“Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich,” Munger told Roger Lowenstein for Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, published in 1995. “Not because I wanted Ferraris — I wanted independence. I desperately wanted it. I thought it was undignified to have to send invoices to other people.”

1959 Introduction
His fateful introduction to Buffett had come during a 1959 visit home to Omaha. Though the precise venue of their first meeting was the subject of lore, it was clear they hit it off right away. In short order they were talking on the telephone almost daily and investing in the same companies and securities.

Their investments in Berkshire Hathaway began in 1962, when the company made men’s suit linings at textile mills in Massachusetts. Buffett took a controlling stake in 1965. Though the mills closed, Berkshire stuck around as the corporate vehicle for Buffett’s growing conglomerate of companies.

A crucial joint discovery was a company called Blue Chip Stamps, which ran popular redemption games offered by grocers and other retailers. Because stores paid for the stamps up front, and prizes were redeemed much later, Blue Chip at any given time was sitting on a stack of money, much like a bank does.

Using that pool of capital, Buffett and Munger bought controlling shares in See’s Candies, the Buffalo Evening News and Wesco Financial, the company Munger would lead.

In 1975, the US Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Blue Chip Stamps had manipulated the price of Wesco because Buffett and Munger had persuaded its management to drop a merger plan. Blue Chip resolved the dispute by agreeing to pay former investors in Wesco a total of about $115,000, with no admission of guilt.

The ordeal underscored the risks in Buffett and Munger having such complicated and overlapping financial interests. A years-long effort to simplify matters culminated in 1983 with Blue Chip Stamps merging into Berkshire. Munger, whose Berkshire stake rose to 2%, became Buffett’s vice chairman.

China Bull
In recent years, Munger’s fans continued to travel to Los Angeles to ask him questions at annual meetings of Daily Journal Corp., a publishing company he led as chairman. He displayed his knack for investing by plowing the company’s money into temporarily beaten-down stocks like Wells Fargo & Co. during the depths of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Munger was for many years more bullish than Buffett when it came to investing in China. Berkshire became the biggest shareholder of Chinese automaker BYD Co., for instance, years after Munger began buying its stock, though Berkshire began trimming that stake in 2022.

Munger started sharing his vice chairman title at Berkshire in 2018 with two next-generation senior executives, Greg Abel and Ajit Jain, who were named to the board in a long-awaited sign of Buffett’s succession plans.