Keep the Ambition, Lower Your Ego. How to Thrive as a No. 2 Like Charlie Munger.

Charlie Munger was Robin to Warren Buffett’s Batman, a business equivalent of the Edge rocking with the Bono of investing.

Munger, who died Tuesday at age 99, played one of the toughest roles in the corporate (or any) world: No. 2.

Succeeding as second in command takes a rare blend of confidence and humility, say people who’ve done it. The consummate right-hand person must be devoted to organizational success while accepting that someone else’s star will always shine brighter.

At a time when many American workers are reconsidering whether the race to the top is worth running at all, Munger’s apparent satisfaction with being the ultimate sidekick could be a model.

It helped that Warren and Charlie, as the duo was known, shared a personal friendship. And being a wingman is presumably more fun when you’re a billionaire, as Munger was. Most important, say those who knew him: Munger knew he was respected and appreciated.

Buffett made sure of it.

Harry Kraemer, former chief executive of the healthcare company Baxter International, recalls a conversation with Buffett at a CEO gathering around the year 2000: “I said, ‘Boy, you’ve got an amazing track record.’ And he goes, ‘It isn’t just me. Never mention my name without Charlie’s.’”

In a recent annual letter, Buffett wrote: “I never have a phone call with Charlie without learning something.”

There aren’t many pairs like Buffett and Munger. An analog might be the late Canadian telecom mogul Ted Rogers and his longtime lieutenant, Phil Lind, who died in August at age 80. Robert Brehl, who co-wrote Lind’s 2018 memoir, “Right Hand Man,” says loyalty is essential to a relationship like Rogers-Lind or Buffett-Munger.

Having complementary strengths and interests helps ward off resentment, Brehl adds.

“You have to have the yin and yang,” he says. “Ted wouldn’t have been as effective without Phil, and the same thing with Warren and Charlie.”

Before meeting Buffett, Munger was already a professional success. He served in World War II, went to Harvard Law School and co-founded a law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson, where his name was first on the door.

Even though his results as an investor were strong, over time, he realised he could be more successful—and happier—in a partnership. Understanding his own shortcomings contributed to his willingness to become Buffett’s running mate, he has said. He rejected Buffett’s initial overtures before agreeing to come aboard.

“It took me a long time to wise up that [Buffett] had a better way of making a living than I did,” Munger told CNBC in 2021. “But he finally convinced me that I was wasting my time.”

Not that it was easy to set aside his ego to take the No. 2 role and play to what his No. 1 needed. Buffett was Berkshire Hathaway’s public face and larger-than-life persona. Munger seemed to relish his freedom from talking to reporters and investors. In the background, he could be sharper, more direct and funnier.

The durability of the Buffett-and-Munger duo act stemmed, in part, from a shared intellectual curiosity, a measure of humility—for billionaires, anyway—and willingness to learn from their mistakes.

“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines,” Munger said in his commencement address to the University of Southern California’s law school in 2007. “They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and, boy, does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

Savvy runners also know it can be best to let someone else take the lead to break the wind. A certain type of person prefers to run second, says social psychologist Tessa West, who is studying people she calls “runners up” for a forthcoming book.

“Once you get to a certain level of power, you realise that that top position doesn’t necessarily come with more influence—it just comes with more publicity and a lot more reputational risk,” she says. “The way I see it, Munger got to have his cake and eat it too. He had status without all the headaches.”

He also had a life outside of Berkshire and Buffett. One of Munger’s pet projects was a quest to design the perfect college dormitory.

He’ll be remembered as the consummate consigliere, but that wasn’t his whole identity.

—Geoffrey Rogow contributed to this article.

Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.

When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.

The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.

But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.

Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.

After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.

“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”

The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.

Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.

In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.

Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.

“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”

Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.

“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.

The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.

The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.

In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.

Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.

Keep the Ambition, Lower Your Ego. How to Thrive as a No. 2 Like Charlie Munger.

Warren Buffett’s longtime deputy showed that rising to the top isn’t everything

Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.