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A friend of Charlie Munger’s says Munger doubled his money on a contrarian bet soon before his death.
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The friend, Li Lu, gave an interview in which he discussed Munger’s careful approach to investing.
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Li also described dramatically different approaches to risk tolerance between Munger and Elon Musk.
Charlie Munger was still sniffing out bargains and scoring big gains at age 99, says a close friend of the late investing icon.
Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner and Berkshire Hathaway’s vice chairman for more than four decades, died in late November 2023, about a month shy of his 100th birthday.
In a rare interview marking the first anniversary of Munger’s death, Li Lu told the Chinese social network Zhenge Island that one of Munger’s last moves was a contrarian bet.
“There was a stock that everyone disliked, and it might not be particularly politically correct,” Li said. But that didn’t stop Munger from studying the company and buying its shares, continued the Himalaya Capital Management founder, whom Munger once described as the “Chinese Warren Buffett.”
“The week before he died, this stock had doubled from the time he started investing to that time,” Li said. It’s unclear which stock he was referring to. Li didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Li said the wager showed Munger retained his passion for investing until the end and “could still go against the market consensus and live to see this stock double.” He said the stock remained “in the Munger family portfolio” and was “still performing very well.”
Li was the only person apart from Buffett who Munger trusted to invest his family’s money. He introduced Munger to BYD, the Chinese EV maker that’s been one of Berkshire’s best investments over the past decade.
Describing Munger’s careful approach toward investing, in his interview with Zhenge Island he also seemed to allude to a story Munger had discussed at Daily Journal‘s annual meeting in 2017, saying Munger “read Barron’s magazine every week for 50 years and only made one investment.”
“In 50 years I found one investment opportunity in Barron’s, out of which I made about $80 million with almost no risk,” Munger said in 2017. “I took the $80 million and gave it to Li Lu, who turned it into $400 to $500 million. So I have made $400 to 500 million out of reading Barron’s for 50 years and following one idea.”
Munger added further details, indicating that the stock was an auto supply company named Tenneco that Apollo Global Management acquired in late 2022. He said that he made 15 times his money on the stock in about two years and that it took him only 90 minutes of research to pull the trigger after reading about it.
