Billionaire investor Mario Gabelli: Warren Buffett has created enormous wealth for his shareholders

Joining us right now is longtime Berkshire shareholder, Class A shareholder, I should add Mario Gabelli, who is the CEO of Gamcorp, GAMCO Investors and who’s been coming here for decades to this meeting, but who has known Warren Buffett since all the way back to the 1960s. Mario, this is a very different meeting because it’s the first one without Charlie. What are you looking for in this meeting? What do you think? Well, first of all, because of that, I want you to have your own personal peanut brittle so that you can think of Charlie when you’re on the stage this morning, Look, go back to the 60s when Warren left the hedge fund business and bought a business. The idea at that time was to buy businesses that you could buy for less than liquidation value kind of cigar. But investing. And as time evolved, he did other things. And then he gives full credit, full credit in his annual report to how Charlie said good businesses, good management and reasonable price. And then the question is what do we do next? What is Warren going to do because of all of his liquidity and the world that he’s in, in terms of the style of what he buys. So he’s buying pieces of companies much like we do in our portfolios. We have lots of little businesses that we think are OK and some don’t do well. We have our own equivalent. So that’s the question. The second part is that the world changes. You know he’s probably had more litigation dynamics in the last 90 you know year than he’s had in a long period of time prior to that. So he’ll adopt and he’ll do great. For example, last year he had a $15 billion of his holdings in Japan. He now has 25 billion even with the yen at 1:55. Last year the yen was 133. So what is he thinking about on a global basis? So that’s it. OK, so some of those questions, let’s jump into that. The litigation factor, Berkshire Hathaway Energy has been front and Center for for much of that and Warren wrote about that in the annual letter. Just the problems on a regulatory front. So what what do you see as the potential solutions for a problem like that? Are you you? There are going to always be issues. I happen to think more generic. In England, losing party pays. So therefore if you sue somebody and you lose, yes. And that would make a little bit more difference in terms of the focus and the attention because you think that these are not valid lawsuits. No, no, no, no, no, not with regards to Warren. But you’re talking more at a broader scope from Warren’s point of view, the notion of starting what goes on in the change in the climate and the impact on energy. The wildfire in West, TX recently, I forgot the name. What impact does that have? Assuming you had nothing to do with it, you’re still going to get probed. Assuming you have something. The challenges of having transmission. I’m a data center. I need electricity. I’m an EVI need electricity. Where’s electricity? Renewable. I want quality. I want new small nuclear reactors, a long way off. I want to have distribution. And by the way, I want it really cheap. Yeah, well, you don’t want the consumer to pay. So one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is I had a bank in the, you know, the 1930s. You had the movie and the banks go bust, but you had FDIC insurance funded by the other banks just like you saw the, you know, Republic First and First Republic. I forget which one was First the. And so why not have the, the those that own data centers like Apple put money into an insurance fund that if they’re taking energy from an area where there’s a wildfire or some kind of fire, they help fund it like the FDIC. So there’s a lot of things going on. So that’s Warren. He’s appropriate. If I can’t get, if I get tarred and feathered and I don’t get a return on investment, I have to think what’s morally right and what’s legally right and what’s financially right. So that’s what he’s going through. And as a shareholder you feel confident in all of this though it’s or what are you thinking as a long term ship Berkshire shareholder? Well, I would not have thought about the impact of what Pacific Gas and Electric went through because of the wildfires. The notion of having different climate at different points. I always thought about, you know, you’re going to have a hurricane, you’re going to have a tornado, you’re going to have an earthquake. But the notion of consistent damage to the environment maybe that your transmission is going through that it’s very hard to put it all on the ground. How else do we find distributed power? So I have it at my data center, my EV, without going through the system, but I that’s the minimus dynamic. And look at Warren Buffett, his book value that is gap generally accounted accepted principles. Book value is the largest of any company and he’s growing that And he’s got, if he has sits backs and does nothing and new ones, he’s making 5% T-bills, you know yesterday doing nothing after the market closed. I think he made $8 billion on the tick up of 10 points at Apple. You know, so sit back and say what businesses do I want to own? Where are they? How do we have the capitalism that allowed him to succeed? How do we keep that in place given the dynamics of the world and the dynamics of the United States? And then when a Le Bron James makes a lot of money or Taylor Swift makes a lot of money, we applaud that Ohtani playing for the LA Dodgers against the Atlanta Braves tonight. If they make a lot of money, if individuals create businesses, they should be applauded. And so Warren has created enormous wealth for 35,000 people who come here today and all of his shareholders and all the companies that works with. So we should applaud them. So that’s that’s it.