Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2016

The 2016 meeting sits on the dividing line in the Daily Journal record: it’s the last one before CNBC started capturing the event on video, so the durable artifacts are an audio recording and the verbatim transcript made from it. Munger, then 92, spoke for just under two hours and stayed afterward to talk with attendees.

Why listen. This is the meeting that turned the Daily Journal gathering into an annual transcription tradition, and the substance holds up. Munger is enthusiastic — by his standards — about the company landing the Los Angeles courts contract, one of the largest court systems on earth, as proof the software business was real. He draws a pointed parallel between the Daily Journal and IBM: both had large, sticky legacy businesses that the world moved past, and neither led the new world that replaced the old one. It’s a characteristically unsentimental way to talk about a company he chairs.

Notable threads: the court-software bet and what a flagship contract signals; IBM as a cautionary mirror; Coca-Cola as a still-strong but no-longer-easy franchise; and his oft-told 1962 oil-royalty story — a $1,000 stake that paid roughly $100,000 a year for decades, his case study in exploiting an inefficient little corner of the market. No public video exists — this meeting survives as audio and the full transcript linked above.