It began with a failing textile mill. Warren Buffett turned Berkshire Hathaway into a holding company that owns insurers, railroads, utilities and consumer brands outright, and runs an equity portfolio the whole market reads for signals. No investor of the modern era has a record close to it.
The method came from Benjamin Graham and was sharpened over decades with Charlie Munger, and it sounds almost too plain to work. Buy good businesses with durable advantages at sensible prices. Then keep them. He skipped every fad he could not explain and treated panics as sales rather than emergencies.
His edge was never a secret formula. It was the temperament to do nothing while everyone else panicked.
Temperament did as much work as analysis. Patience, frugality, a deep suspicion of leverage and of anything requiring hype to make sense. His shareholder letters and the annual meeting turned corporate governance into public education, and pulled tens of thousands of people to Omaha every year to hear it.
With more of the work now passed to his successors, one question remains. Does the discipline outlive the man who set it? His own answer was to build an institution rather than a following — which is, in its way, the longest-term investment he ever made.