Faith is easy to talk about. Wiring is more difficult.
Then Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Charlie Munger Not only did he praise talent, he backed it with tens of millions of dollars from his family fortune.
recipient? Li LuInvestor Munger later dubbed him “China’s Warren Buffett” in a 2023 Financial Times profile.
Munger, who died in 2023 at the age of 99, met Li Ka-shing at a Thanksgiving dinner in 2003. What impressed him wasn’t Li’s dramatic backstory – he fled China after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, earned a degree from Columbia University and started his own company. This is something simpler.
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“I’m not interested in revolution. I’m a capitalist,” Munger told the Financial Times. “It was his talent for capitalism that attracted me.”
This ability will soon be put to the test.
When Lee launches new fund Himalaya Capital In 2004, Munger entrusted him with $88 million to manage, urging him to stick to long-term value investing rather than short-term trading.
The result? By 2023, this investment will grow approximately four to five times.
“We’ve had incredibly good returns over a long period of time,” Munger said in the same Financial Times profile. “That $88 million is already four or five times that amount.”
At the 2018 Daily Journal annual meeting where he served as chairman, Munger was candid about how rare this kind of trust was for him. “In my life, I have given money to one outside manager, and that was Li Lu,” he said. “I don’t have anyone else in my life. And I don’t think it’s going to be easy to find a second one.”
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This is not hype. Munger has drawn a very hard line.
At the same meeting, he explained why Lee stood out. “The first rule of fishing has always been to fish where there are fish…and Li Lu just went where the fishing was good.” In other words, while most investors poured into the rigorously analyzed U.S. market, Li focused on China, where the opportunities were greater and competition was weaker.
This philosophy is clearly reflected in two decisive investments.
One was an early bet on Kweichow Moutai, when the stock traded at just four to five times earnings. Munger joked that Li Ka-shing “reversed the wheel” and went on an acquisition spree — a move that would become one of Asia’s best-known consumer investments.
