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100% I agree Francis would be a great addition to the board! Loved his presentation shared by @mananainvesting It reminded me a bit of watching Li Liu present. I wonder why it hasn't happened yet? Seems like it would be a win win (as long as Francis has the time).

Nor do I. Lauren was speaking to a very specific audience of people who were in attendance at the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway. I have been a 30 year holder of Berkshire Hathaway myself, and have never gone to the Woodstock for Capitalism myself. Nevertheless I have often privately bemoaned that by the time I learned about the company and had enough personal resources to invest in it, that the glory years were behind it. I tell myself and the family members on whose behalf I have also invested in Berkshire that we can be proud of owning a company with integrity and based on value investing principles…but that its size will work against the likelihood that our investment in it will compound at much more than the stock market index as a whole. For 20 years now, I have also been searching for smaller Berkshire like companies that I can place part of our retirement accounts in…to include Markel, Alleghany and Fairfax since that time. Berkshire bought out Alleghany, so we’ve been left with Markel and Fairfax as potential smaller companies that might be able to compound in our portfolios faster than a mature Berkshire. Berkshire has benefited over the years from having attracted a very loyal shareholder base who have held the stock for years and years, and even decades and decades. If a company happens to have a similar value investing philosophy, and envies the shareholder base Berkshire has maintained, what better place to share the story of your company with than those same folks? That’s why Markel has long held meetings in Omaha during the Berkshire meeting to share the story of Markel with Berkshire meeting attendees. A less than 30 minute presentation on Fairfax at Guy Spier’s conference, which mostly regurgitated slides already made public at the Fairfax annual meeting, and which annual meeting had already touted the CAGR for Fairfax stock since 1985 doesn’t seem to be beyond the pale to me. And at the Fairfax annual meeting, it was explicitly shown that since 1985, Fairfax’s market value per share had compounded even faster than Berkshire over the same period. So the Fairfax annual meeting was already comparing the performance of Fairfax to Berkshire. As a longtime Fairfax holder (20 years now), I would prefer to have more long term Berkshire owners take a look at the company than the kind of folks who listen to short seller reports. If I had not already known about Fairfax, I would think of Lauren’s presentation as being a public service. I first heard of Fairfax years ago when reading a book called “Selling America Short”. Some time later I remember hearing Whitney Tilson referring to the company as “crappy underwriters with a great investment arm”. Lauren has made a small addition to publicly available comment on the company, and it’s a bit of a counterbalance to a lot of the negative commentary the company has experienced over the years.