Elon Musk: The Future We’re Building
“My proceeds from PayPal were $180m. I put $100m in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.” — Elon Musk
In this TED Talk, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk discusses The Boring Company, SpaceX, Tesla, hyperloop, Donald Trump, and more. While it’s 40 minutes long and almost certainly contains a few exaggerations, watching Musk describe his ambitions is always interesting.
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Hanlon’s Razor
Most of us are familiar with Occam’s Razor - Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. It’s a simple and straightforward rule of thumb in complex decision making. A less well known but equally valuable tool in decision modeling is Hanlon’s Razor - Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect. The German general Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord used Hanlon’s razor to assess his men, saying:
“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent – their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy – they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions.
One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent – he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”
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Ten Year Futures
A nuanced take on the speed at which new technologies will disrupt our lives and existing markets. The author proposes a viewpoint we share – that the near-term disruption will be focused on things like traditional retail and TV, areas we have avoided in our portfolio from the outset. Autonomous cars and VR/AR will have significant implications down the road (pun intended), but we aren’t quite there yet.
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Why Toddlers Are Smarter Than Computers
Along a similar vein to the article above, Gary Marcus discusses how far tools like “deep learning” and the associated neural networks have to go before being able to replicate a human’s speed in adapting to new tasks. The key takeaway is the need for technology to adapt “small data”, as well as big data, to replicate things like common sense and reasoning.
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The Truth About Investing by Howard Marks
We have been following legendary investor, Howard Marks, for many years and were very fortunate to host him at our Investors Conference back in 2015. His Memos are a must read but we were pleased to see much of his wisdom consolidated into one piece.
“Over the last few decades, investors’ timeframes have shrunk. They’ve become obsessed with quarterly returns. In fact, technology now enables them to become distracted by returns on a daily basis, and even minute-by-minute. Thus one way to gain an advantage is by ignoring the “noise” created by the manic swings of others and focusing on the things that matter in the long term.” – Howard Marks
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Can Wal-Mart’s Expensive New E-Commerce Operation Compete With Amazon?
“We blew Wal-Mart too” – Charlie Munger’s comment at the Berkshire Hathaway AGM in reference to him and Warren not investing in Google and Wal-Mart. Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize what is in store for Wal-Mart’s future and thought it would be beneficial to include a Businessweek article highlighting their most recent acquisitions and plans for e-commerce. As a former Wal-Mart executive highlights, “the Jet.com deal is a big inflection point. This is Wal-Mart’s last shot here.”
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Brookfield's Bruce Flatt: Billionaire Toll Collector Of The 21st Century
Long one of our core holdings, the Brookfield story has been an amazing example of the power of permanent capital and a truly long-term view. For those who don’t know the story well, this article provides a good summary of one of Canada’s most impressive capital allocators.
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