australians. It is encouraging that the government has listened to feedback and clarified its position.
But the lesson remains: the wealth landscape is changing.
Increasingly, governments, regulators and tax authorities are paying closer attention to how wealth is held and transferred. That means families cannot afford to adopt a “set-and-forget” approach to their structures.
The families who will be best placed for the future are not necessarily those with the greatest wealth.
They are the families with the greatest clarity. Clarity around ownership, succession and governance. And clarity around how wealth will transition from one generation to the next.
Ultimately, preserving wealth is not about avoiding change.
It is about preparing for it.
Because the greatest risk is not change itself.
It is losing the ability to respond to it.
Anthony Hunt is Co-Founder of Wealth Lawyers and former COO of Westpac Private Bank. He advises business owners, investors and affluent Australian families on wealth protection, succession planning and intergenerational wealth transfer
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