An online contest is again offering a few young entrepreneurs the chance to present business ideas to billionaire Warren Buffett. Students between the ages of 7 and 16 can submit their ideas until Feb. 15. Four individuals and two teams will be flown to Omaha to present their ideas to Buffett in person next May. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A)‘s chairman and CEO says he was impressed with the ideas last year’s finalists presented. The contest is affiliated with the “Secret Millionaire’s Club” cartoon that teaches kids financial principles.
Even Warren Buffett Can’t Save the Small Newspaper Business (DailyFinance)
There’s an old saw on Wall Street that goes like this: “With few exceptions, when management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” …Meanwhile, everywhere you turn, companies are rising up to siphon away the revenues that newspapers need to cover their costs. Craigslist and its free classified ads. Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO) — and yes, DailyFinance’s parent corporation AOL, Inc. (NYSE:AOL), too — offering free the news and views that newspapers charge for. What once was a cash cow has morphed into a miserable business model that’s killed many a paper over the past couple of decades.
Just How Wise is the Sage of Omaha? (TheDailyBeast)
Say you have a million people stand in a row and flip coins a million times. Each time they get heads, you give them a dollar. Each time they flip tails, you take a dollar from them. On average your total payout should be zero*: the tails should cancel out the heads. But that doesn’t mean everyone ends up with nothing more than what they started with. Some people will be horrific losers, mortgaging the house to cover what they owe you. Others will be rich. And at least one will have a run so phenomenal that you’ll think it can’t be luck. He must have some sort of secret skill–the Warren Buffett of coin flippers.
Inside the List (NYTimes)
SEPARATED AT BIRTH? Carol J. Loomis’s “Tap Dancing to Work,” an anthology of Fortune magazine articles by and about the cuddly billionaire Warren Buffett, is new on the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 10. It’s hardly the first time Buffett (inset, top) has turned up on this page: “The Warren Buffett Way,” an investment primer by Robert G. Hagstrom, spent five months on the list in 1994 and 1995, and two biographies, Roger Lowenstein’s “Buffett” (1995) and Alice Schroeder’s “Snowball” (2008), were also best sellers.
USA Not So Fresh & Easy for Tesco (DailyFinance)
Andy Paul and Nate Weisshaar look at the recent announcement from Tesco Corporation (NASDAQ:TESO) that it will be closing down its U.S. operations, Fresh & Easy. The market seems to have liked this announcement, so what does this mean for shareholders? Legendary U.S. investor Warren Buffett increased his stake in Tesco earlier this year. You can find out what attracted Buffett to the company and the price the billionaire investor paid for his shares, by downloading an exclusive Motley Fool report “The One European Share Warren Buffett Loves.”
The 91% Tax Fantasy: Peter Schiff (CNBC)
The fiscal cliff deadline is looming and President Obama refuses to sign any legislation that doesn’t raise tax rates on the top 2%. There is an understandable amount of debate on either side of the aisle over the president’s decision. In the past month, Warren Buffett and Paul Krugman have each released opinion pieces that tout the 1950s as an exemplary era for the country. The top tax rate was as high as 91% but individual wealth and GDP still managed to grow like wildfire.
