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Comment by profsummergig | Hacker News Reader

This is fascinating, because from what I've heard, Warren Buffett did not favor tech stocks. Does anyone know what gave Buffett the faith that this company was a real deal?

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It's a car and battery company, isn't it? Framing it as a tech company is a bit weird, but I guess Tesla did the same.

Buffett didn't love automobile stocks either, but Berkshire Hathaway held General Motors from 2012 to 2023.

It was Charlie Munger who became enthusiastic about BYD after learning about it from investor Li Lu, leading him to convince Buffett to make Berkshire Hathaway's $230 million investment in 2008.

I think this was mostly a Munger pet investment, he had an extremely high opinion about the CEO and could see he was delivering on his goals one after another.

Maybe he was more afraid of software dominated stocks?

BYD is at heart an automobile manufacturer and so maybe he felt more confident evaluating it using his normal tools.

Yes the circumstances are well known. Li Liu convinced Munger and Munger talked to Buffett.

Munger believed in the founder from the very early days before it was a car company.

They “just” were a battery company then. Is that considered tech?

I remember vaguely an interview about it and he said he could understand the business and what was driving the industry and the technology.

I think he said something about equivalent of selling shovels to miners in a boom, that PV was going to need storage etc.

Berkshire was never tech investor. They looked for solid manufacturing with good price and potential to scale like manufacturing. Not everything is tech and you can still grow without being tech.

He owns the largest railroad company in US. That’s no less “tech” than batteries, motors and other EV car bits.

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