Charlie Munger

The quotes that circulate under his name usually come from the second chair at Berkshire Hathaway — the man Warren Buffett called his closest partner and right-hand man. Charlie Munger held the vice chairman's post at the conglomerate from 1978 until he died in 2023, and Buffett credited him with something larger than a title: being the architect of the business philosophy that shaped the modern company.

Munger was born in Omaha on New Year's Day, 1924, and worked as a lawyer before making his name as a financier. The American investing and philanthropic worlds knew him in all three capacities — businessman, investor, giver — though it is the partnership with Buffett that put his thinking in front of a wide audience and kept it there.

He died on 28 November 2023, still in the role he had occupied for forty-five years. What survives him, at least in the form most people encounter, is a body of remarks on how to think about business and decisions — carried forward largely because the person who worked alongside him longest kept pointing back to their source.