there's nothing wrong with leaving things to your kids to run.
that's the point of the effort after all.
warren as smart as he is was tryna go against the grain of thousands of human evolution. if you train your kids - then most likely they would've values similar to yours. hit or miss but most times a hit.
A lot of rich men, when younger, say that they will not leave so much of the wealth to their children. Then they get older and realize what other old men realized.
Which is what?
That it's a lot cooler saying noble things than actually DOING noble things.
Evolutionary psychology is stronger than whatever they thought previously.
Sad.
You only have to get rich once, you will not get rich for the second time, and opportunity to get rich occurs only once in every many generations.
We live in neo feudalism. The hard part is getting to a billion but once you do your family will be part of the elite for centuries.
What’s wrong with that? Are you more entitled to Warren Buffets billions than his children are?
Me personally? No. The labor whose value he extracted and hoarded through his investing? Yes, they are.
Don't grow old
These are jobs with titles we are talking about it says nothing about Buffets assets or will.
Yeah, the "upside" to nepotism is that, if you or your brother or your buddy did a good job raising the kid, you have someone who has had solid training for longer than it's possible for any other candidate to have had, and a better understanding of their character than you can get from interviewing another candidate a few times. Hiring Joe's kid is a no brainer, if you trust Joe, less risk of a really bad hire even if he doesn't turn out to be stellar.
The other downside of nepotism -- besides the risk that Joe did a shit job and won't admit it or maybe can't evaluate his kid objectively -- is that even if the kid is the bee's knees, a great hire, it's not really fair -- there's almost certainly other candidates who are just as good and trustworthy as Joe's kid but they can't compete with either Joe's kid. It doesn't really matter what sort of references or credentials a candidate can show you if you can serve as a reference for the other candidate. You can't really run a meritocracy like that.
for the downside - countless cultures have had preventative mechanism for that.
if your biological child is an idiot/wasteman - then you could adopt - the Roman Empire ran on adopted children, with biological children seen as wasteman.
the other way it's done e.g with Japanese businesses - again adopt your son in law and give him your surname.
the thing about giving helm to the sons - is usually you would've had a whole lifetime to evaluate the candidate 20+ years. do mistakes happen yeah, but honestly the risk is overblown.
>there's nothing wrong with leaving things to your kids to run.
where that's true or not, that's not what happened. this is more like "there's nothing wrong with trying to help your son in his career and getting him a job."
Berkshire Hathaway's market cap is a trillion, and Warren Buffet's net worth has never been close to that, i.e. it's not his company so he's not leaving it to his son to run.
You might admire Warren Buffet's acumen and think he'd be good at picking people, but all (for varying values of all) parents believe in their children so it's not easy to tell if you'd be getting his best advice in this case if you were another major shareholder in Berkshire.