Below are 30 annotations on the 2025 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, recording several things that are worth revisiting repeatedly.
1. Japan investment: use facts to judge cultural receptivity
【3.Interest rates in Japan】
Warren Buffett:
"Japan's record has been extraordinary. My guess is that Tim Cook would tell you that iPhone sales there are about as great as any country outside the United States. American Express would tell you that they sell their product very, very well in Japan. Coca-Cola, our investment, does extraordinarily well in Japan."
【Annotation】Outside the United States, the places that accept American culture more pragmatically are not, in fact, Britain and Europe; Europe is more defensive culturally. Buffett is not discussing something empty here, but facts seen through iPhone, American Express, and Coca-Cola.
2. There is a prerequisite to turning every page: first learn to think independently
【3.Interest rates in Japan】
Warren Buffett:
"I never dreamt of that when I picked up that little handbook, it was about that thick, but sometimes two companies to a page, and a couple of thousand pages, I believe. But it's amazing what you can find when you just turn the page. Turning every page is one important ingredient to bring to the investment field. That's what very few people do."
"So you've got to do a little of it yourself."
【Annotation】This has prerequisites: first learn to think independently, and then have a correct thinking framework; otherwise everything you read will look like a heavenly book.
3. Convergence is harder than fragmentation
【4.Berkshire Hathaway's cash】
Warren Buffett:
"Charlie always pointed out that we made most of our money. I'm above about eight or nine ideas over 50 years, and we talked about it every day, and we read every report, and we did everything else but if you think you can get an idea day from listening to your Frederick Booker or doing a lot of reading of the financial information published, forget it."
"Charlie always thought I did too many things. I thought if we did about five things in our lifetime, we'd end up doing better than if we did 50, and that we never concentrated enough."
【Annotation】Convergence is a very difficult thing; fragmentation is much easier.
4. Highly compressed understanding of Right Business
【3.Interest rates in Japan / 4.Berkshire Hathaway's cash】
Warren Buffett:
"I was just going through a little handbook that probably had two or 3,000 Japanese companies — sometimes two companies to a page. There were these five trading companies that had a special name form in Japan, but they were selling at ridiculously low prices."
"Things get extraordinarily attractive very occasionally. Nobody knows what the market is going to do tomorrow, next week, or next month, and nobody knows what business is going to do. But they spend all their time talking about it because it's easy to talk about, but it has no value."
【Annotation】He has already formed a very mature idea of Right Business. Looking through some simple materials, there was a detail earlier that one page contained information on two companies. Buffett's point is that such brief information alone is enough to make a judgment; this is the result of very high generalization and very high compression.
5. Real estate's delayed feedback and illusions
【5.Real estate investing】
Warren Buffett:
"In real estate, when you make a deal, a big deal with a distressed lender, when you sign the deal, then you go into another phase, then people start negotiating more things, and more things. It's a whole different game."
"In a real estate deal, every sentence is as important as a person. For a guy, 94, it's not the most interesting thing to get involved in something where the negotiations could take years."
【Annotation】Real estate projects drag on for too long. Feedback on ideas is constrained by time, so unrealistic illusions are more likely to arise—for example, in bubble periods people become overly optimistic about the outlook, and after the project starts it becomes hard to pull their thinking back.
6. Jay Pritzker: a person who can see through institutional complexity
【7.Portillo's Hot Dogs】
Warren Buffett:
"Jay just gave me a lecture or a lesson on the tax code, and I could have gone to graduate school for years, and never learned as much as he did."
"Jay Pritzker was a remarkable manager. He found the opportunity in a complex system — Rockwood had 30 million pounds of cocoa on LIFO, and the tax code had one crucial provision that most people would never think to look for."
【Annotation】Jay Pritzker leads to Marmon later on. Talent like this is extremely rare—was he good enough to be a point that justified immediate action? Buffett gave a vivid illustration later with Ben Rosner. What Jay Pritzker embodied was clarity in seeing problems: finding opportunities within a complex institutional system, and generalizing simple, effective knowledge structures out of complex information. Buffett is not naturally comfortable with a diversified company; his eventual acceptance of Marmon may have had something to do with the founder's personality traits.
7. Ben Rosner: trustworthy is superior to able
【9.Being patient vs acting fast】
Warren Buffett:
"He said to me, and Charlie, I'll run this business for you until December 31st, and then I'm out of here. I got Charlie, we went down the hallway, and I said, If this guy quits at the end of the year, you can throw away every book on psychology. So we bought the company and had a great relationship."
"When you get in the room with somebody like that, and they want to sell you something for $6 million, it's got 2 million in cash, and couple million real estate, and it's making 2 million a year — you don't want to be patient then."
【Annotation】What Ben Rosner embodied was "trustworthy"—a willingness to take a small loss himself. "Trustworthy" reaches the point of action more easily than "able"; that may be what Buffett was trying to express.
8. Career risk is scarier than investment risk
【9.Being patient vs acting fast】
Warren Buffett:
"Among all my partners, I never had a single institution. I never wanted an institution. I wanted people. I didn't want people who were sitting around having people present to them every three months and tell them what they wanted to hear, and all that sort of thing."
"You have to be willing to hang up after five seconds, and you have to be willing to say yes after five seconds. You can't be filled with self-doubt in the business."
【Annotation】Institutions have their own things they want to hear. Being forced to follow institutional preferences creates emotional pressure. Charlie Munger has a very direct line: The biggest problem with professional money management is career risk.
9. Musk's methodology
【10.Modernizing GEICO】
Ajit Jain:
"He has basically reduced the workforce by 20,000. Starting with something close to 50,000. He's brought it down to 20,000, and that translates to, I guess, at least $2 billion. All this has allowed GEICO to become a much-focused competitor. So in the last seven quarters, GEICO has shown a combined ratio that has eight in front of it."
【Annotation】Musk's methodology: delete as much as possible—delete what should be deleted, plus some things that should not be deleted; you must overshoot in deletion. Only after overshooting can attention discover the parts that truly cannot be done without and need to be added back. Those are the real things. In a mixture of "fact + illusion," distinguishing the two is extremely troublesome, or even impossible. You can only watch it happen, and Musk offers a method that can be widely applied.
10. The simplest facts are also the hardest to discover
【10.Modernizing GEICO】
Warren Buffett:
"Somebody just made the judgment. That's all that came from USAA, which made the judgment that government employees — the name GEICO stands for Government Employees Insurance Company — the government employees were better drivers than average."
"I don't think he was an actuator or anything else, but he just made an observation."
【Annotation】The simplest facts are also the hardest facts to discover. The fork between Basic trust and Basic mistrust lies very close to the starting point; once someone turns into Basic mistrust, he naturally does not know the scenery that lies close to the starting point.
11. Finding your own sound
【11.Greg Abel's successor qualities】
Warren Buffett:
"Glenn Miller went on from having a broken-down band for 15 years. He found the sound and created the first gold record — the Chattanooga Choo Choo in 1941."
"He turned around from being a nothing with the band that he had till he found the sound. I have always told my kids ever since that their sound isn't my sound. Don't worry too much about starting salaries, and be very careful who you work for because you will take on the habits of the people around you."
【Annotation】There are two very important points here. One is finding the point you are good at; everyone may have some kind of talent of his own. The second, even more important, is finding it by yourself. The essence of "Basic trust" is initiative. The gap in the middle is when "Basic trust" is not strong enough; a gentle push, or a slightly stronger push, can both be thought through carefully, but they will not affect those whose "Basic trust" is already very strong.
12. If Basic trust is strong enough, you will not starve on the road
【11.Greg Abel's successor qualities】
Warren Buffett:
"If you don't find it immediately, you know, don't starve to death in the meantime, but you will find it, and you'll find it in the right individual. In this sense, it's almost like finding the right person in marriage."
"You can't even dream all the dreams that you could have about a place like Berkshire, but the big thing you have to do though, is always to be sure you can play the next day."
【Annotation】Survival has its own "gravity," and there is some unavoidable noise. If the power of Basic trust is strong enough, one can break free from these things and not "starve to death" on the way to searching.
13. The yen is a special case in foreign-exchange strategy
【12.Investments in foreign currency-denominated assets】
Warren Buffett:
"The Japanese situation is different because we intend to stay long in that position, and the funding situation is so cheap. I've attempted to some degree to match purchases against yen-denominated funding but that's not a policy of ours. In fact, that's the first time we've done that."
"We do nothing in terms of the question about its impact on quarterly and annual earnings. What counts is where we are five, 10 or 20 years from now."
【Annotation】Usually he does not consider foreign-exchange risk. The yen is a special case, and the main reason is the low financing cost.
14. It takes this kind of "courage" to give up a project
【14.Private equity "competition"】
Ajit Jain:
"We do not like the risk-reward that these situations offer, and therefore, we put up the white flag, and said, we can't compete in this segment right now."
Warren Buffett:
"There are people who want to copy Berkshire's model, but usually they don't want to copy it by also copying the model of the CEO having all of this money in the company forever. If what we do here at Berkshire doesn't work, I spend the end of my life regretting what I've created."
【Annotation】These people do not have the psychological structure needed to give up the projects that should be given up. If they truly had this kind of "courage" (here "courage" is synonymous with "Basic trust"), they would not be doing the work they are doing.
15. Human interaction keeps attention active
【15.Advice for young investors】
Warren Buffett:
"Who you associate with is just enormously important. You're going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people that you work with, that you admire, that become your friends."
"There are people who will make you want to be better than you are, and you want to hang out with people who are better than you are."
【Annotation】Human interaction may be the place most capable of keeping attention active. In interaction, discover the points that can shine (minds). If you can see points of light, then seeing one point of light will enable you to find more points of light later in life.
16. Two quantified indicators for work
【15.Advice for young investors】
Warren Buffett:
"I would try to look for something that I would do if I didn't need the money. What you're really looking for in life is something where you've got a job that you'd hold if you didn't need the money."
"You don't want to associate with people or enterprises that ask you to do something or tell you to do something that you shouldn't be doing. That's one of the problems."
"Every one of those I named always did more than their share, and they thought like they never sought more than their share of the credit."
【Annotation】"Something I would still do even if I didn't need the income" = 1; "Do not stay with people or enterprises that ask you to do things you should not do" = 0. These are quantified indicators for work. Many things are not impossible to quantify; the question is why places where one can be "vaguely right" become completely vague.
17. External scorecard vs internal scorecard
【17.Major setbacks or low points in life】
Warren Buffett:
"If you look at the lifespan of professional athletes, after a while, you get to decide that you're better off if you really weren't the first one chosen to be on the baseball team or the basketball team, or anything else."
"Charlie and I never really exercised that much or did anything. We have been carefully preserving ourselves for years. So look at the bright side of things to the extent that you can."
【Annotation】This hints at the impact on the body of a mentality that says "you must win" and "you must defeat the opponent." In the final analysis, it is a problem of the external scorecard: winning brings intense excitement, losing brings unbearable pain. The internal scorecard has no such loss of "being defeated by someone else"; even when you lose, what you feel is only that you are getting closer and closer to the facts.
18. Viewing change optimistically
【18.Autonomous vehicles and GEICO】
Warren Buffett:
"If the game didn't change at all, it really wouldn't be very interesting. If every time you swung the baseball, you hit a home run in the game, it wouldn't be interesting. So the fact that there will be things you have to think about all the time as you go along, and you'll make mistakes, and all that, and then that's really part of the fun."
"Your brain would turn to mush if you didn't have a few problems now and then."
"We've got this wonderful world, which now we know that there are eight countries that can destroy it. We don't have what I would consider necessarily the perfect people leading each one of the nine countries."
【Annotation】Buffett looks at change from an optimistic angle: if "there were no change, your brain would instead turn into mush." Then he went on to mention the atomic bomb and countries such as North Korea. The world needs change.
19. Margin of safety: acknowledging uncertainty about the future
【18.Autonomous vehicles and GEICO】
Warren Buffett:
"Cars become incredibly safer, and it costs 50 times as much down or thereabouts to buy an insurance policy."
"You never reach an answer in this business. You reach a point of action that you take, but we try to get into as high probability things as we think we can do, and play the game in the same way, but it will be different than you think."
【Annotation】The existence of a margin of safety is equivalent to admitting uncertainty about future change. Auto insurance is a very good example: accidents have declined, but attention to car safety at the individual level has risen even faster. It is very difficult to predict the future from a single variable. Only a very small number of single variables have predictive value, and even then they must be protected by a margin of safety.
20. The structural advantage of insurance float
【19.Operating earnings】
Warren Buffett:
"It's like running a bank where people leave their money with you, and you pay a minus 2.2%, and you don't have any check clearing or anything else. We run our business actually with a different mindset than any other P&C company, I think, probably, in the world."
Ajit Jain:
"If you look at the entire range, including life insurance, our cost of flow to 2.2% negative, that means we've got the float plus somebody has given us 2.2% of that of cash."
【Annotation】Banks: deposits and depositors both carry fear, and when a crisis comes there may well be a run. Securities: the flexibility and liquidity of trading give people the sense of safety that they can "cash out at any time"—this is an illusion. As a whole, it cannot be cashed out, and in a systemic crisis this illusion will break. Insurance transfers fear outward; insurance float stands on the opposite side of fear and will not run on the insurance company in a crisis. This is a structural advantage that comes from the product itself.
21. The balance sheet is evidence of flaws solidifying
【21.What did Warren Buffett learn from Greg Abel?】
Warren Buffett:
"I spend more time looking at balance sheets than I do income statements and Wall Street really doesn't pay much attention to balance sheets. I like to look at balance sheets over an 8 or 10 year period before I even look at the income account. There are certain things that are harder to hide or play games with on the balance sheet than you can with the income statement."
"Charlie was never satisfied with just superficial things about any subject. He always would tell me not to take a position on anything until you can describe the arguments against it better than the person who is arguing with you."
【Annotation】When risk spills outward from personality, and is then reinforced by positive feedback in the wrong direction, the problem becomes even worse: it strengthens the error and lets the error solidify more quickly. This is how many people are finished. The balance sheet reflects the stock, and is the place most likely to reveal behavior errors after they have solidified.
【25.How to get a meeting with Warren Buffett / 26.BHE's valuation】
Warren Buffett:
"There are some problems that can't be solved, and we are not in the business of trying to solve insolvable problems."
"But then the problem we have, of course, is that the people who work for you, that's their job. So they want to have reasons to keep going, and those are tough choices if you're managing, but that's why they have managers."
_（On February 17, 2026, PacifiCorp officially announced that it had signed an agreement with Portland General Electric to sell its Washington service area for $1.9 billion.）_
【Annotation】With an emotional structure undisturbed by noise, if ideas cannot converge they will fragment: everything sounds reasonable, and one can no longer distinguish what is important from what is not; still less can one know what information is important and knowable, and what information is important but unknowable.
23. Scale → regulation → capital confiscation
【26.BHE's valuation】
Warren Buffett:
"Berkshire Hathaway Energy is worth considerably less money than it was two years ago, based on societal factors. The public utility business is not as good a business as it was a couple of years ago. Look at Hawaiian Electric and look at Edison in the current wildfires situation in California and their societal trends."
"I would say that our enthusiasm for buying public utility companies is different now than it would have been a couple of years ago. It's pretty dramatic in public utilities because they are going to need lots of money."
【Annotation】As scale expands → it enters regulated public utility status → capital is confiscated / or it becomes a state asset. The line between these two is sometimes somewhat blurry; in any case they are pretty much the same. There is no good answer to this problem.
24. The business logic of paving the way for others
【28.Investing in big-tech】
Warren Buffett:
"Hollywood's answer was always to get their money from other people to put up the capital. A lot of people have gotten very rich in the country by essentially figuring out how to get others to put up the capital."
"It'll be interesting to see how much capital intensity. There's more capital intensity going on with the Magnificent 7 than there was a few years ago. Basically, Apple has not really needed any capital over the years. Whether that world is the same in the future or not is something."
"It's a well-designed business for the people who practice it. The trick in life is to get somebody else's capital, get an override on it. But it can lead to a lot of abuse."
【Annotation】The logic of this passage is somewhat long: (1) the trend of tech companies becoming asset-heavy is the starting point; (2) then comes the possibility of building on top of other people’s capital and infrastructure—Coca-Cola uses bottlers, AMEX uses airlines, auto insurance uses the automobile manufacturing industry, and private equity also uses other people’s money; in fact, insurance is also using other people’s money; (3) it closes by saying that this must not be abused.
25. Emotional structure matters more than talent
【29.Early influence】
Warren Buffett:
"If I spend 10 hours reading Ben Graham, I would be damn smarter when I got through. So minds are really, really different."
"I think there was a book that talked about spending 10,000 hours as something. I could spend 10,000 hours tap dancing, and you'll throw up if you watch me."
"My dad always used to tell me that you know you're something different, it may not be good, but you find your own path."
【Annotation】Find the point you are good at, build your "circle of competence" from that, and then find a way to stay inside it and not step outside. Talent in skill alone is not enough for this; emotional structure is more important than talent in skill.
26. A quantified indicator of being "vaguely right"
【30.DOGE】
Warren Buffett:
"We are doing something that is unsustainable, and it has the aspect that it becomes uncontrollable to a certain point."
"There is a downside, there's upside. It's the problem of the most successful company in the history of the world. At this point, we have a little room to go and solve."
【Annotation】"There is a downside, there's upside"—this is a quantified indicator of being "vaguely right." It is the same as always: the closer you are to the source, the harder it is to identify.
27. The psychological defense of losers
【31.A fair capitalism】
Warren Buffett:
"I don't think you get very far by lecturing the world on how. I think it's a real mistake in communication and persuasion to lecture a bunch of people where you just won the game."
"The winners humiliate the losers and do all kinds of things."
【Annotation】The core problem of losers is psychological defense. Lecturing / humiliating only strengthens the other side's defensive capacity.
28. High-energy execution and bias
【32.Greg Abel's approach to managing the operating subsidiaries】
Warren Buffett:
"A manager who behaves differently than what he's asking the people beneath them to behave — it just doesn't work over time."
"People want a manager that they admire, and they're not going to admire them if those people profess to behave in one manner and behave in another manner. It's easier for an organization to see its quality move downward than it upward."
"Once you start deviating downward, it is really contagious and it's hard to rebuild, so you really need someone who behaves well on top and is not playing games for their own benefit."
【Annotation】Saying from on high, "You should do it this way," is a very important warning. It is hard to change the psychological desire to occupy the high ground. Binding oneself to the identity of a "cultural inheritor" may perhaps be one hedge. Here "perhaps" means blaming others, correcting others, and exerting pressure on others—where does that pressure itself come from?
- Blaming others usually strengthens one's own ideas, and most ideas are a combination of partial facts and partial bias;
- As pressure increases, bias is more likely—and faster—than facts to intensify.
Think about whether high-energy execution is especially suitable for the growth of "bias." Perhaps it is also like noise: once you find what you are good at, attention related to noise will naturally recede. There are many forms of psychologically occupying the high ground. Once one occupies the position of "cultural inheritor," that position can take up enough attention, and other harmful risks are reduced.
29. Healthcare: the more solid the facts, the larger the illusion
【34.US health insurance reform】
Warren Buffett:
"There comes a point where the governments — health is so important to everybody. What I said to Jamie and Jeff, I said, well, the tape worm won. There are problems in society when you get 20% of your GDP going into a given industry. The degree of enthusiasm for changing that industry, the political power that the industry will have — that doesn't mean they're evil, it's everybody, they just ends up there."
"So we came to a conclusion, we didn't know the answer. Three of us had the money to do it. And we didn't know how to change what 330 million people felt about their doctor, felt about their health care, what they felt entitled to."
【Annotation】Approached from the angle of "fact + illusion," the factual part of healthcare is extremely solid, but that also means a larger and more uncontrollable illusion.
30. Attention determines the direction of a system's self-reinforcement
【34.US health insurance reform】
Warren Buffett:
"This country has worked out better than any country in the world, so you can't argue as a failure, but you can't argue that there are certain problems that are terribly tough to figure out ways to solve."
"If you get elected, you're going to say to yourself, well, I can do more good if I stay in. Then, if I really vote my conscience on this sort of thing, you give away a little bit here and a little bit there and a little bit there. And finally, you don't recognize yourself in the mirror anymore."
【Annotation】Just like a person's strengths and weaknesses: if attention fixes on weaknesses, the weaknesses do not disappear and may even accelerate their self-reinforcement; but if attention fixes on strengths, the weaknesses may slowly recede because they lose attention and lose the supply of energy. The reversal of the healthcare problem may be related to voters' attention. If people pay more and more attention to it, the matter becomes more troublesome; if the level of attention declines, reversal may become possible.