Welcome to Omaha, Todd Combs
????Todd Combs, the up-from-obscurity investment manager whom Warren Buffett has made famous simply by hiring him, met just about all of the Berkshire Hathaway brass that he ever needs to a little over a week ago.
????That did not happen because Combs, 39, officially arrived for work. He's winding up his hedge fund, Castle Point, and won't join Berkshire until January.
????But in the interim he accepted a special invitation to attend a four-day Berkshire (BRKA, Fortune 500) board meeting held in early November. It began with an Omaha dinner on Thursday, November 4, at Piccolo Pete's, Buffett's favorite restaurant these days.
????That evening was Combs' first introduction -- and vice versa -- to such board members as Bill Gates; Tom Murphy, the former head of Capital Cities/ABC; and the newest board member, Steve Burke, chief operating officer of Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500).
????For the next day-and-a-half, Combs sat in on presentations given by eight Berkshire managers about their operations. "Eight interesting business stories" is how Buffett described these to Fortune.
????Among those presenting were another Berkshire newcomer, Matt Rose, CEO of Burlington Northern Santa Fe; Ajit Jain, who runs Berkshire's highly important reinsurance operations; and David Sokol, whom Fortune recently profiled as "Buffett's Mr. Fix-It." Sokol, who has had many a Berkshire assignment, is currently running NetJets, which he has turned around from a loser to a company well into the black.
????Combs, of course, did not attend the board's two business meetings, held on Friday and early Saturday. But next on Saturday came the meeting's pièce de résistance: an overnight trip on a private Burlington Northern train that traveled west to the largest U.S. coal mine, Arch Coal's Black Thunder mine in Wyoming. Buffett found the visit "fascinating."
????We have no quote from Combs. He's still ducking the press. But we do have a picture -- the first to actually catch him in a suit -- to be added to those taken by Bloomberg News earlier at a hockey rink. This picture was snapped at the Piccolo Pete's dinner on Thursday.
The Combs portfolio
????In the board's business sessions, Buffett says, he clarified what role Combs will be playing when he reports for work in January. The backstory here concerns Berkshire's October 25th press release in which Buffett, announcing Combs' hiring, indicated that Combs would be running "a significant portion" of Berkshire's money. That wording, plainly imprecise, led some media commenters to believe that Combs was going to be handling megabillions of Berkshire's huge investment portfolio, which at the end of September was $113 billion in size.
????But Buffett told the board that he and Combs had discussed Combs' initially running perhaps $2 billion to $3 billion. Either amount would greatly exceed the $400 million that Combs was running at Castle Point.
????Amounts of $2 billion to $3 billion, though, would be roughly comparable to the sums managed by Lou Simpson, who has long been in charge of investing the funds of GEICO, a big Berkshire division. Simpson, 74, whose offices are in Chicago, is retiring at the end of this year.
