The start of a 60-year partnership
How Munger and Buffett met
Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett — the two men behind Berkshire Hathaway — did not grow up as partners; they were introduced over a meal in Omaha in 1959, when Munger, by then a Los Angeles lawyer, was back home settling his late father's affairs. Mutual friends, the Davis family, thought the two rational, wisecracking Omahans were so alike they had to meet. They clicked within minutes, and the conversation that started that night ran, by phone and letter, for the next sixty-plus years.
Short answer. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett met in 1959 at a dinner in Omaha, arranged by the family of Buffett's early investor Dr. Edwin Davis, while Munger — then a Los Angeles lawyer — was back in town winding down his late father's law practice; the two hit it off within minutes and became lifelong partners.
The prequel: they worked at the same Omaha grocery — years apart
The strangest fact about their friendship is that they nearly had one two decades early and missed it. As a teenager in the late 1930s, Charlie Munger clerked at Buffett & Son, the Omaha grocery run by Warren's grandfather, Ernest Buffett — long, cheap Depression-era shifts that Munger loved to recall. Warren Buffett worked in the same store as a boy, under the same demanding grandfather.
But they never crossed paths there. Munger was about six and a half years older (born January 1, 1924, to Buffett's August 30, 1930), so their stints simply didn't overlap. Both men told the story on themselves for the rest of their lives — the one anecdote in their history that each independently confirmed.
Sources
- Buffett & Munger, CNBC — "Lessons from working for Buffett's grandfather" (2016)
- Janet Lowe, "Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger" (Wiley, 2000)
How did they actually meet?
In 1959 Munger's father, the respected Omaha lawyer Alfred Case Munger, died, and Charlie — by then practicing law in the Los Angeles area — came back to settle the estate and wind up the practice. That homecoming created the opening. A few years earlier, in 1957, an Omaha physician named Dr. Edwin Davis had put $100,000 into Warren Buffett's young partnership on almost no due diligence; when a puzzled Buffett asked why, Davis said Buffett reminded him of his family's closest friend, Charlie Munger. ("I didn't know Charlie Munger," Buffett later said, "but I liked him already.")
So while Munger was in town, the Davises engineered the introduction the family had wanted for two years. The dinner itself was arranged not by the elder Dr. Davis but by his son Neal Davis — Munger's best friend since childhood — with Buffett's partners in tow. The two met over a meal in Omaha. (The exact venue is genuinely disputed: biographers place it variously at the Omaha Club or Johnny's Café, and Alice Schroeder notes the competing versions are likely conflations of several dinners over a few days — so this page names the city, not the restaurant.)
Sources
- Alice Schroeder, "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life" (2008), incl. endnote 27 on the disputed venue
- Janet Lowe, "Damn Right!" (Wiley, 2000), Ch. 1
- "The Not-So-Silent Partner," Forbes, Jan 22, 1996 (Lenzner & Fondiller)
Did they hit it off right away?
Immediately. By every account from both men, the rapport was instant — they talked for hours and recognized in each other the same restless, irreverent, ferociously rational cast of mind. Buffett's favorite telling: "About five minutes into it, Charlie was sort of rolling on the floor laughing at his own jokes — which is exactly the same thing I did. I thought, 'I'm not going to find another guy like this.'"
It's an anecdote Buffett polished over decades, so the "rolling on the floor" is affectionate hyperbole — and note he's describing both of them laughing at their own jokes, not Munger alone. But the substance is solid and mutually attested: two Omaha outsiders, each privately convinced he'd finally met his intellectual match.
Sources
- Warren Buffett, CNBC — "Buffett reflects on his first meeting with Munger" (June 29, 2021)
- Roger Lowenstein, "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist" (1995)
Were they business partners from the start?
No — and this is the part most retellings get wrong. For most of the 1960s they ran entirely separate shops. Buffett had the Buffett Partnership in Omaha; Munger, whom Buffett soon nudged out of full-time law ("I told him that law was fine as a hobby but he could do better," Buffett wrote), founded his own Los Angeles investment firm, Wheeler, Munger & Co., in 1962. They weren't formal partners; they were two friends running money 1,500 miles apart, in frequent — often near-daily — contact by phone and letter, trading ideas and sometimes buying the same stocks.
The most consequential thing to travel down that phone line was a change of mind. Munger pushed Buffett off Ben Graham's strict "cigar-butt" bargain-hunting and toward paying up for genuinely great businesses. Buffett has said so plainly: "Charlie shoved me in the direction of not just buying bargains, as Ben Graham had taught me. This was the real impact he had on me." The 1972 purchase of See's Candies — a wonderful business at a fair, not cheap, price — is the textbook first fruit of that shift.
Sources
- Warren Buffett, "The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville" (1984 Columbia essay) — the "law … as a hobby" line
- Alice Schroeder, "The Snowball" (2008) — Wheeler, Munger & Co. and Jack Wheeler
- "The Not-So-Silent Partner," Forbes, Jan 22, 1996 — "Charlie shoved me…"
What did the friendship become?
Munger wound down Wheeler, Munger in the mid-1970s and, in 1978, formally became vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway — the title he held until his death in November 2023, four weeks short of 100. Buffett came to call him "the architect of the present Berkshire," with himself as the "general contractor" who executed the design, and nicknamed him "the abominable no-man" for his willingness to kill a deal by simply saying no.
A partnership that a couple of mutual friends had to force into existence over a 1959 dinner ran, essentially unbroken, for sixty-four years. (Where it went from there — the track record and the differences between the two men — is covered on the track-record and Munger-vs-Buffett pages.)
Sources
- Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway 2023 annual letter (Feb 2024) — "architect … general contractor"
- Berkshire Hathaway proxy/company history — Munger vice chairman from 1978
More on partnership More on cooperation More on temperament
- “Charlie shoved me in the direction of not just buying bargains, as Ben Graham had taught me. This was the real impact he had on me. It took a powerful force to move me on from Graham's limiting views. It was the power of Charlie's mind.”
- “A partner ideally is capable of working alone. You can be a dominant partner, subordinate partner, or an always collaborative equal partner. I've done all three.”
- “If you get Warren Buffett for 40 years and the bastard finally dies on you, you don't really have a right to complain.”
Where they differed once they were partners: Munger vs. Buffett. And the record they built: his investment track record.