Sheelah Kolhatkar on Short Termism

pretty dire consequences for all of us. In the business world. Short termism manifests itself in an intense focus on next quarters results, not next year's, and god forbid, not a decade from now next quarter. To an alarming degree, as we'll be discussing, this pressure leads businesses to engage in fraud in order to present Wall Street with the quarterly earnings results it wants to see, think and run. But that's actually only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The

more damaging effects are a little harder to see. The way a focus on producing profits now can divert research and development dollars that could have invented, say, a life saving drug, and done what business is supposed to do by making the world a better place. So it was a good thing when Warren Buffett, obviously a business icon, and Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase Wait And last spring with an op ed in The Wall

Street Journal entitled short Termism is Harming the Economy. They argued that public companies should reduce or eliminate the practice of estimating quarterly earnings because they argued, it often leads to an unhealthy focus on short term profits at the expense of long term strategy, growth and sustainability. Well yeah,

but over the years there have been others. In early twenty sixteen, Larry Think, the chief executive at Blackrock, the world's biggest investor with almost five trillion dollars under management, sent a letter to chief executives at S and P, five hundred companies and large European corporations. He also urged quote resistance to the powerful forces of short termism afflicting corporate behavior. That was three years ago, so it's not

clear what effect, if any, thinks missive is having. Concerned voices have been buzzing about this since oh, at least the days of Enron, And really none of it seems to make a damn bit of difference. So does all of this mean that capitalism has a problem? Is this part of the reason that a lot of people, particularly in the US, the bastion of capitalism, don't seem to like or trust business very much anymore? Here to talk

about this and more is Sheila Kolhatkar. Sheila and I first met Jonzaco, and we were drawn to each other because, well, we like each other, and because we both worked in finance before coming to journalism. She's now a New Yorker writer who wrote the best selling book Black Edge, Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street, a man who not incidentally made his fortune on short termism. But I swear we're

going to find some optimism amid the gloom. Okay, I promise we're going to try, so, Sheila, before we really dive into this, let's talk about why people should care about this disease of short termism. I would start off by asking someone, have your wages gone up? Has the medication your mother needs to treat her dementia? Has that become so expensive that you can't afford it. Do you know people who've been laid off. Has the big factory in the town where you grew up closed? You know?

Are there a lot more people out of work than there used to be. All of those things are connected in some way to decisions that companies and policymakers are making that are focused much more on short term interests. So short termism sounds abstract, but it's actually incredibly real in the sense that it's the paycheck in somebody's pocket every week. It's the medication they might need to cure

a chronic disease. What sounds like an abstract concept is actually anything, but it's very concrete in terms of the impact it has on people's lives. It's really connected to almost everything. One of the things I say a lot is that business stories are always stories about people, and that you've got this great character in the PC road. So tell us who is Ron Shake and what made

you care about him. Ron Shake is the founder of Panera Bread, which is this wildly successful fast casual sandwich chain. It's one of the most successful restaurant companies in the US. Ron will tell you very excitedly and show you charts of the Panera stock price and how well it performed. I came to be interested in him through this sort

of roundabout way. I have been doing a lot of long form pieces for The New Yorker where I work, and one of the themes that comes up a lot in them is the way that a lot of businesses are being pressured by Wall Street investors to just be very focused on short term interests and short term things that will cause their stock prices to go up. Absolutely

the curse of our time, right, yes. And I could see, partly because of my obsession with this, partly because I have a financial background, that there's a connection between the fact that this is happening and all this other chaos we're seeing in our political and economic world, and the Trump presidency, the political polarization, all these debates about rural voters in the Midwest and why they were drawn to President Trump's message. There's a connection between these two things.

And I was struggling to find a way to illustrate that connection, and along came Ron Shake, who is a very interesting, successful, compelling guy, but who also sort of embodies this connection and the tension between long and short term interests, and I had the good fortune of sitting down to talk to him. It's one of the things that drew media your pieces this larger picture behind it, right, that Shart Tramism in business is not just a business

world issue. It's actually has all these bigger ramifications. But we'll get to that. Going back to Ron, what made Panera so successful. The interesting thing about Ron is that he has a real knack for recognizing gaps in the market, particularly in the food restaurant world. And he started Panera in the well he started the company that became Panera

in the early eighties. He began with a simple cookie shop in Boston, and very quickly he recognized that there were a lot of office workers in Boston who didn't have anywhere to eat lunch that you know. Their options were McDonald's are sort of a more formal, old fashioned sit down restaurant, and he could see that people were becoming a little more health conscious. So through a series of kind of mergers and he took over Obopa. He started serving soups, salad, sandwiches to this like busy but

health conscious cohort of office workers. So he saw an opening to provide people with a different type of food than they'd had previously. But he also did other things that were different that you detail in your story. What were some of those things that were really innovative from a business point of view. One of the things he talks about a lot is that he really wanted to make his restaurants welcoming. He wanted to make them into places where you might hang out or have a meeting.

You would say, oh, you could have a business meeting, a job interview, a church meeting, sort of the way Starbucks did around the same time, and even Barnes and Noble when it was really up and coming, you know, having couches and comfortable seating. And he also started one of the first restaurant loyalty programs where you could like earn points and rewards for eating there. He also sort of later in the company's evolution, introduced different ways of ordering.

You know, you could order on your phone, you could order online, you could call so multi platform, multi channel ways of stuff that seems obvious now but wasn't at all when he did it. Right, there's this point I wanted to pause on this quote in your piece I Love, which is from him, but he says they wanted food they felt good about. They wanted environments that engage them, they wanted people that cared. Shake said basically they wanted to feel respected by their food. And what fast food

had become was a commodity. It had become nutritional cocaine. And I thought, is there a parallel here between what people want in food and what they want in capitalism and short termism in a sense financial cocaine. Well, that's what's great about the story, because yes, it's it's like a little microcosm of the larger issues we're dealing with, which is there was this huge upsurge in cheap, easy, ultimately damaging food, drink, even the coffee at that time

was just this very mass market. You know, he mentioned Maxwell House at one point. I mean, the whole consumer brand market was dominated by these huge companies Coke, Pepsi, Maxwell House that were creating products that were ultimately sort of garbage, inexpensive, you could grab and go. And yes, that is something we've obviously been accustomed to in the larger economy and sort of the source of many of

our deeper problems. I do kind of look at almost all major news events as ultimately financial stories, if you peel back the threads, if you really dig into almost anything, there is a financial agree I think there's a huge advantage in looking at the world that way because you see through a lot of stuff that people who aren't

looking for that might miss. And therefore, when you see someone like President Trump gathering up all sorts of votes from out of work factory workers in states that are experiencing like economic depression, you know, all the dots are connected. For me, I can very easily see how changes and trends in finance, you know, the rise of private equity, offshoring, all these things ultimately trickle down into these real world effects,

doesn't it. In no way when you look back on your early experience and finance back in the round two thousand, doesn't seem like a more naive time in a sense, and that we were perhaps more willing to believe some of the cynicism that it afflets us now hadn't really said in yet, And the short termism that is so pervasive seemed like a temporary blip or something that was

fixable or is that just me? I absolutely look back on even you know, even ten years ago, things seemed a little quaint sometimes to me in light of what's going on now. I mean, what's happened really is just a lot of the facade that used to be covering over everything has been removed. I think the financial crisis was the beginning of that that really pulled the shades off of everyone's eyes. I mean that was really a period when a lot of people became kind of radicalized

in their views and their cynicism about Wall Street. Right shocking that you could look at these big companies with their tens of thousands of employees and their billions of dollars in market cap and there gleaming skyscrapers in New York and they could be so fragile. And then you have antidotes to those stories like Iran shake who built

something real right and he got rewarded for it. Didn't he did, He did, He did well personally, He made a killing in the best of ways, in the sense that he created a successful business and got paid for having done so. Absolutely. I mean he became very wealthy personally as a result of exactly what we want people to do in our economy, which is he had an idea, He risked his capital and his time, he invested, he

built his company, he innovated, he created jobs. You know, he helped move the food industry into a healthier direction. And yes, he did very well as a result, and that's exactly what business should be about. Right. Does he think he could do it today? No, I mean, this was one of the reasons he was so interesting to talk to because he feels very strongly that it would be difficult, if not almost impossible, to do now what he did then as a result of a whole bunch

of factors. But this rise in short term pressures is sort of the number one culprit he would point to.

Did he feel like he had to push back on that even while he was building his company, He absolutely did, I mean he In twenty seventeen, Ron decided to take Panera private, and he ended up joining forces with a private equity firm that he felt had sort of longer term goals for the company, because he felt that being publicly traded company and being subject to the whims of the stock market in the current environment was undermining the company's ability to grow and innovate and really made it

almost impossible to run and build a successful business. So he seemed to believe. It was one note that actually made me a little skeptical that he seemed to believe that private equity was part of the solution. Does he actually believe that? And do you believe that because I tend to think of private equity as part of the problem.

That's a fair question. I think, like activist hedge funds, private equity firms come in all different stripes, and there is one version of private equity investing that serves a valuable purpose in the market. I mean, in theory, private equity investors are looking for troubled businesses, businesses that could use a little capital investment, maybe some new strategy, the ideas that they're going to go in there, they're going to make investments, they're going to change management, and then

ultimately leave the company in a stronger position. I mean, that's the theory, and that is of course, occasionally, or perhaps sometime in the past, it often worked like that, where you would have an investor who would be incentivized

to try and help fix or improve a company. And of course there are even examples of companies that are really doing things wrong where activist investors might call that out and point out severe problems that slogan of private equities that it allows businesses to focus on the long term.

It's become a marketing slogan that I worry is devoid of substance in many cases, because I think the private equity owners put as much pressure on the business to generate profits as the public markets do so that they too can turn around, flip it, take it public again, and get their money out. Because that short term pressure

has become relentless investors as well. Right, Yes, and I think many of those private equity deals are structured so that the investors make money even before they flip the company. I mean they're paying themselves dividends. They're making the company borrow money to pay the private equity firm fees for managing the company. You know, they forced the companies to

sell all their real estate and unlease it back. They weaken the companies so then when there's a real hiccup in the business environment, there is no cushion there to help the company weather that. That practice that you just mentioned of private equity firms taking dividends by loading a company up with debt and figuring out a way to pay themselves, in effect, before they've done anything to earn that payday to me, is just a complete betrayal of

what private equity is supposed to be about. Yes, agreed, I mean the incentives are very messed up, And I wrote about toys ARUs recently that's a very good example. I mean, there are obviously a whole bunch of challenges facing a company like toys Rus and Amazon is a huge one, But when you really look at the details of what the private equity investors did and only sears

is a bit of a similar story. I mean, the argument is that their interests are supposed to be aligned with those of the company and of the longer term stakeholders in that company. But what they've managed to do is figure out a way to make their money no matter what. So they're not really aligned. They're not really taking a big risk that creates all sorts of inverted perverse incentives and leads to all these companies that could

have probably been saved just being sent into bankruptcy. So I want to pause on this notion of incentives and compensation because I often feel like the quest for the right compensation system it tends to be the law of unintended consequences. Right everybody comes up with a compensation structure that they think is brilliant, I mean stock options, What could be better, right, aligning and executive's interest with the

head of shareholders. And then, of course executives figured out ways to basically game the system such that they could get paid in the short term whether or not their companies did well. The best example is Actually and Run, where the top two hundred executives I'm going to be directionally right about this number, got over a billion dollars in stock option compensation in two thousand, which was Enron's

last full year of existence before it went bankrupt. I mean, if you need a fact to show how absurdly unaligned, right,

stock option compensation can be. There's this great stat from the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and they say, pension funds, insurance companies, mutual fund, sovereign wealth funds hold over one hundred trillion dollars in assets and they're managing money on behalf of all of us, right, And so you'd think that haven't obvious interest in long term value creation, right, because that's what we all want, is long term value creation.

And yet all these players are encouraging short termism. Too, Why what's gone wrong there? Why can't we align capital

with capitalism. This came up a lot around some of these high profile bankruptcies we've seen recently that involved private equity investors, because I think in the case of Choice r US, where many of those workers just got very badly burned or you know, we're owed money or didn't get severancy expected, a lot of pension fund investors were sort of like, hey, wait a second, like why are we putting money with these private equity firms when they're

then going out and dumping our members pensions onto the fire the second that you know, things get tough at the company. It doesn't do you a whole lot of good if your pension fund is making money, but the way it's making money is costing you your employment, right, and something very twisted about that tell us about Shake's battles with activist investors. He had to fight them off too, didn't he. Even with everything he'd done, he still had

to defend off attempts to change his strategy. Well, that was it he I don't think he had one of the most drawn out, brutal activist investor fights of all time, but it was notable he had a couple of different activists take positions in his stock. He told me that often the things they wanted him to do, he felt were kind of undermining of the longer term goals and interests of the company. And one of the things that

they wanted him to do is raise prices. You know, I'm sure someone an analyst at one of those funds kind of crunched the number of Panera and said, you know what, you could get these people to pay like x percentage more for these sandwiches. You should charge more. But he had very strong feelings about customer loyalty, and he wanted people to have a really positive feeling about their experience at Panera and to want to come back.

And he thought, you know, that might kind of juice up earnings in the near term, but over time, we're going to lose customers. You know, we're not going to have the same loyalty that we used to. Someone else could come into the market with a cheaper product and draw them away. So he resisted that he felt he had some position of strength when dealing with these activists because the company had been so successful, But even still, he eventually decided that he couldn't risk having his decision

making undermined, and he made it. He told me a story about how they'll often send in an analyst, you know, some business school graduate decades younger than the company founder or the CEO, and this analyst will say, well, you know, sir, I think you could think you could try just raising the prices a little bit. I've got this spreadsheet. Ron was just seemed a little insulted by that. Frankly, I

can imagine what's interesting. It makes me think back because I remember someone saying to me years ago that one of the signs of a business that was going to face trouble was one that didn't leave a nickel on

the table. I didn't really know what that meant at the time, but I think when you do extract every possible bit of earnings from your customers, from your from your suppliers, in the end, if you don't leave crumbs for other other people, if you are taking every single nickel, it's a form of short termism, and it's a form

of disrespect for the ecosystem in which you exist. Right absolutely, I think the whole thing is steeped in a sort of contempt for the other the other parts, the other the event, that's a great phrase, the other the other

entities who have interests in the company. Um, it's also undermining of your own interests because, um, you know, the moment there's a bump in the road, that company will not have any any ends, any friends, any gas in the tank, like pick your cliche metaphor to whether that challenge, you know, and then they have to go into the spiral or even more cost cutting and yep, leaving the

nickel on the on the table creates give them the system. Yes, if you had to vote activist investors thumbs up, thumbs down. I've been asked this before. You know, would you just ban hedge funds if you could? No, I mean I wouldn't ban all activist investors. However, I do think we need to rethink tax policy, regulatory policy. We need to find ways to perhaps make it less financially attractive to do this short term trading and more attractive create greater

incentives for longer term investment. In a really interesting way, I think your current focus in your current work connects to your wonderful book Black Edge, because in some ways, the Steve Cohen's story is the story a very short term capital Right, would you argue that his worldview, that short term worldview has done damage to capitalism above and beyond the damage of just the Steve Cohen's story. Well,

he's part of a system. He's part of a group, very large and influential group of mostly hedge fund investors who are interested in, yes, short term trading, I mean essentially gambling informed gambling, you might say. And I don't want to put all of the ills of our economy at Steve Cohen's feet, of course, but the fact is that this type of investing that he represents has absolutely

contributed to this pressure. And one of the moments I wrote about in the book that really stood out to me was the sort of key trade that occurred that ended up being a focus of the trade, Right, the Dell trade. Dell was, you know, Dell was going to report earnings, which companies do every three months, and you had all of these young men, they were all men in this case, many of them prought of our finest colleges and boarding schools, and there they were, you know,

with their Bloomberg screens. They spent months, weeks, months trying to figure out what the gross margin number was going to be for Dell's quarterly earnings report, and they wanted to know, down to like a quarter of a penny, what that gross margin was going to be. They had to kind of figure out what this particular metric, what this number was going to be, what the market was expecting, and that using those two pieces of data, they could try and anticipate what the stock would do when the

information finally became public. And this led many of them to you extraordinary lengths to try and get that information, and of course the government felt it was very suspicious and ultimately charge some people over that trade. But what was remarkable to me was that, you know, you have all these really highly educated, able bodied people, and that was what they were spending their day doing, trying to

guestimate to Dell's gross margins. And I just thought it was just such a misallocation of intellectual talent and our economy, Like those people could have done so many amazing things. They could have started companies, they could have been teachers or doctors or whatever, and this is what they were doing. And a lot of people are now leaving Harvard and Yale and Wharton Business School and going to do that all day. That seems to be a misallocation of intellectual

talent to steal your phrase on a grand scale. Right. Also the flip side of it, which was that the people at Dell, like the investor relations staff at Dell, had to try and manage expectations of all these investors because their stock was liable to swing wildly, and part of their job was to try and like keep things under control and like just let people know just enough so that there weren't any big shocks and the stock wouldn't plummet or shoot up. Seemed just like a big waste,

and it did, right. They downmissed the gross margin forecast by like a tiny sliver, and that sent the stock into this tailspin, and people made tens of millions of dollars off this trade. And making tens of millions of dollars in a way that's just playing quarterly earnings results, right, It's not making tens of millions of dollars because you've built a new something it's going to make the world better. Yeah. Oh, it's a lot easier to make the millions of dollars

gambling than to go do the hard work. I mean, it is much easier to just pick the right side or perhaps get information so you don't even have to risk being wrong. That's actually an extremely scary statement that it's easier, right, That it seems easier, and that's part of our own culture of short termism and how it's

spread beyond just quarterly earnings. So I want to go back to the headline of your story, because this is the bigger picture argument for why this matters, Right, that Shake's got this argument that short termism isn't just a business world phenomenon. It's not just a problem for a business, but it's actually changing and shaping our society. Right, can

you tell us about that. Well, one thing you said to me is, well, if you're a blue collar worker in Michigan or Pennsylvania or Iowa, and you're on a plant floor assembling furniture or car parts or whatever it is, and you know, suddenly your company falls on hard times. They close the manufacturing facility near your town. It's sitting there like a rotting shell on the landscape. Instead, a Walmart opens up or an Amazon distribution center opens up.

So now instead of having sort of a unionized, relatively well paying job working in this factory, you can now go work for a minimum wage as a checkout cashier at Walmart and apply for food stamps to help make up the shortfall because you can't afford I mean, the point is he charted this decline in people's economic security, and he links that directly to short termism. Of course, so a lot of those decisions are short term decisions there.

You know, a lot of offshoring comes from the idea that, well, we can do this cheaper over there, that you know the product won't be as good, will be kind of cheating our consumers by giving them a crappy product, will be short changing our workers, will be laying off all these people. Our stockholders will be happy because the profit

margin will improve. So yes, these are a result of these same short term trade offs, and they lead to decisions that have created a situation where the top point one percent of our country have seen enormous increases in their net worth and their earnings, and most people have not seen real increases in their wages in twenty plus years. That's not sustainable. I mean, that's why people are so upset and angry. I love this quote he told you.

When we live in a world where we view value creation as the end and not as a byproduct, which is what short term thinking lends itself to. We end up doing great damage to every other constituency, and that's what ultimately drives back to the kind of let's rip down the establishment and nihilism that, in my view, is at the core of trumps m He says, but there is that right. It creates this hopelessness and this sense

that we're not all in it together. I think it's very much connected to this rise in populist feeling, not just in the US but the world. Another piece I worked on the New Yorker dealt with Elliot Management, this big Act of its head fund. I wrote about what that particular investment in a company called Athena Healthcare, what they know Elliot wanted Athena to do, and it was

all very sort of dramatic. But at one point I interviewed Marty Lipton, the chairman of Wachtel Lipton, the big law firm, and he has become very interested in this issue of short termism, and I think he really sees the world in terms of one where a lot of people have seen their fortunes decline because of short term decisions.

In the business world. And he said to me, you just cannot have a democracy where most of the population is just not seeing any improvement in their situation while a tiny sliver is just getting richer and richer, he said, is just not sustainable. And it was sort of a chilling quote in a way. But I think we can

already see moves in that direction. And it's scary. It's a great irony, isn't it that by engaging in this type of behavior, corporations, investors are actually creating the very situation that's going to undermine the system that benefits them so much, right, And you would think that would I'll be able to step back from that and fix it. And Shake is trying to so tell us what he's

doing and is it getting any traction. He really wants to kind of bring his message and the lessons that can be learned from his experience to policymakers in Washington, to other business leaders. He's been doing talks and speeches you know, around the world about this, and I think people are very intrigued. The great thing about the story of panias it is so clear, it is so accessible to people. So when you explain short termism and Cherylder

writes and all this stuff. I mean, most people's eyes glaze over, but everyone knows Panera Ron is like this very approachable, charismatic guy. Anyone who reads the story can just sort of see all the pieces laid out. It's such an easy vehicle for communicating this. And certainly after the the article came out that I wrote about him, a number of you know, like senators and presidential candidates did reach out to him. There was some tweeting of

the piece. So I do think there's a chance that some of the policymakers designing economic agendas of some of these forthcoming presidential candidates may take this into account, do you really? I think so. Certainly on the Democrats, I mean, I don't know if they'll do it. Well. You know, we've already seen a suggestion from Bernie Sanders and Chuck

Schumer that we should ban stock buybacks. Now, I think a lot of people will perhaps rightfully roll their eyes at that, but I think that that whole idea comes out of a concern about short termism. I don't know if they have someone who really understands the stock market giving them advice about how to go about doing this. I think it could go very wrong, obviously. What concerns me, though, is that we've been talking about this for at least as long as you and I have been covering business right,

and the problem only seems to get worse. It does seem to get better despite the good intentions of a guy like Ron Shake. Am I being too cynical. I think there's a lot of reason for cynicism. I agree things have gotten progressively worse. There's barely been a pause in the sort of trajectory. I do think Trump's victory and what that communicated about the feelings of a lot of voters and the economic stresses of a lot of

people who are sort of previously invisible. I think that has been a bit of a wake up call to a lot of people. Now. Whether it will be enough for whether anything will happen, I just don't know. But there is a lot of energy and conversation around this, and there wasn't as much before. It's a starting point. Yeah, there's a great quote by Shaike that I thought so this up. He said, this system doesn't serve the American people. There's an opportunity to ask ourselves, is this what we want?

I think a lot of people are asking the question is will those in a position to really make big changes while they listen? And a lot of them have not been listening, even watching what Trump has done. I mean that kind of the contrast between what he promised and what he talked about and what I think a lot of people responded to in his rhetoric and what he's actually done, or what at least he's allowed the

Republicans in Congress to do. I mean, there's a huge gap between those two, and I wonder how many of his voters are feeling. If they're feeling let down by him, there is a genuine backlash going on. I think it's interesting that people are talking about socialism now. I mean that's not something that has been going on over the previous decades. I mean, people are seriously considering socialism. They're

so disgusted with the way capitalism has unfolded. So I mean, I am also cynical about how much things are going to change. I think there's still so much financial interest in keeping the system as it is. But there does seem to be a very powerful backlash, and maybe it will result in some compromise. One can hope Can we trust the politicians to solve this? Can we trust CEOs to solve this? And if we can't trust politicians and CEOs,

how does this change? Is it? Guys like Ron Shake, I don't think the politicians have done a whole lot to earn our trust in this particular area. I'm feeling a little frustrated with them, and I think, honestly, in a lot of cases, their interests are not aligned with their constituents. I mean, this is a huge problem. The same can be said for a lot of business leaders.

I think there are more and more of them like Ron Shake, trying to kind of speak up about this, But the fact is that most of them are focused on the same short term interests that the politicians and the investors are focused on, and are making decisions to benefit themselves at the expense of their workers, their customers, their communities. So no, I don't trust them. I think the only way that they're going to change their attitude

is if people insist that they do. I don't have a great prescription as to how to make that happen, but there are seeds of it going on because there is a sort of backlash against this kind of thinking taking place. The fact that people are talking about stock buybacks and short termism and socialism and you know, all these things that really would have been considered dirty forbidden words. I think it's a sign that there is pressure rising up that may force some change. Shake had a great

quote on this point. He said to you, we all believe the system is bigger than us and we can't fix it. But if we don't take control of that system, it's misserving us in powerful ways. And so thought about in that light, it's what's the alternative, right, other than try to do something. I think it's the only way change happens. I've been thinking about the dangers of short termism for a very long time. An end Roun's case, obsession with short term earnings didn't just cause the bankruptcy

of the company. It resulted in the loss of a lot of great ideas that could have been transformative businesses. On the flip side, I remember spending the day with Warren Buffett a few years back. He said to me that his major goal for his company, Berkshire Hathaway, the most important thing for him was that the company was around in a hundred years. And the reason why is that Berkshire Hathaway is in part an insurance operation, and it's made promises to pay people that stretch out a

hundred years. And for Buffett, the thing that was the most critical to him is that the company is there to fulfill those promises. In other words, he thinks about his company not as a monument to himself, but in terms of the impact it has on people's lives. And now there's Ron Shake, who told Sheila of this. We've ended up in a situation, to the detriment of all of us, where our public companies are not able to do the things we want in the economy. He continued,

this system doesn't serve the American people. There's an opportunity to ask ourselves is this what we want? And that's really the question, isn't it Is this what we want? If not, maybe there's a way for us to join forces with people like Shake and put pressure on the powers that be to change for real this time before it's too late. Making a Killing for You is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Rosie Stoffer. My executive producers

are Alison mcclein no relation in making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering is by Jason Gambrell. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLean. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mactwelve and let me know who you've enjoyed hearing from.