Well-educated, high profile CEOs sometimes become synonymous with their companies.

Steve Jobs and Apple, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, and Jeff Bezos and Amazon. It's hard to separate the man from the operation.

However, investing in a company simply based on its leadership might not be the best strategy, according to Warren Buffett.

Rather, as he said in an interview with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) in May 2010, one should instead in invest in a business that any fool can run.

The interview comes from a document dump from the National Archives, which released transcripts, meeting agendas, and confidentiality agreements from the FCIC. The group was set up by Congress in the aftermath of the to look into the causes of the event.

When asked by the FCIC what attracted him to the management of Moody's — the credit ratings agency that was at the center of the mortgage-backed securities debacle — when he made his initial investment, Buffett responded:

"I knew nothing about the management of Moody's. The — I've also said many times in reports and elsewhere that when a management with reputation for brilliance gets hooked up with a business with a reputation for bad economics, it's the reputation of the business that remains intact.

If you've got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper, if you have a network television station — I'm talking of the past — you know, your idiot nephew could run it. And if you've got a really good business, it doesn't make any difference."

Of course, there are some differences when it comes to management. Anyone who's had a bad boss can tell you that. However, the way Buffett is thinking about it here, as he says in the interview, is if 10 years ago someone owned the only newspaper in town, then they're the person with the pricing power — and that's a good business.

He said something more or less the same in the case of Moody's, noting that very few businesses had the competitive position that rating agencies like Moody's and Standard and Poor's had. And he even went as far as calling them a "natural duopoly to some extent," since both basically became the standard for regulators.

Tellingly, when asked whether he had ever pressed for the election of any board member, Buffett responded: "If I thought they needed me, I wouldn't have bought the stock."

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Saturday is the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting, and CEO Warren Buffett and his right-hand man Charlie Munger will answer investors' questions.

Over the last half-century, Buffett has taken a failing textile company and turned it into a legendary conglomerate.

Using historical price data for Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares from a retrospective analysis of Buffett's outsize returns and Yahoo Finance, we calculated how much $1,000 of Berkshire stock would be worth today if you had invested that money at the end of each year of Buffett's tenure.

That $1,000 invested in 1964, when Buffett took over the company and shares were just $19, would be worth about $13 million today, based on the $249,010 price of the stock on Wednesday — and $1,000 invested in 1990 would be worth $37,305 today.

Here's a chart showing the current value of Berkshire Hathaway stock bought at different times in the last 50 years:

Investing in the first couple of decades of Buffett's stewardship would have grown the $1,000 to several million dollars by today. After about 1980 or so, those gains were much more modest, although still impressive.

To get a better handle on values in the last 30 or so years, which are hard to see in the above chart because of the large returns in earlier years, here's the same chart using a logarithmic scale, in which the vertical axis is incremented in powers of 10, making it easier to compare the range of price returns we're looking at:

We'll have full coverage of the annual meeting on Saturday.

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Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway will host its annual meeting on Saturday.

The event draws huge interest in the financial world and is sometimes called "Woodstock for Capitalists" or "Buffettpalooza." Business Insider will cover it, and you can check back on Saturday for a blow-by-blow of the day.

Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger will answer five hours of questions. Typically, the crowd pays closer attention to Buffett's words of investing wisdom rather than Berkshire Hathaway's operations.

That's no surprise considering Buffett's vast wealth and lifetime of accomplishments.

Following are interesting things we've gleaned from the billionaire's eventful, 86-year-long life.

The "Oracle of Omaha" was born in 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, to Howard and Leila Buffett. His father was four-term US congressman from Nebraska and a stockbroker.

Source: Investopedia

While most kids were playing stickball out in the street, Buffett was rubbing elbows with Wall Street's most powerful players.

At age 10, Buffett had his "road to Damascus" moment, on Wall Street.

During a visit to New York City, Buffett and his father joined At Mol, a Dutchman who was a member of the New York Stock Exchange, for lunch.

"After lunch, a guy came along with a tray that had all these different kinds of tobacco leaves on it," Buffett recalled. "He made a cigar for Mr. Mol, who picked out the leaves he wanted. And I thought, this is it. It can't get any better than this. A custom-made cigar."

It was at that moment Buffett realized he would dedicate his life to making money.

Source: Business Insider

Buffett caught the investing bug early. When he was 11 years old he purchased his first stock.

He bought three shares of Cities Services Preferred at $38 per share. The young Buffett held on to them despite a quick price drop, to $27 per share, but sold them as soon as they reached $40.

Buffett's small profit could have been tremendous if he had waited it out a little longer, as the price of Cities Services Preferred's stock ultimately soared to nearly $200 per share.

The experience imparted an important financial lesson, which has informed his investment decisions to this day: Buy and hold.

Source: Biography.com

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett kicked off the proceedings at the Berkshire Hathaway 2017 Annual Shareholders Meeting with some high praise for a fellow stock market icon.

He told attendees that Jack Bogle, the creator of the first index fund, has "probably done more for the average investor than any man in the country," citing lower fees combined with solid returns through investing in index funds.

Bogle, who founded passive-investment behemoth Vanguard, has put "10s and 10s and 10s of billions into their pockets, and those numbers are going to be 100s and 100s of billions over time," Buffett continued to rave.

It isn't the first time Buffett has lauded Bogle's efforts to shape the modern investment landscape. In a shareholder letter published earlier this year, he called Bogle a "hero," and touted the merits of low-cost S&P 500 index funds.

The compliments were a nice early birthday present for Bogle, who turns 88 years old on Monday.

Buffett will continue answering shareholder questions throughout the day. Stay tuned.

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Warren Buffett said that the biggest failure of the Wells Fargo fake accounts scandal should be laid at former CEO John Stumpf's feet.

Wells Fargo settled with regulators in September after it was revealed that employees had opened as many as 2 million accounts in the names of customers without their knowledge. This launched a massive investigation, two congressional hearings, and eventually led to former CEO John Stumpf stepping down.

During the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Buffett addressed the scandal by breaking down three big problems. 

"There were three very significant mistakes, but there was one that dwarfs all the others." said Buffett

The first mistake was creating an incentive structure that rewarded bad behavior.

Wells Fargo advocated cross-selling, in which employees were judged based on how many extra financial products they could sell to each customer.

"Clearly at Wells Fargo there was an incentive system built around cross selling and services per customer," Buffett said "Undoubtedly people got paid, graded, and rewarded based on that system... it turns out that was incentivizing the wrong behavior."

The second, and biggest mistake, according to Buffett was when executives found out about the scandal, former CEO John Stumpf did not do enough about the issue. According to an internal investigation, Stumpf knew about the systemic issue as far back as 2012, but did not take substantial action.

"The biggest mistake was, obviously I don't know all the facts, but at some point if there is a major problem will get to the CEO and at that point the CEO has to act," Buffett said.

"It had to stop when the CEO learns about it," Buffett continued.

Buffett compared it to the Salomon Brothers scandal which led to the near downfall of that investment institution.

The third mistake, Buffett said, was that the bank underestimated the fall out and public backlash. "They totally underestimated the impact of what they had done," Buffett said.

In the end, however, Buffett said the issue came down to not doing enough about the scandal when they found out about it.

"The main problem was they didn't act when they learned about it," the legendary investor concluded.

Wells Fargo is one of the largest holdings of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact, Berkshire applied to the Federal Reserve in order to own more than 10% of the bank, but eventually dropped the request after determining the additional regulation associated with owning more of the bank was too burdensome.

UPDATE: Wells Fargo sent Business Insider the following statement on Buffett's comments:

We agree with Mr. Buffett’s comments and value Berkshire Hathaway as a long-term shareholder and customer. We have taken decisive actions to fix the problems, make things right for customers, and build a better Wells Fargo. Our top priority is rebuilding the trust of our customers, team members, community partners, and shareholders.

Our actions include:

• Eliminating product sales goals for Retail Bank team members and implementing a new performance management and rewards program that emphasizes customer experience and team goals.
• Centralizing key enterprise control functions, such as risk management and human resources, which had been reporting to the lines of business.
• Strengthening ethics and risk management throughout the company, including creating the new Office of Ethics, Oversight and Integrity to centralize the handling of internal investigations, complaints oversight, and sales practices oversight

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The first analyst question at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting on Saturday was about the threat of self-driving technology.

"If they make the world safer it's going to be a very good thing, but it won't be a good thing for auto insurers," Buffett said.

Self-driving cars have moved from a futuristic dream to a technology that corporations from BMW to Alphabet and Apple are investing in. Buffett said he thinks widespread adoption of self-driving cars is further down the road, and will depend on how safe they are outside test situations.  

"If driverless cars became pervasive it would only be because they were safer," he said. "That would mean that the overall economic cost of auto-related losses had gone down and that would drive down the premiums" for companies like Geico, a Berkshire wholly owned subsidiary.

"The driverless trucks are a lot more of a threat than an opportunity to Burlington Northern," Buffett added. 

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Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are big fans of Jeff Bezos.

At the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, the legendary investors praised the Amazon CEO saying that his ability to grow Amazon's business while running other projects like The Washington Post and Blue Origin was incredible.

"Jeff Bezos is a different species," Munger said.

Buffett said that Bezos has built Amazon into a dual threat as an amazing online retailer and the burgeoning dominance of its cloud computing business.

Buffett also tipped his cap to Bezos ability to be actively involved in his non-Amazon projects.

"At the Washington Post, he's played that hand incredibly," Buffett said. "He's been involved in the actual execution not just bank rolling the operation."

Buffett also called the Amazon CEO "the most remarkable busines person of our age" during an interview with CNBC on Friday.

Buffett also joked that while they have faith in Bezos, they've missed out on the Amazon stock's meteoric rise.

"I was too dumb to realize what was going to happen," Buffett said, adding that he "underestimated the brilliance and the execution" of Bezos.

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Berkshire Hathaway wants to apologize.

During the investment conglomerate's 2017 annual shareholder meeting, vice chairman Charlie Munger admitted Berkshire missed the boat on Google and Walmart.

"We failed you there," he said, calling the firm's decision to not invest in the two companies its "worst mistake."

"We were smart enough to figure it out and we didn't," said Munger.

The comments stemmed from New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin's question asking why Berkshire sold a third of their IBM shares, and why the firm has historically stayed away from tech stocks.

"When I started buying IBM six years ago, I thought it'd do better in the six years that have lapsed than it has," chairman Warren Buffett responded.

Munger continued, saying that Berkshire avoided tech stocks because "we felt we had no advantage there."

The discussion then pivoted to Munger's lament over missing on Google, as well as one other regret.

"We blew Walmart too," he said.

Buffett will continue answering shareholder questions throughout the day. Follow Business Insider's coverage of the event here.

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Charlie Munger just dropped a nugget of wisdom at the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting on Saturday.

"A lot of other people are trying to be brilliant. We're just trying to be rational," he said.

"Trying to be brilliant is dangerous, particularly when you're gambling."

In other words, while other people may try to get too fancy in their investing bets, it's best to just stick with the rational basics.

Munger is the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett's right-hand man. 

Like Buffett, Munger is incredibly sharp in his wit and investing wisdom. And as an admirer of Benjamin Franklin, he often argues that, when it comes to investing, it's best to think rationally.

"Our ideas are so simple. People keep asking us for mysteries, but all we have are the most elementary ideas," he once said at the Berkshire Hathaway meeting back in 1997.

"If you've got two suitors who are eager to have you, but one is way better than the other, you're going to choose that one rather than the other. That's the way we filter stock buying opportunities."

Stay up to date with the latest from the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting here. 

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Warren Buffett isn't too worried about any problems appearing in the US economy.

Buffett has long held the belief that the American economy will do just fine, and he reiterated that belief at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.

"When the rest of the world is fearful, we know that America will come out fine," Buffett said.

In fact, Buffett leaned on his old adage and said that in economic downturns, Berkshire Hathaway is likely to come out on top. The downturn in the economy makes investments look cheaper, the Berkshire Hathaway CEO and chairman said.

Buffett also said that it doesn't particularly matter who the president is, and there will always be downturns in the economy. The resiliency of America should carry the day.

"There will be an occasional hiccup in the American economy. It doesn't matter who is president," Buffett said. "Those people may get blamed for it."

The legendary investor has also said that the generation being born in America is the "luckiest ever born."

Check out the rest of our coverage of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting here.

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When retired journalist Carol Loomis stepped to the microphone at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting, she posed a question sent in from the younger generation.

The apparent "millennial" (Loomis' word) wanted to know what value Berkshire offers the companies in which it invests, and by extension the firm's own shareholders. Apple gives the world iPhones, while 3G Capital improves operations, he argued, but what does Berkshire do?

The investment conglomerate adds value through relief, responded Buffett, who noted that Berkshire does a lot of the dirty work for its portfolio companies. What it doesn't do is meddle, he said.

"We certainly don’t add to value by calling them up and saying we developed a better system," said Buffett. "We might very well free up about 20% of the time of a CEO just in terms of meeting with analysts, the calls and meeting with banks. Essentially, we relieve them so they can spend their time figuring out how to run their business."

Buffett defended Berkshire's relatively hands-off approach, while noting that the firm often serves as a protective shield from the public market while offering ample capital to the companies under its umbrella.

"Our abdication actually has some very positive value on the companies," he said.

Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger will continue answering shareholder questions throughout the day. Follow Business Insider's coverage of the event here.

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Warren Buffett thinks that President Donald Trump's massive tax cut plan will help Berkshire Hathaway's bottom line but won't change the way it invests in its business.

Buffett noted that the possibility of a corporate and investment tax cut will likely be beneficial to the profits of Berkshire Hathaway. The Berkshire CEO said that the drop in the investment tax would lower their deferred tax obligations for gains on their investment would drop.

"We have $90 or $95 billion in gains, and our owners, dollar for dollar, will participate in that," Buffett said. "If the rate were to drop 10%, that $9.5 billion is real."

At the same time, Buffett said that the possibility of tax credits intended to spur investment wouldn't move the needle much.

Asked by journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin about the possibility of investing in capital projects if the Trump administration follows through on its promise of an investment tax credit, Buffett said it "depends on how it's worded," but said a change in the law wouldn't motivate the company to sink more money into capital-heavy businesses like Burlington Northern railroads.

"I can't recall sending anything out to our managers saying 'let's do this because the tax law is going to change'," Buffett said.

Charlie Munger, Buffett's partner, agreed with the assessment.

"We're not gonna change anything at the railroad just for some little tax jiggle," Munger said.

Buffett and Munger seemed to agree that most businesses would likely not substantially change their large-scale investment decisions due to the incentive. "I doubt there would be any dramatic change" to business investment Buffett said.

The only difference it could make, said Buffett, would be to the timing of a scheduled investment. The legendary investor gave the example of an airline considering buying a bunch of planes in December of a year. If a tax credit would only be applicable to that year, the airline would be incentivized to hustle and make the purchases. If the credit will start the next year, the airline would likely delay the investment until then.

That's why he said it was important for lawmakers to announce the effective date of any tax breaks well in advance.

Overall, however, Buffett wasn't too enthused about the impact of the credits. 

"It's so speculative anyway in terms of what the law will be," Buffett concluded. "It doesn't change anything for us big time at all." 

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Charlie Munger is bullish on China.

The vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway responded to a question from a Chinese investor at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting about the future of the Chinese market.

"I do think the Chinese stock market is cheaper than the American stock market," Munger said. "I do think that China has a bright future."

Munger said the country's room for further economic growth will allow it to see a boom in investments going forward, but did caution there would be "growing pains" along the way.

Warren Buffett quipped that Munger had given the media a "headline" moment.

"Munger says Chinese market is going to outperform America," Buffett joked.

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Even though the person may not replicate his investing track record, whoever replaces Warren Buffett as Berkshire Hathaway's CEO will take one of the most prominent positions in finance. 

Ajit Jain, who heads up the conglomerate's reinsurance businesses, has long been considered Buffett's likely successor. 

But without getting into details of who will eventually replace him, Buffett told shareholders at the annual meeting what he'd like to see in a successor, following a question on how the person should be compensated:

"I actually would hope that we have somebody that's already very rich — which they should be if they've been working a long time — and really is not motivated by whether they have ten times as much money than they and their families can need or a hundred times as much.

"And, they might even wish to perhaps set an example by engaging for something far lower than actually what you could say their true market value is. That could or could not happen, but I think it would be terrific if it did. I can't blame anybody for wanting their market value.

"If they didn't elect to go in that direction, I would say that you would probably pay them a very modest amount and then have an option which increased in striking price annually."

This segued into a scathing critique of compensation consultants, who are hired by corporate boards of directors to provide independent advise on shareholders' behalf.

"I have avoided all my life compensation consultants. I hardly can find the words to express my contempt," said Charlie Munger, Berkshire's vice chairman.  

Munger did find such words during the 2012 meeting when he said for "compensation consultants, prostitution would be a step up."

"If the board hires a compensation consultant after I go, I will come back mad," Buffett said. 

For Buffett, the problem is that compensation consultants use other companies as a guide.

"What consultant is ever going to get another assignment if he says you should pay your CEO down in the fourth quartile," Buffett said. "It isn't that the people are evil or anything, it's just that the nature of the situation produces a result that is not consistent with how representatives of the owners should behave."

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Warren Buffett sees cyber attacks as a bigger threat to humanity than nuclear weapons.

"I'm very pessimistic on weapons of mass destruction generally although I don't think that nuclear probably is quite as likely as either primarily biological and maybe cyber," Buffett said during Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholders' meeting on Saturday.

"I don't know that much about cyber, but I do think that's the number one problem with mankind." 

Last year, Buffett said CNBC — cyber, nuclear, biological and chemical attacks — posed a major threat to the economic well-being of Berkshire shareholders. 

"If [a nuclear attack] ever happens, there'll be more to worry about than the price of Berkshire," Buffett noted.  

In 2015, Berkshire made a bet that could profit from increased cyber breaches. Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance launched two insurance policies that cover cyber liability and the costs incurred to respond to a data breach or threat. 

Similarly, AIG launched a product earlier this year that covers expenses arising from online bullying and extortion, according to Fortune.

Buffett's remarks came a day after thousands of documents were released online targeting French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, before the second round of voting on Sunday. The incident brought flashbacks of the hack into Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails before last year's election.

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Warren Buffett thinks retail in America is going through a huge transition.

At the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Buffett said there is clearly pain for retailers as they adjust to the growth of online shopping.

"The department store is online now," Buffett said, noting that the shift could be hard to grapple with for the major retailers.

Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, agreed that the retail business has become incredibly difficult.

"It would certainly be unpleasant if we were in the department store business," Munger said.

Roughly 3,500 brick-and-mortar retail stores are expected to close over the first half of 2017 and retail executives are been noting the pain in recent public statements.

Earlier this year, Berkshire Hathaway sold off the overwhelming majority of its share in Walmart for $900 million.

"I have no illusion that 10 years from now will look the same as today, and there will be a few things along the way that surprise us" the Berkshire CEO said.

Buffett did say that his retail businesses — Fruit of the Loom and Nebraska Furniture Mart — have seen an increase in online shopping, but have also seen increasing same store sales and thus the effect has not been a negative one.

In fact, Buffett said the percentage of shopping done online at Nebraska Furniture is close to 10% of sales.

"The world has evolved, and it's going to keep evolving, but the speed is increasing," Buffett concluded.

Check out our coverage of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting here.

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Warren Buffett thinks that the US healthcare system is broken.

The legendary investor said costs for healthcare have exploded in the US and are holding back business growth.

Buffett pointed out corporate tax payments as a percentage of GDP have shrunk from 4% in 1960 to just 2% now. On the other hand, medical costs have ballooned from 5% of GDP to 17% of GDP currently.

"Medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness," Buffett said.

Buffett said that the lower rate of healthcare spending in other countries is one of the biggest disadvantages for US businesses.

The Berkshire Hathaway CEO also said that for his own business, "the tax system is not crippling our business around the world," but the burden of healthcare costs make it more difficult to do business.

Additionally, in regards to the American Health Care Act — the bill passed by the House on Thursday to repeal and replace Obamacare — Buffett did not offer a forward prediction on how it would impact people's healthcare but he did say it had one direct impact on him.

"The net effect of that act is that my federal income taxes would have gone down, down 17%, last year," Buffett said.

"It's a huge tax cut for guys like me."

Buffett went on to say that the AHCA will lower taxes significantly for people making over $250,000 that have large investment income. 

"That means one of two things, either the deficit goes up, or someone else's taxes do," Buffett said.

Charlie Munger, Buffett's partner, also decried incentives for healthcare providers to charge ever higher costs for procedures with questionable impact, saying there is "too much chemotherapy on people that are basically dead."

"A lot of it is greatly immoral," Munger said. "You have a lot of doctors and hospitals that are feasting on a dying person like jackals on a carcass."

While Munger and Buffett did not offer particular policy solutions, they did say that the issue is being dealt with poorly by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

"Both parties hate each other so much that neither one of them can think rationally," Munger said.

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Warren Buffett says that in 10 years, the retail industry will look nothing like it does now.

"The department store is online now," the billionaire investor said Saturday at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, as Business Insider's Bob Bryan reported.

"I have no illusion that 10 years from now will look the same as today, and there will be a few things along the way that surprise us," he said. "The world has evolved, and it's going to keep evolving, but the speed is increasing."

Charlie Munger, the vice chairman, chimed in, saying, "It would certainly be unpleasant if we were in the department-store business."

Buffett isn't just sounding off about the demise of traditional retail — he has been pulling his money out of the industry as well.

Berkshire Hathaway fired a warning signal for the retail industry in February when it sold off $900 million of Walmart stock, choosing instead to invest billions in airlines.

Buffett's comments come at a time of massive upheaval for the retail industry.

US retailers have been closing stores and filing for bankruptcy at rates not seen since the recession.

Brick-and-mortar retailers have announced more than 3,200 store closures so far this year, and Credit Suisse analysts expect that number to increase to more than 8,600 before the end of the year. For comparison, 6,163 stores shut down in 2008, the worst year for closures on record.

Stores are closing because of the rise of e-commerce and shifts in how people spend their money. Shoppers are devoting bigger shares of their wallets to entertainment, restaurants, and technology and spending less on clothing and accessories.

Department stores like Macy's, Sears, and JCPenney have been hit the hardest by these trends — since 2001, department stores have lost half a million jobs.

Buffett isn't the only investor who thinks these trends are permanent. The asset management company Cohen & Steers released a report last week supporting that theory.

"We see this retail weakness, which is occurring despite a relatively healthy economy, as part of a permanent evolution in how and where Americans spend their money," the firm, which manages $58.5 billion in assets, said in the report. "We expect the paradigm shift taking place to dramatically alter the retail landscape, with potentially significant implications for real estate investors."

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The Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting has been called "The Woodstock of Capitalism" and a host of other corny names over the years, as famed investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have whipped up a festival-like atmosphere with food stalls and games.

But the 2017 edition of the meeting was a bit of a downbeat affair.

A good portion of the marathon question-and-answer session on Saturday focused on two things: Buffett's death and Berkshire's misses.

A variety of questions posed to Buffett and Munger focused on their advanced age and mortality, and went in depth on what they expected out of a successor.

"If I die tonight, the stock would go up tomorrow," Buffett joked.

When asked about how they bounced ideas off of each other, Munger quipped that "it can't continue much longer."

Buffett delved into what kind of person he is looking for in a replacement, and even discussed the compensation structure for the person that takes over Berkshire.

Now the fascination with death is not particularly new for Buffett and Munger. They make jokes about being old quite a bit, but the focus on a successor from the questioners and the length of answers seemed to belie a more urgent fixation on life for Berkshire after Buffett.

Buffett and Munger also spent considerable time focusing on trades they did not make and companies they did not invest in.

The investing legends twice talked about their failure to invest in Amazon despite having high praise for CEO Jeff Bezos.

"I was too dumb to realize what was going to happen," Buffett said referring to Amazon.

The Berkshire executives issued a mea culpa on missing out on Walmart and Google. Buffett called missing out on the two growth stories his "worst mistake" and told the nearly 40,000 assembled that he "blew it."

"We were smart enough to figure it out and we didn't," Munger added.

Buffett took himself to task on his large investment in IBM, which has not turned out so well, as of April 19 Buffett had an unrealized loss of about $787 million on the investment. Buffett told CNBC on Friday that he dumped roughly a third of his IBM shares recently.

"When I started buying IBM six years ago, I thought it'd do better in the six years that have lapsed than it has," Buffett said.

He criticized the failures at Wells Fargo — one of Berkshire's largest holdings — for its fake accounts scandal, saying the firm made three huge mistakes.

Other less-than-uplifting topics included the cybersecurity threat to the world, the downfall of traditional retail, and the failures of the American healthcare system.

Buffett did reiterate his bullish long-term view for the American economy, but seemed more focused on the current shortcomings in various industries, companies, and Berkshire itself.

So while there were all the typical hallmarks of a Berkshire meeting with Buffett and Munger — the peanut brittle, Cherry Coke, and the occasional inappropriate joke— the looming questions of life after Buffett and could've, should've, would've added a bit of gloom to the meeting.

SEE ALSO: 'JEFF BEZOS IS A DIFFERENT SPECIES': Buffett and Munger praise Bezos, Amazon

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Warren Buffett and Bill Gates aren't buying into President Donald Trump's tax plan.

In an interview with CNBC on Monday, both Gates and Buffett downplayed the benefits of Trump's proposed tax cut for businesses and said the promised higher growth from the cut was overplayed.

Trump, who released a one-page outline of the plan on April 26, wants to cut the federal corporate tax rate to 15% from 35% and has said doing so would create economic and business growth.

Buffett, however, was skeptical about the plan's effect on Berkshire Hathaway. He told CNBC’s Becky Quick he couldn’t think of a single Berkshire business in which the US tax rate put the business at a disadvantage compared with foreign companies. "For one thing," he said, "ours aren't as high as we think they are in many cases. They're not as low elsewhere."

Buffett is correct that many companies do not pay the headline tax rate. The statutory rate is 35%, but the rate after deductions and such, known as the effective rate, for companies in the S&P 500 is closer to 24%.

Buffett was also dismissive of the suggestion by the Trump administration that increased economic growth would help pay for the tax cuts and make up the loss in government revenue, a justification that comes from a method called dynamic scoring.

"Everybody that wants a cut in taxes can hire some academics and they look for dynamic scoring and they say the country will really be better off if I pay less tax," Buffett said. "I don't blame them — it's very understandable, so be very, very, very suspicious of dynamic scoring."

Gates said any tax cut was unlikely to benefit businesses in the tech sector but would most likely help shareholders.

"I don't think that the success of the technology sector will be improved by some tax change," Gates said. "The tech companies are not starving right now, and this only comes up when you have profits, and these companies have very high profits. It's not like we're going to be stronger in the tech sector by making owners of those stocks richer."

Trump's tax plan has already faced opposition from Democrats and drawn concern from some Republicans. Despite initial promises to get it done by August, the Trump administration is reportedly concerned the plan may not get through Congress until 2018.

SEE ALSO: DEATH AND REGRETS: Warren Buffett's big annual meeting was sort of depressing

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