Berkshire Hathaway’s legendary annual meeting just wrapped up — here’s what you missed (BRK.A, BRK.B)

• 12:02 PM

The recent Harry Potter question from a shareholder encapsulates the whole problem with the Berkshire experience as it stands in 2016.

The media covers Buffett a lot because while he says lots of smart and quotable things about investing and business he is also a source of fascination. He seems to be a sort of American miracle, a folksy, down-to-earth private citizen who became very rich by doing some simple things and investing over time. This is only partially true.

And the problem is that this sort of half-right vision of who Buffett is — in reality, a genius investor that happened to grow up in Omaha, the causality of where he is from and what he eats getting this almost completely wrong — gets conflated into questions where shareholders ask how Buffett feels being a god among men.

Which is, on its face, ridiculous.

The question eventually got down to a, “What do I tell my children about the terrible world of people getting rich that I see today?” which is a naive interpretation of the lessons that you can actually learn from Buffett.

He doesn’t have the answers on how, in a sort of “Boy aren’t these people just real idiots” kind of way to understand the world because it doesn’t seem to me that he thinks about other people that way. Namely: things other people do don’t really matter to him. Unless, of course, those people run a business he might invest in or compete with.

So the whole idea that we’re going to learn something transcendent from a figure like Buffett is to misunderstand how he became who he is at all.

And when you make outrageous comaprisons like calling the Berkshire Hathaway meeting Hogwarts and compare Buffett and Munger to fictional characters that are written into books to be avatars of some moral lesson, the process of learning about investing from a veteran who knows things turns into a farcical worship of a smart person that happened to go into investing instead, say, manufacturing or politics.

“Woodstock for Capitalism” is the problem, I guess.