Buffett's vault test: lock a farm away for 20 years, it produces 20 harvests.

Lock Bitcoin away for 20 years, it produces nothing. An asset that can only gain value because someone else pays more is a bet dressed as an investment.

All in for Berkshire. That was Buffett’s choice for over 45 years.

His $100K salary hasn’t changed since 1980, while his net worth grew to $148B and the median S&P 500 CEO pay reached $17.1M in 2024.

I bet he isn’t restricting himself, he simply never needed more.

Buffett's best investment in the Washington Post wasn't the stock.

No one believed Katherine Graham could run the paper. But under her leadership the stock gained 3,000% and Buffett's $10.6M stake became $1.4B.

Seems correcting her 'funhouse mirror' was worth more than any check he wrote her.

Buffett always knew it.

Of the U.S. large-cap active funds in the top 25% in 2022, zero stayed there over the next two years.

See Buffett's point?

60% of U.S. stocks since 1926 never beat Treasury bills. 2% created 90% of all the wealth.
The top 6, $AAPL, $MSFT, $NVDA among them averaged an 80% drawdown along the way.

Volatility is not the enemy, but picking the wrong company certainly is.

Munger was right about leverage: one bad August in 1998 was enough.

In 4 months, LTCM lost $4.6B and nearly took down the global financial system. The fund had two Nobel laureates and 4 years of 21% returns.

25:1 leverage doesn't care about your credentials.

"I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."

Lynch or Buffett: the conclusion is the same. The moat has to live in the system, not the CEO.

$1 invested in Altria in 1925 is worth $4,240,000 today.

Not a tech company, not a platform, just a tobacco company compounding at 16.2% ROIC for 100 years.
Your great-grandparents could have turned $250, less than $5,000 in today's money, into $1 billion.

SpaceX is targeting a $2T valuation at IPO. That's 80x forward revenue.
$NVDA at peak AI hype: 40x.
30% of shares reserved for retail investors., triple the industry norm.
Worth sitting with.

You could buy every mining company in the world with $NVDA's market cap. And still have change left over.

Big Tech like $GOOGL, $MSFT and $TSLA starts in a mine. Nobody prices it that way.

8 out of 10 people at work are somewhere else mentally.

Gallup just measured what sleepwalking looks like at scale: only 20% of employees are engaged at work, 64% do the bare minimum, 16% are actively checked out.

That's decades of wasted compounding from people who never made the change.

Jeff Bezos wrote his first shareholder letter in 1997. It reads like a blueprint for everything $AMZN became over the next 27 years.

Most founder letters age badly but this one aged like a prediction.

Without a doubt, one of the best entrepreneurs of all time.

China watched the U.S. go to war with Iran and said almost nothing.

When you look at who the real collateral victims of that war are, it becomes obvious why.

States do not have allies, they only have interests. And Trump has made it his mission to make that explicit for everyone.

Charlie Munger did not think better because he knew more.

He thought better because he relied on better mental models.

I went through decades of his speeches, letters, and interviews to identify them.

Here are 40 of the mental models behind his success.👇

The hard part is that you have to update your model while everyone around you is still using the old one. You feel wrong for months, sometimes years, because the consensus label is sticky and price action confirms the consensus, until it doesn't.

Your money, your thesis.

$NFLX was a DVD-by-mail service. Then a streaming platform. Now it's becoming an advertising and live events company. Third reinvention in 20 years.

The pattern is the same every time: The business moves -> The narrative lags -> and the gap between the two is where the money is made.

$AMZN still gets analyzed as a retailer. It's a cloud margin machine that happens to deliver packages. AWS is 60%+ of operating profit. The retail arm is the distraction, not the business.

Some companies changed what they are and nobody updated the label.

$MSFT was a Windows licensing business. Now it's cloud infrastructure and the picks-and-shovels of AI adoption. The stock did nothing for 15 years under the old identity. Then Nadella rebuilt the entire model and it 7x'd.

Of course, no regulators, institutions, or laws.

Turns out, that's not what markets need to exist. They just need people.

Somali pirates opened a stock exchange in 2009.

72 companies. 24/7. Shareholders funded hijackings and split the ransom. One investor's contribution: a rocketlauncher received as alimony.

The capital was pooled, the risk shared and the return expected.

Sam Walton put it simply: "It's the little things that count. Most people don't take them seriously enough."

Most people don't take them seriously enough because the payoff is invisible for years. Then one day it's obvious to everyone.

This is also what makes investing so personal. Even if someone had your capital, your tools, and your watchlist, they still wouldn't be you. The real edge compounds the same way, through reading, patience, and thousands of small decisions that no one else sees.

A culture of discipline and constant optimization can't be bought. It's built over decades of small improvements that become institutional knowledge. A compounding of know-how.

$COST and $AMZN followed the exact same path. Their success is cultural before it is operational.

If you replaced every Walmart employee and manager tomorrow, the company would start losing market share almost immediately. Because Walton didn't just compound capital. He compounded culture.

Each small optimization saved a bit of money, which compounded into lower prices, better locations, higher volumes, and more bargaining power, which then fed back into even more strength.

But the moat isn't logistics. It isn't scale. It isn't low prices.

The hard part was doing all of them, with discipline, for decades.

That accumulation of tiny improvements is what allowed $WMT to become the largest retailer on Earth in one of the most competitive industries that exists.

Tiny trash cans next to every cash register so cashiers never had to walk. Employees calling competitors every morning to compare prices. Managers tracking inventory turns down to the decimal.

None of these ideas were hard to implement. Any retailer could have done them.

He spent his entire career walking the aisles of other retailers, studying layouts, pricing, employee behavior, shelf placement. "I probably have been in more stores than anybody in America, maybe in the world."

Every visit had one purpose: find one small thing to copy and do better.

Sam Walton visited more stores than any human alive. Not his own. His competitors'.

Berkshire $BRK started as a failing textile mill that Buffett bought out of spite. 90 seconds on how that mistake became a $1 trillion company.