Ryan Cohen seems to be doing his best Warren Buffett impression, just like Michael Burry suggested.
The billionaire GameStop CEO and Chewy cofounder channeled the legendary investor in a lengthy X post titled “The Hollow Men” on Wednesday.
Cohen railed against a “new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.”
He lambasted independent directors who don’t dare rock the boat and risk losing their cushy, well-paid jobs.
He berated corporate bosses who balk at tying their fortunes to their company’s success — they collect big bonuses if its stock price rises, and receive huge payouts if they tank the business and leave.
He also chastised managers who avoid accountability by hiring expensive consultants to blame if things don’t work out.
Cohen labeled those three groups the “hollow men of the boardroom” who “wear the right suits” and “say the right buzzwords” but have little skin in the game.
Risking your own bottom line is the “only thing that keeps a business honest,” Cohen wrote. He called for a return to an “owner’s mentality,” where bosses treat shareholders’ money as if it were their own.
He warned that failure to change would mean “iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners — the shareholders — are left holding the bag.”
Burry shared Cohen’s post and wrote: “Ryan has rougher edges than Buffett, but that just makes him more modern in approach.”
The investor-turned-writer of “The Big Short” fame and GameStop shareholder has been touting the opportunity for Cohen to transform GameStop through acquisitions, drawing parallels to how Buffett reshaped Berkshire Hathaway from a failing textile mill into a $1 trillion conglomerate over six decades.
Following Buffett’s lead
Buffett, who recently stepped down as Berkshire’s CEO, has frequently taken aim at crony directors, overpaid executives, and costly consultants.
In his shareholder letter for 2019, he bemoaned that many independent directors don’t spend a penny of their own money on shares of the companies they’re overseeing — and high fees heavily incentivize them to be compliant in the hope of landing additional, lucrative board seats.
“When seeking directors, CEOs don’t look for pit bulls,” Buffett wrote. “It’s the cocker spaniel that gets taken home.”
Buffett joked that he was the “Typhoid Mary of compensation committees,” as he’d only ever been appointed to one despite sitting on 18 different boards up to that point.
Time and again, Buffett has espoused an owner’s mentality, underpinned by having more than 99% of his net worth in Berkshire stock.
“We want to make money only when our partners do and in exactly the same proportion,” he and the late Charlie Munger wrote in their “Owner’s Manual” for Berkshire shareholders.
“Moreover, when I do something dumb, I want you to be able to derive some solace from the fact that my financial suffering is proportional to yours,” Buffett added.
Cohen has diverged from Buffett’s playbook in some ways, such as buying bitcoin for GameStop last year, and recently agreeing a compensation package worth tens of billions if he hits certain market-value and profit milestones.
But he’s also refused a salary as GameStop CEO, built a roughly 9% stake in the video-game retailer, urged frugality across the business, and even modeled its investor-relations website on Berkshire’s homepage.
Cohen’s tirade against the “Risk-Free Insider” is certainly rooted in Buffett’s philosophy too, even if he’s harsher in his wording as Burry said.
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