Some Things Just Take Time

From the Capital Cities/ABC section of Buffett’s 1985 Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders. Berkshire’s stock purchase had helped finance Cap Cities’ $3.5 billion acquisition of ABC, and Buffett notes the deal’s “economics are likely to be unexciting over the next few years.” The line about nine women is a parenthetical aside attached to “we can be very patient.”

In context, the joke is defending a specific deal. Buffett had backed an acquisition whose payoff would take years to show up in the numbers, and he wanted to head off the natural reader question: couldn’t more talent or more effort speed that up? His answer is that some sequences won’t compress no matter what you spend on them, so the patience is forced rather than chosen.