As to worshipping rich people, anything you consider worth people's time can be similarly dismissed as perfunctory worship of it.
I didn't really know what to say, because she is right. Warren Buffet is good at picking companies who are undervalued and making money from that. That's a skill I guess. But do you want a country filled with Warren Buffets? Is there any reason to value this kind of parasitic success? The guy isn't really much different than the mafia or a loan shark. He loans money to companies he thinks will succeed, and wants interest paid back to him. At least Bill Gates provided value (and he was predatory in doing so) and his work changed the world. Aside from his eventual philanthropy, it's hard to see how Warren Buffet has changed the world.
Maybe I'm missing something. But how do you inspire a young person to be like Warren Buffet. And more importantly, should you?
I'm not sure you quite understand what Buffett does. Yes, his company invests in other companies. However, it's more typical for him to invest to: (1) gain a controlling share and (2) realign the company's management and strategy.
He often turning around companies through his own expertise. Not just "loaning them money and collecting interest".
Yes Buffett got rich, but he got rich by creating things, which requires new jobs. A lot of other people got rich along with him.
I guess my point wasn't that somebody else was losing out. But that Warren Buffet could have made 1/1000th the amount of profit as he did and the world itself would not have lost out. Only Warren Buffet gains, not the world as a whole. Ultimately what value does Warren Buffet's success in terms of dollars bring to the world? Again, ignoring his eventual philanthropic choices.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he is a bad person or that he is not highly intelligent or even shouldn't be successful. What I am saying is that it's hard to justify that he has added proportional value to the world that is worth the money he has made. To each his own, but if this were a world full of people who only wanted to benefit upon the production done by others, then this would be a troublesome world. Just imagine, could Linus Torvalds have chosen to turn Linux into a profitable venture? Could he have been all about the money and not about producing a truly great OS that people could build upon? I just don't think it's wise to put Warren Buffet as a success story above, say, Linus because he made so much more money. I'd rather live in a world of mostly Linus' than a world of mostly Buffet's.
Donating almost everything back to society, that does not count?
Second, he's creating value for these businesses. The owners have worked hard, they need to sell to someone, and Warren provides them a way to keep building their lives work without having Wall Street force them to change how they do things.
Without buyers for shares, there can be no sellers, and then there are no capital markets, and we are all far poorer for it.
What your daughter could learn from Warren is
1) Basic investment valuation skills, which can be applied to any investment, business, or purchase (including cars and homes) and improve her live in many ways.
2) Business management skills. Understanding what makes a good vs. a bad company, competitive barriers, motivation, etc.
3) The need to avoid bias in decision making. He spends a great deal of time managing his own mental framework to ensure emotions and outside forces don't lead him to make less rational decisions.
She can read his investor letters for free online, and learn many of these skills just by reading them.
It's ironic that she's entrepreneurial, and all you can take from the documentary is that he intended to donate all his wealth to charity after he died and it had grown to the largest size possible, and his wife convinced him no, it was better to do it while he was still alive. And that somehow makes him a bad guy.
In his twenties and thirties he ran the Buffett Partnerships and averaged around 35% a year returns, over 13 or 14 years, beating the market by a massive amount.
He retired around age 40, then bored went back to full time work running a company he controlled, Berkshire Hathaway. At one point he had beaten the market all but a couple of 50 years.
In his shareholder letters he describes very clearly how he does it. Its a combination of being an excellent value investor, understanding which companies have competitive moats, and working very hard at reducing negative psychological biases.
We can't be as good as investor as WEB, but reading and understanding his shareholder letters will make you a much better one in anything you do (buying a house, car, etc), and understanding the psychological biases that drive you to bad investing decisions can be applied in many areas.
In contrast, when I read [auto]biographies of notable people today, we are ONLY seeing the life from a snapshot in time - n accumulation of their life, from deliberately chosen points of view - and we never get to see that relatable part of "what was this person thinking when they were 35 years old, stuck in a panicked business climate".
I also think its fascinating to see people's decision-making processes and attitudes change over time. For example, anyone who has read WB's shareholder letters see his attitude change from "buy cigar butts, and sell those" (basically, find OK assets which are undervalued) to "pay a premium for great things, and hold them forever". WB even reflects on this attitude change at times - some of his earlier purchases (like the actual textile mill) was an attempt to identify decent businesses in a bad spot, buy them on the cheap, and turn them around. Later, he basically said - that was just a bad idea, and it's buying trouble for years. Instead, pay a premium for a company which is solid, run by solid people... and let that naturally appreciate in value, and get out of its way.
WB mentions Dale Carnegie frequently - I do think reading both "How to Make Friends & Influence People" and Berkshire's Letters to Shareholders could basically be a business course itself - how to do business honorably, ethically, and respectfully. Lots of lessons to be learned there.
The letters starting from 1995 can be consulted at http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/reports.html.
They are also available in book form 'Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders', starting from 1965 (with the early partnership letters).
Charlie Munger's Wesco Letters to Shareholders are also interesting, especially the early ones: http://www.wescofinancial.com/.