Buying Berkshire and running it as an investment vehicle clearly was a “profit seeking” decision, it also clearly wasn’t a profit maximization decision. The most mediocre hedge fund manager alive gets 2% of the fund a year for “expenses”, and 20% of the profits. Buffett obviously could have gotten the same, which would have doubled or tripled his current net worth.

If he had that perfectly standard money management arrangement, Buffett would have made $10B last year, and been able to shield it from taxes as long term capital gains. Instead he made $100,000 in salary, and paid regular taxes on it. The last 4 years alone a 2/20 profit share would have been worth close to $40B, nearly doubling his net worth just from those years, ignoring the profit share from the 40 years before that.

The reason Buffett chose Berkshire as a vehicle and doesn’t take his rightful fees from it, is he was already wealthy when he started with it. He had shutdown the Buffett Partnerships and briefly retired after making himself and his investors (a collection of mostly Omaha doctors and dentists) all multi-millionaires in only 13 years. When he decided to restart his friends and investors jumped in with him and he didn’t need or want to charge them fees. So every BRK shareholder since has gotten that glorious free ride.

The dividend tax rate is another spurious issue. Coke pays federal and state taxes on its profits, the pays most all of what’s left as dividends to its investors. Berkshire only pays around a 10% tax rate on those dividends, less than the 15-20% individual investors pay, but for good reason, because the corporate dividend tax is the first level of a DOUBLE taxation. If Buffett ever wants to pocket those Coke dividends, Berkshire has to pay them as dividends and shareholders would owe another 15% dividend tax rate on top and Buffett himself would have to pay 20% because he’s top bracket. That 10% is an extra tax Berkshire shareholders have to pay to own Coke thru Berkshire instead of directly.

This also shows how Berkshire’s tax structure is so inefficient. Even with the “discount” on dividend earnings, Berkshire paid over $7B in taxes last year on $33B in eanings. If he was still running an investment partnership, not only could he pay himself massive fees, but those fees would be considered “carried interest” and treated like long term capital gains, and only taxed when he sold shares, at low long term capital gains rates.

If insurance float is an interest free loan, in what world is it tax evasion? Taxes are owed on profits, not loans. And float is only interest free if you run your insurance companies exceptionally well. Ordinary insurers take a loss on float as a cost of doing business. But Buffett refuses to own insurers that are that crappy, and it’s the discipline of his insurance companies that makes Berkshire one of the rare insurers to have free float.

Lastly “crime” has a meaning, and you don’t get to redefine it as things you regard as “unethical”. Buffett has been investing very publicly for over 60 years with a total tally of zero crimes, and zero unethical acts. You may wish for some to maintain your silly desire that people can only be more successful than you by cheating and committing crimes, but they ain’t coming.