Interview · 2022
On Leadership & Capital Allocation, with Todd Combs (2022)
Munger had a short list of business operators he genuinely revered, and Henry Singleton — the founder of Teledyne — sat near the very top. In this 2022 conversation with Todd Combs, one of the two investment managers Buffett hired to help run Berkshire’s portfolio, Munger uses Singleton as a lens for the subject he considered the heart of management: the allocation of capital.
Why watch. It’s an unusually concrete treatment of an abstract-sounding idea. Munger explains why Singleton’s record — buying in shares when they were cheap, issuing them when they were dear, and ignoring Wall Street conventions about how a CEO should behave — represents capital allocation done right, and why so few executives manage it. Combs is a sharp interlocutor, and the back-and-forth pulls Munger toward specifics about leadership, incentives, and the rationality that he thought separated the great operators from the merely competent.
A strong pick for anyone interested in management and capital allocation rather than stock-picking per se. Watch via the official YouTube upload linked above.