When people you respect succinctly say things you agree with... whatchagonna do, eh??
Here's the Buffett playbook:
Buy safe, high-quality assets; fund them with low-cost, long-duration liabilities, many of them provided by a large, sophisticated insurance operation; use leverage but manage it carefully; and stick to your strategy for many decades, building a sterling reputation that acts as a powerful stabiliser for the business.
It's the funding, stupid.
What was fascinating here is the top-5 holdings across time:
aaaaaand, actually, the leverage is down over time, and the cash balance is always pretty large (and in recent years, extraordinarily high):
So yeah, not a genius... just hyper-focused, using cheap, safe, and convenient financing to do what you or I never could.
Hur-rah.
non-paywalled: https://archive.md/xhxM5