Warren Buffett on parenting, horse betting and why he stopped talking

(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can sign up here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)

Warren Buffett and Becky Quick covered too many topics in the interviews that aired in a two-hour special on CNBC Tuesday evening for me to write a cogent summary.

“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” included discussions about his inability to find a big company to purchase for Berkshire Hathaway as its cash pile moves toward $400 billion, new CEO Greg Abel, his company’s future and past, the difficulty of giving away billions of dollars, and the invaluable role of luck in his success. That’s not a comprehensive list.

Here, however, are some brief clips and quotes that caught my attention.  

• Buffett on what’s needed to find good businesses: “It doesn’t take a genius, and it sure doesn’t take any Greek symbols or anything like that to figure out what a business is worth… If (Greg Abel) quit at high school like some of our managers have, he’d still be as smart as he is.”
• Buffett on the Sunday board meeting when directors considered his recommendation they name Greg Abel as next CEO: “(Director) Steve Burke finally said, you know, ‘We don’t need to sit around for three months and peer at our navel or anything on this. This is the right decision.’ And so they voted to do it.”

• Buffett on Berkshire’s future: “It’ll always be moving somewhat, but it’ll be mostly expanding. Occasionally, there will be things that disappear … We will have companies that 50 or 100 years from now will not be viable in the economy of that world. But we’ll have a whole lot more that developed over the years. And we can go wherever the country goes, and we can go with capital.”
• Why being on a corporation’s board of directors is the best job in the world:

• Why he gave up betting on horses when he was in high school: “One of the first things you learn in horse racing is you can beat a race, but you can’t beat the races… I had a couple of horses in mind, but I lost the money on the first race. And then I did the dumbest thing you can imagine… I just kept betting every race. And when I went home, I was $50 poorer, which was all I’d taken with me… 
  I went to the Howard Johnson’s, and I had a couple of dollars left. I bought myself a fancy meal and just sat there and thought about it and thought about it on the train. And that was the end of horse racing.”
• Buffett on running Berkshire for decades: