I suppose I am blinded to his chicanery by the fact that he is fundamentally a builder of cars, rockets, robots and a handful of other things. In my mind, a con man is someone who is fundamentally in the business of lying to you so he can run off with your money WITHOUT leaving behind remarkable things like Models Y and Starlink satellites as your consolation prizes. Tempermentally,

You offer a reasonable response to the (apparently) overwhelming sentiment about Musk, which is at least to consider that the alternate position might be correct, tempered by the success he has had in making things and building businesses.

This is the Berkshire board, and over the years we have talked a LOT about the integrity of the CEO and how the rest of the corporation naturally follows in an ethical path, so I thought I would offer a couple of examples of people “who built something” which turned out to be chimera, even if they left something behind. Please note I am not trying to make “an exact comparison” with Musk, Tesla, or SpaceX, as no exact comparison is ever “exact.”

Jack Welch managed to hit the analyst numbers every single quarter and the stock prospered for years, decades even. It is now pretty well recognized that the accounting at GE was manipulated to give the desired result rather than the real one, that it relied on aggressive accounting tricks and maneuvers which eventually resulted in huge regulatory penalties. The corporation of 100 years, FWIW, no longer exists in any recognizable form to what it was just a few years ago.

Enron, famous for the accounting scandal which laid it low did actually have several legitimate businesses - and they did well. They had over 30,000 miles of pipelines across the US, their financialization of energy trading was a model during the deregulation zeal of the millennium age (with caveats for the unregulated abuses at the time) and they owned and improved global energy assets including power plants, gas distribution systems, and other assets which ran and were often improved with their management. That, obviously, was not the end of the story, and for another...

WorldCom built a colossus telecommunications company acquiring MCI and other companies, and building infrastructure on its own until it was laid low by a massive accounting scandal, most of the assets eventually acquired by Verizon, many of which are still in use today. The original WorldCom network still forms an important part of Verizon’s business, for instance - so they “built”, they just also “defrauded.”

That’s the thing about Berkshire: I never once worried about the integrity of the company, that there would someday be a headline in the Wall Street Journal about “funny lunchmeat in the accounting” or that the stock was secretly being manipulated for the benefit of insiders. With Musk, SpaceX, and Tesla?

Well, you get to make up your own mind, but I am mindful of the hoary old saying “Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.”