There was very little in the way of news in the annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholders that Warren Buffett released Saturday morning. Buffett did mention that “Berkshire had a good year in 2022,” with operating earnings of $30.8 billion, and disclosed that subsidiary See’s Candies sold $400,309, or 11 tons, of its peanut brittle and chocolates at last year’s annual meeting in Omaha. But the main thing that stood out about the letter was its brevity — at 4,455 words, it was the shortest Buffett shareholder letter in 44 years.
Yes, I began assembling this data before the new letter came out — I suspected there might not be a lot else to discuss. The trajectory was already giving the unmistakable signal that the Berkshire chairman is winding things down. And, well, of course he is: Buffett is 92; his longtime business partner, Berkshire Vice Chairman Charles Munger, is 99.
The big spike on the chart is from the 2014 letter (published in February 2015), when Buffett offered a look back at the 50 years since he had taken control of a faltering Massachusetts textile manufacturer and began its long transformation into an investment vehicle and industrial giant; Munger chimed in with his own 2,430-word review. This look back involved acknowledging lots of mistakes, which has become something of a Buffett trademark. His 25-anniversary review was even titled “Mistakes of the First Twenty-five Years (A Condensed Version).” The latest missive included four uses of the word, too, which relative to the letter’s small overall word count turns out to be a lot by Buffett standards.
