At the first Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting led by new CEO Greg Abel, the spotlight turned back over to the company’s chairman Warren Buffett and, surprisingly, Tim Cook. Buffett looked to be fully embracing retirement as the legendary investor sat in the front row wearing a blue coloured sweater instead of his usual suit.
However, the Berkshire shareholders were in for a surprise as Abel announced that Buffett would like to speak a few words, prompting one of the biggest highlights of the meeting.
Warren Buffett asks Tim Cook to take a bow:
Buffett used the moment to highlight Berkshire’s massive success with its Apple investment and the executive who orchestrated the tech giant’s growth over the last decade. Notably, Cook himself has relinquished his post as the Apple top executive and will be handing over the reins of the company to John Ternus come this September.
The legendary investor reminded the audience of the massive gamble taken by the company almost a decade ago when it decided to allocate around 10% of its resources, about $35 billion, into Apple stock. Buffett said it was essentially handing over the money to Tim Cook, a leader who was barely known to the average American investor back then and who, in Buffett’s own words, “succeeded a legend.”
The payoff for Berkshire, however, has been staggering. Buffett noted in his speech that the initial $35 billion investment has ballooned into $185 billion pre-tax, factoring in dividends alongside realized and unrealized appreciation.
In classic Buffett fashion, the retired investor joked about his own role in the windfall. “I didn’t have to do a damn thing,” Buffett told the crowd. “We’re very big around here on having other people do the work and collecting the money, but that has been a success.”
How Tim Cook succeeded a ‘legend’:
Buffett talked about the tech giant’s ‘roller coaster’ history, where it was started by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in a garage 50 years ago, and then Jobs was removed from the company for a while. The Apple founder later returned to the company and led to its reincarnation with the launch of iPods, iMac, and the iPhone. However, Jobs had an untimely death as he succumbed to cancer and asked the Apple board to choose Cook to run the company.
“Everybody said who’s going to manage Apple when Steve Jobs isn’t around,” Buffett said. “Probably just a very few percentage points of American investors had even heard of Tim Cook. In effect, Tim took over about 14 years ago when Steve died, but when we made our investment and turned over 10% of the resources of Berkshire, we were turning it over to Tim.”
The legendary investor then asked Cook, who was also seated in the audience, to stand up and ‘take a bow and our shareholders would say thanks to him.’
“How would you like to step into the shoes of Steve and come through his record?” Buffett said during the applause. “It’s one of the miracles of American business management.”
