No. of Recommendations: 9
It's pretty clear to me they took the unusual ( to say the least) step of announcing the buyback to keep a negative narrative from running away and getting out of control after Greg's first letter. Warren is pretty savvy about market movements and is very adept at trading his own account, even if he does not do that for BRK.
Warren and Charlie have both said that Greg has many talents Warren does not have that will be very useful to Berkshire. Being gregarious and articulate in the same way Warren was is not one of those talents, obviously.
The stock is undervalued recently, even if not wildly so or as undervalued as they would like it to be to really back up the truck with cash on repurchases. They would be volume constrained that way anyway, even if they waited for that to happen.
I think a bigger concern would be losing managerial talent to run their own public companies if the narrative on Greg got out of control. For instance, Brooks is killing it and I'm sure the CEO is well compensated...BUT...how does that compare to running a company like ONON, DECK or NKE with control over capital allocation as well?
There is lots of other managerial talent that might be poached if moral got low/down and opportunity kept calling. Many of the old line businesses are limping along, barely keeping pace with inflation. If you lose too many star players, that can gain momentum and be a difficult thing to fix.
