The Untold Story of Charlie Munger’s Final Years
The Berkshire vice chair was making gutsy investments, forging unlikely friendships and facing new challenges to the end
Charlie Munger owned a house with spectacular ocean views in Montecito, Calif. The Berkshire Hathaway BRK.B 0.52%increase; green up pointing triangle vice chairman had designed the entire gated community, which locals called “Mungerville.” At one point, he told a friend he expected to spend his last years there.
Instead, Munger chose to remain in his longtime home in Los Angeles. The place didn’t even have air conditioning. During a heat wave three years ago, friends brought electric fans and bags of ice to cool his library.
Munger didn’t care. The home was close to people he liked and projects he found stimulating. Rather than a quiet life by the sea, Munger spent his final years chasing gutsy investments, forging unlikely friendships and facing new challenges.
When Munger died two years ago, weeks before his 100th birthday, the billionaire investor was among the nation’s most beloved businessmen, celebrated for his wit and wisdom—and the role he played helping Warren Buffett build Berkshire Hathaway into a trillion-dollar company.
The unexpected last chapter of Munger’s life is less well-known. In the year before his death, Munger made over $50 million from a bet on an out-of-favor industry he had shunned for 60 years. He revved up his real-estate activities, working with a young neighbor to place big, long-term wagers, unusual for a nonagenarian. He faced down health challenges and wrestled with the future.
“Even a week or two before passing away, he was asking questions such as, ‘Does Moore’s Law apply in the age of AI?’” recalls his friend Jamie Montgomery, referring to whether artificial intelligence would see exponential gains like those experienced in computational power.
Friends and family say Munger’s eventful last period offers lessons for investors—and a blueprint for how to age with grace, equanimity and purpose.
“To the day he died, that mind was running,” says Munger’s stepson, Hal Borthwick. “He never stopped learning.”
A graduate of Harvard Law School who co-founded the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles, Munger quit his practice in 1962 to focus on investing. Later, he shuttered most of his investing partnerships, joining Berkshire in 1978 as its vice chairman.
Munger became Buffett’s consigliere and sounding board, pushing Buffett to loosen his investment parameters beyond bargain investments to buy high-quality companies.
“Charlie and I are interchangeable in business decisions,” Buffett said in 1982.
Buffett declined to comment for this article.
By the last decade of his life, Munger was less involved with Berkshire Hathaway, despite a stake in the company valued in 2023 at $2.2 billion. He spoke with Buffett every week or two. Buffett was based in Omaha, Neb., and Munger lived in Los Angeles, and they both had hearing issues, making communication more difficult.
“They would scream to each other,” says Whitney Jackson, the wife of Munger’s grandson and a frequent visitor to Munger’s home in his last years. “It was likely meant to be confidential, but anyone within a mile’s radius could hear them.”
Munger turned his attention to other endeavors. He was a board member—and superfan—of retail giant Costco, with a stake valued at about $100 million at his death. He invested in hedge-fund manager Li Lu’s Himalaya Capital and smaller investment firms in Boston and Melbourne.
Munger made his own investments, too. Sitting in a recliner in his library, he’d grab green Value Line binders from a nearby desk and pore through data on publicly traded companies.
For decades, he barely looked at coal stocks, friends say, but in 2023, these companies grabbed his attention. Coal usage was in a long-term decline, and investors saw a bleak future for the industry. Yet many producers remained profitable, trading at inexpensive levels. Coal will remain necessary as global energy demand grows, Munger argued to friends and others.
“He read an article that said coal was down the chute,” Borthwick recalls. “He said, ‘Horse feathers.’ ”
In May 2023, Munger purchased shares of coal miner Consol Energy. Later in the year, he bought shares of Alpha Metallurgical Resources, which produces coal for steel production. By the time of Munger’s death, Consol had doubled in value. Alpha had also surged. Together he scored paper gains of more than $50 million, friends say.
“He made a very large bet, and it turned out really well,” Borthwick says.
Consol has since merged with another producer and the stock has fallen. Alpha has dropped, as well. Investor Mohnish Pabrai, a friend of Munger’s, says his coal investments would still be profitable if he held them today.
The moves taught Pabrai a lesson, he says: “You don’t need to slow down, you just keep going.”
Munger made another unusual late-in-life wager. It began in 2005, when Munger was 81 years old and a 17-year-old neighbor, Avi Mayer, knocked on the door of Munger’s longtime home in Los Angeles’s Hancock Park neighborhood. Mayer presented Munger with a Hebrew volume containing the Five Books of Moses.
“I had read about him and thought he was Jewish,” says Mayer, whose grandfather had recently died, leaving a hole in his life. (Munger was not Jewish.)
Mayer was having difficulties in school. He battled ADHD and was discouraged about his future.
“I was insecure,” he says. “My friends were going to college and I wasn’t.”
Mayer began spending time with Munger.
“He listened to my problems and talked about life principles and personal values,” Mayer says.
Munger told others that he appreciated Mayer’s intelligence and ambition. The famed investor supported Mayer as he weighed skipping college, saying Mayer could instead attend “Munger University.” So that’s what Mayer did.
“I watched him in action and learned from him, and he handed me books once in a while,” Mayer says. They became close and Munger arranged for kosher food to be delivered to his home so they could dine together.
When Mayer partnered with his childhood friend, Reuven Gradon, to invest in real estate, Munger studied their early moves. A few years later, he offered to back the young men and their company, Afton Properties. “I’m graduating you,” he said. Starting around 2017, the three men purchased nearly 10,000 “garden” apartments in Southern California, becoming one of largest owners of these low-rise apartments in the state.
In the years before his death, Munger involved himself in almost every aspect of their business—choosing neighborhoods, assessing construction, even picking paint colors. He had special interest in landscaping details, insisting on low-density building complexes, deciding the company should spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to plant new trees, says Mayer, now 37.
Munger encouraged Mayer and Gradon to take long-term loans—even as other real-estate investors favored short-term debt that could be quickly refinanced—arguing that securing favorable interest rates and holding assets for years was the way to profit.
The moves panned out: Afton’s holdings are now worth about $3 billion, according to a person close to the matter. Munger remained involved until the end, helping negotiate the purchase of a building in Santa Maria, Calif., a transaction that closed days after his death. It was across from a new Costco supercenter, making it extra special to Munger.
Munger didn’t tell many people, but in the last decade of his life, he had begun to face health difficulties. Back in 1978, a surgeon had bungled cataract surgery, leaving him blind in his left eye. He learned to compensate, installing bright lights around the house. Around 2014, though, Munger experienced a problem in the optic nerve of his right eye. He faced the possibility of going blind—yet he took the setback in stride, says Li Lu, a regular visitor. Munger decided to adjust his life, asking others to read to him and contemplating other steps.
“I’ll have to learn Braille,” he told one friend. He had studied it after his botched cataract surgery but never mastered it. He was ready to try again.
That turned out not to be necessary. His right eye slowly improved, but Munger’s movement became constricted. Around 2016, he lost the ability to play golf, a longtime passion, and relied on a walking stick. Playing bridge with others became difficult. Munger, who had lost his wife in 2010, feared loneliness and irrelevance.
He chose to spend more time with friends, buoying his spirits. Each Tuesday, he met a half-dozen or so business associates and others for breakfast, usually at the Los Angeles Country Club. The group typically arrived at 7:30 a.m. and could go for hours. They discussed investments, traded barbs and shared jokes. Regulars included investors John Hawkins and John Conlin, Uber Chairman Ron Sugar, and later Bobby Kotick, the former Activision chief executive. Robert Bradway, Amgen’s CEO, made occasional visits. Munger, at the head of the table, told stories and shared philosophies.
“He’d always say, ‘Take out Berkshire’s top five investments and its returns are pretty middling,’ ” says Montgomery, a lesson to the group that success can come from just a few winning moves.
As a younger man, Munger could be cranky and acerbic; now, he was warm and reflective.
“At my age, you make new friends, or you don’t have any friends,” he told the group.
Munger retained a bit of an edge, though. When a senior Ford executive joined the breakfast club one time, Munger surprised the group by outlining the carmaker’s profitability—by product line—over the previous 25 years. Then, Munger hit him with a zinger.
“I don’t know why you guys bother making cars,” he said, noting that the bulk of Ford’s profits came from trucks.
Munger appeared invigorated by the meetings, the last of which took place 10 days before his death.
We all learned from Charlie, and Charlie liked that he learned from us,” says Paul Major, a local businessman who was another regular.
Food became a special passion. Each Friday, friends drove to Munger’s home for a potluck lunch, carrying chicken sandwiches with butter on soft white bread, the crusts sometimes removed. They brought fruit or salad, along with cherry pies and vanilla ice cream.
“Occasionally we would have some See’s Candy for a special treat,” Montgomery says.
For years, Munger’s family tried keeping him on a healthy diet. He resisted the effort. “He sipped water like it was poison,” says Jackson, his grandson’s wife.
By the end, the family’s resolve melted. They began ordering him takeout.
“His last delivery was Korean fried chicken: A whole chicken, kimchi fried rice and waffle fries,” Jackson says.
Munger and Jackson made a list of his favorite meals, which she conjured up. He had fond memories of eating Spam during a stint in the army, for instance, so she cooked a dish of Spam fried rice.
“He went on and on about how it wasn’t how he remembered it, and that it had changed,” Jackson recalls. “I said ‘Granddad, it’s your taste buds.’ ”
Jackson tracked down the former chef of New York’s Plaza Hotel, asking for his corned-beef hash recipe, which included lobster. But most of Munger’s faves were easier to obtain.
“He loved Costco hot dogs,” she says. “In the hospital, one of the last meals he had was an In-N-Out burger and a Diet Coke.”
Munger was counting down to a 100th birthday party on Jan. 1, 2024. Friends and longtime business associates including Jim Sinegal, Costco’s co-founder, planned to fly to Los Angeles for the festivities.
Munger’s health was faltering, though. He sensed the end was near. When a friend asked how he was feeling, he replied: “There’s a lot wrong with me.”
When he discussed his legacy, he said he was comfortable with his accomplishments and optimistic about Berkshire’s future.
“Once it’s built, you don’t need to be Warren and Charlie,” he told a friend. “What we have is a framework for looking at investments.”
Near the end of life, Munger leaned on humor for strength. He told family members that Diet Coke was responsible for his longevity, lightening the mood.
And he shared a wish with a visitor.
“Oh, to be 86 again,” he said.
Late on Thanksgiving evening two years ago, days before his death, Munger was admitted to a hospital near Montecito. He asked family members to leave the room so he could call Buffett one last time.
They shared a last farewell.
