Legendary American businessman Charlie Munger had a celebrity status overseas that very few of his peers, except of course his lifelong business partner Warren Buffett, enjoyed. After his death on Tuesday, there has been a collective sense of awe toward the 99-year-old longtime Berkshire Hathaway lieutenant on Weibo -- China's version of Twitter. Business owners and influencers in China have been flooding the social media platform with tributes.
Munger was also aware of his guru-like fame in South Asian countries and in a 2019 interview had even said that most of his fans consisted of nerds from China or India.
“Well, the world is very peculiar. And these people that like me are mostly nerds in China or India,” Charlie Munger told The Wall Street Journal when asked about his thoughts on his worldwide fan club.
“It’s a very deep attachment,” he added. “They’re so passionately interested in improving themselves. Some of them just want to get rich in some easy way, but mostly they’re trying to improve themselves.”
Munger also told the publication that a lot of his fans in China and India are “graduates of great engineering schools,” but he wouldn’t call them investors as most of them treat investing only as a speculative game.
“I wouldn’t call a man who uses computer science to sift vast amounts of data for correlation (an investor)…What he is is a trader,” he said. “Those correlations are very peculiar…. Of course, the more people that try and trade that (a correlation), the less well it works.”
While Chinese admirers make up a great share of the Berkshire Hathaway lieutenants' fans -- with some shelling out as much as $2.34 million for a lunch with the business tycoons -- in India, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett enjoy a similar fan craze but for a different reason.
India has been a key market on Berkshire Hathaway's radar for years while it has yet to build a meaningful business presence in China, the Observer reported.
After Buffett visited India for the first time in 2011, he bought a stake worth up to $360 million in mobile payment startup Paytm. Moreover, Berkshire Hathaway’s India-born insurance division chief, Ajit Jain, is also widely believed to be one of the successors of Munger and Buffett.
Read more: Top 10 quotes from investing genius Charlie Munger
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