The Berkshire CEO described his agency’s wins over time, highlighting its $1.3 billion guess on Coca-Cola in 1994—price $25 billion on the finish of 2022. He famous the dividend had grown to $704 million by final 12 months, up from $75 million the primary 12 months, writing, “Development occurred yearly, simply as sure as birthdays. All [Vice Chairman Charlie Munger] and I had been required to do was money Coke’s quarterly dividend checks. We anticipate that these checks are extremely more likely to develop.”

The legendary investor additionally defended inventory buybacks. Final 12 months, the U.S. authorities imposed a 1% tax on them—a late addition to the Inflation Discount Act—and Biden has signaled assist for elevating it.

“If you find yourself instructed that all repurchases are dangerous to shareholders or to the nation, or significantly useful to CEOs, you’re listening to both an financial illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue (characters which can be not mutually unique),” he wrote. 

His agency has been among the many largest U.S. repurchasers lately, shopping for again virtually $8 billion of its personal shares in 2022, $27 billion in 2021, and about $25 billion in 2020.

“There are various Berkshire centimillionaires and, sure, billionaires who’ve by no means studied our monetary figures,” he wrote. “They merely know that Charlie and I—together with our households and shut associates—proceed to have very important investments in Berkshire, and so they belief us to deal with their cash as we do our personal.”

Buffett additionally took goal on the monetary trickery that managers usually carry out to beat analysts’ expectations. 

“Even the working earnings determine that we favor can simply be manipulated by managers who want to take action,” he warned. “Such tampering is usually regarded as subtle by CEOs, administrators and their advisors. Reporters and analysts embrace its existence as properly.”

He known as the exercise “disgusting,” including, “It requires no expertise to govern numbers: Solely a deep need to deceive is required. ‘Daring imaginative accounting,’ as a CEO as soon as described his deception to me, has develop into one of many shames of capitalism.”

Berkshire Hathaway has ranked amongst probably the most most-admired firms within the U.S. for many years. Working such a agency seems to be correlated with the longevity of CEOs, and Buffett has been in that position for greater than half a century.