David Gottesman

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After graduating, Gottesman worked at Hallgarten & Company in mergers and acquisitions for around a decade. In 1963, he was introduced to Warren Buffett at a Wall Street club lunch by a mutual friend, who recognized their identical approach of purchasing value stocks. They soon became good friends, playing golf with each other and having conversations every Sunday night over the phone about which stocks to invest in. Over the next two years, Gottesman often made brief trips to visit Buffett in Omaha, Nebraska; they would discuss ideas from the later part of the day into the early hours of the morning, after which Gottesman would typically return to New York on a red-eye flight to get home by the next morning.

In 1964, Gottesman founded the investment advisory firm First Manhattan Co. He was also an early investor in Berkshire Hathaway. The two firms co-invested in Diversified Retailing Co., which had been established by Gottesman, Buffett, and Charlie Munger to purchase private retail companies, beginning with Hochschild Kohn's (whose president was the uncle of Gottesman's wife). The trio soon concluded that this acquisition had been a "terrible mistake," and Gottesman oversaw its reselling, at only a minor loss. In 1978, Diversified Retailing merged with Berkshire Hathaway.

March 2021, Gottesman owned 17,202 class A shares and more than two million class B shares in Berkshire Hathaway. This made up a sizable portion of his wealth. Gottesman later commented, "There probably has never been a better return on any stock held for 44 years in the history of Wall Street". He estimated that by 2012, they had been worth 6,000 times their original value. In 2003, he joined the Berkshire Hathaway board of directors.

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