Charles T. "Charlie" Munger is an American businessperson, hedge fund manager, philanthropist, investor, and philosopher. He is the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. He has served on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans since 1995.
He was born in Los Angeles, California on September 6, 1923
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His father was a vice president for United States Trust Company of Los Angeles. He graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Business Administration in 1946 and received honorary doctorate degrees from Duke University in 1984 and Hillsdale College in 1999.
He was involved in his father's company until he was twenty-one years old when he joined the United States Navy during World War II.
During his service he was stationed at Pearl Harbor and helped defend against Japanese attacks on American ships there. He became a lieutenant junior grade and then an officer before being discharged in 1946 following the war's end.
After leaving the Navy, he went to work for his father's company as an analyst while studying at night for his MBA at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.
In 1953 he started working at Berkshire Hathaway as an investment manager after being invited to join by Warren Buffett, who had become Munger's friend when both were students at Columbia University during the 1930s.
Though considered to be one of the most influential investors of all time, Munger has long downplayed his role as an investor while giving more credit to Buffett's skills as a manager and marketer than he does to himself as a stock picker: "I just see myself as a manager." Both men have said that they do not look back over their careers and attempt to figure out what decisions they made that led to their success or failure; instead, they say that they pay attention to what is going on around them and react accordingly: "When you're young you don't know enough history to know what's important." Instead they say that they focus on the task at hand: "You don't think about what happened yesterday or last year or five years ago; you try to understand what will happen tomorrow." They also say that they try to avoid making decisions based on emotions: "We're not emotional people; we're logical people who like facts and like numbers." They often refer to themselves as "the two amigos" or "the brain trust". They have stated that if one of them made an error then both would make up for it:
