Even Scotland’s foremost entrepreneurs can be star struck by their business heroes, as Sir Tom Hunter and Lord Willie Haughey revealed on their Go Radio Business Show.
Lord Haughey was first to namecheck Bill Gates, saying: “Why are we not jumping up and down at the prospect of Bill potentially wanting to invest billions in the UK and helping with the nuclear power situation rather than us relying on the Chinese?”
Sir Tom revealed his own admiration, citing the fact this proposition had been set out in a three-part documentary called Inside Bill’s Brain.
“In the third episode he talks about nuclear power and ensuring it’s safe and actually making it almost like a green energy,” he said.
“Where is the open-mindedness for this new thinking? I think Scotland’s been done a disservice by the narrow-minded Greens here. I’m calling them out and I'd love to debate it with them.
“But, if we’re talking about the heroes today, Bill Gates is one of them and Warren Buffet is the other. He’s just held his ‘Woodstock For Capitalists’, which is a get-together in Omaha, Nebraska, and there are around 40,000 people who go and listen to him.
“Now Warren is 92, his business partner Charlie Munger is 99, and they sit and they take questions for four to five hours!”
Lord Haughey shared his own respect for both Buffet and Munger, saying: “They are obviously two geniuses who have sustained their reputations for more than 50 years. There are not many things they get wrong.
“The one thing that was particularly interesting is when they announced their company Berkshire Hathaway had posted a 12% increase in the first quarter. So that’s a $35.5 billion profit for the quarter!
“However they also caveated they were trying to give a veiled message about how it was a good job the US government had stepped in to tackle the contagion that could have happened among the banks.
“They know more about this than us but we’ve been saying for weeks and weeks these were not bank takeovers by UBS and by JP Morgan. This was a government saying: ‘Look, we have to do this!’.”
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