Felix Salmon

Alice Schroeder, Buffettologist exraordinaire, notes the careful form of words in the press release announcing the hiring of Ted Weschler as an heir to Buffett’s investing throne:

The press release contains another tantalizing hint. Twice, it refers to the period “after Mr. Buffett no longer serves as CEO.” These cues are subtle — way too subtle to mean anything definitive. But it makes me wonder whether, at some point, Buffett is going to appoint a CEO while retaining the nonexecutive-chairman role.

That would be a move the business world has definitely not been expecting. It’s also one that may make sense, for Buffett as well as Berkshire. He would remain the company’s most valuable asset — making the phone calls that get those lucrative deals done, playing the world’s economic statesman, and flattering business owners into selling their companies to Berkshire. Meanwhile, Weschler and Combs would have the primary responsibility for investing Berkshire’s $10 billion a year of cash flow and constantly compounding pool of assets.

Schroeder’s point is that Weschler has serious CEO chops.

He does, in fact, cover all the bases: finding acquisitions, financing them, overseeing management of acquired companies, designing their compensation, allocating capital of the entity that owns the businesses, and understanding lending and credit markets from a bank’s perspective. He also knows how to finance acquisitions in special situations such as bankruptcies; manage long-tailed risks like his former employer W.R. Grace & Co.’s asbestos liability; and control equity- portfolio risk in a volatile market using positioning, derivatives and moderate leverage.

Meanwhile, Buffett himself has always been a better investor than CEO. He basically does three things: he speculates in stocks; he buy insurance companies and invests the enormous amounts of cash they have on hand; and he buys companies which throw off cash which he can then use to invest. Essentially, he’s an investor. By contrast, if you give him a company and ask him to grow it, he’s much less good. Look at Berkshire holdings like Dairy Queen or See’s Candies or NetJets or that furniture store in Omaha: none of them have seen particularly notable growth or breakout success under Buffett’s watch.

So it makes sense to me that Buffett semi-retire to an elder-statesman-and-CIO role much like that of Bill Gross at Pimco, and hand over the reins as CEO to Weschler. Or possibly Ajit Jain. And this could happen any time: Buffett is 81, and really doesn’t need the boring managerial hassles of being a CEO. So long as he’s Warren Buffett, and has the “chairman” title (which will be as long as he’s alive, most likely”), Buffett won’t lose any of his Oracle status — he’ll be in the happy position of getting credit when things go well for Berkshire, while not getting all or even most of the blame if things go badly. As Schroeder says:

It’s significant that Buffett has begun the transition to a new investing team, whether he remains CEO in the years ahead or not. Buffett is taking his hands off the reins of the portfolio. Hiring a manager of Weschler’s caliber is an important signal. The transfer of power won’t happen overnight, but its magnitude is something to ponder for those who are interested in the markets. Meanwhile, we get to watch a new story, featuring new players, unfolding at Berkshire Hathaway.

From a PR point of view — and Warren Buffett cares deeply about his public image — yesterday was arguably the single worst day of Buffett’s life. He was dragged against his will — with a subpoena, no less — in front of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which grilled him on whether, as Moody’s largest shareholder, he took any responsibility at all for the disaster that happened there. His answer — no — was met with unanimous derision, both in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere: see The Pragmatic Capitalist, or Bond Girl (“It’s funny how heroes end up cutting themselves down to size even when no one else can”), or Edmund Andrews:

Warren Buffett has turned into an evasive, disingenuous, bumbling buffoon…

When asked by Phil Angelides, the commission chairman, what the agencies did wrong, Buffett passed the buck as shamelessly as every other Wall Street powerhouse player: “I think they made the same mistake that virtually everybody else made,” Buffett told in the first in a long series of evasions…

Having basked for years in public adulation for his his investment brilliance, Buffett suddenly acted as if he hadn’t the slightest idea about the goings on at Moody’s even though Berkshire Hathaway had been one of its biggest shareholders.

Between his Moody’s investment and his Goldman investment, Buffett is slowly working out that only half of his public adulation comes from his compounded annual returns. The other half comes from the fact that he seemingly got those returns investing in Coca-Cola, motherhood, and apple pie. Rather than in entities without which the current wave of misery overtaking homeowners nationwide could never have happened.

Buffett is that rarest of institutional shareholders: someone who actually owns and runs lots of large companies of his own. As such, he can and should act much more like an owner than most shareholders. But he doesn’t, and he has no visible desire to fix the problems at Moody’s or at the ratings agencies more generally. He just says he wishes he’d sold his Moody’s stock earlier, passing on those losses to some other sucker. I don’t think he’s ever going to be able to live this one down.