Peter D. Kaufman
Close friend and editor who compiled Munger's definitive intellectual portrait
Biography
Peter D. Kaufman is an American businessman and editor, the longtime CEO of Glenair, a California manufacturer of precision connectors for aerospace and defense, and a director of the Daily Journal Corporation. He is known to the wider world for one achievement above all others: he conceived, assembled, edited, and — as Munger took visible pleasure in pointing out — personally financed Poor Charlie's Almanack, the 2005 compilation of Munger's speeches, writings, and wit that became the definitive text of Munger's philosophy.
Kaufman's friendship with Munger operated on several levels at once. He was a fellow director in Munger's small corporate world; a fellow polymath whose reading ranged across physics, biology, history, and psychology; and a trusted interlocutor who sat beside Munger at Daily Journal annual meetings and occasionally answered questions from the floor himself. At the 2018 meeting, Munger turned over the microphone so Kaufman could present his "five aces" system for evaluating an investment manager — total integrity, deep fluency in the claimed discipline, a fair fee structure, an uncrowded space, and a long runway — a framework Kaufman had devised when asked to give a reference for an exceptional manager.
Kaufman's editorial labor was genuinely formative for Munger's public legacy. The speeches that constitute the Munger canon — the 1994 USC lecture, the 1995 Psychology of Human Misjudgment, the 1996 Stanford and practical-thought talks — survive in their definitive forms because Kaufman stitched them together, out of Munger's old speeches "plus a lot else," into a single coherent book.
Key Stories
The reluctant author. Munger told the origin story at the 2005 Berkshire annual meeting. Kaufman had tried to do the book for years; Munger resisted. "And I didn't want to do it. And he went and saw Warren, and Warren got enthusiastic. And Warren suggested this ridiculous name, 'Poor Charlie's Almanack.'" Between the two of them, Munger said, they got him to do it — and the motivation was exactly the right one: putting the worldly-wisdom curriculum into a form that outlasts the speaker. His verdict on the result: "I think if you assimilate everything in that simple book, you will know a lot more than about 95 percent of your compatriots. And it's not that hard to do. So, Peter Kaufman has made it easy for you."
"He did the whole damn thing." At the 2019 Daily Journal meeting, after a shareholder thanked both men for the book, Munger assigned credit with total clarity: "It was really Peter Kaufman's idea. He did the whole damn thing, and he paid for it himself, being a rich and eccentric man." The same meeting produced the companion joke that has since become famous: "Peter Kaufman has made me adored in India and China. I wish the hell he could do more for me in Los Angeles." The Chinese edition, Munger reported, had been pirated enormously while still selling some 340,000 legal copies — Kaufman's book had made Munger a folk philosopher in a country Munger deeply admired.
The crooks-and-honesty line. Munger's favorite Kaufman aphorism captures the moral economics they shared: "Peter Kaufman is always telling me if the crooks only knew how much money you could make by being honest, they'd all behave differently." It is, in one sentence, the character thesis of the entire Munger-Buffett enterprise — honesty as profit strategy, not merely as virtue.
Impact on Munger's Work
Kaufman's first impact was preservational. Munger never wrote a book and never systematized his own framework; left alone, his ideas would have remained scattered across decades of transcripts and meeting notes. Kaufman's compilation — and his persistence through Munger's reluctance — converted a spoken oeuvre into a portable one. The worldwide Munger readership, and specifically the enormous Chinese and Indian followings Munger marveled at, are Kaufman's creation.
The second impact was intellectual framing. The title's homage to Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack placed Munger in the lineage he most identified with: the practical aphorist, the polymath who distills complex truth into compact, testable prescriptions. Kaufman understood Munger's model deeply enough to present it in its own idiom, and the book's structure — biography, mental models, the talks — became the reference architecture for how the world studies Munger.
The third impact was personal and institutional. Kaufman served alongside Munger as a Daily Journal director, contributed his own frameworks at the annual meetings, and embodied the type Munger most prized: the businessman-reader whose learning is wide, whose judgment is independent, and whose friendship carries no trace of sycophancy. When Munger wanted the crooks-and-honesty aphorism attributed, he attributed it to Kaufman — the mark of a genuine intellectual peer.
Key Passages From Munger's Speeches and Letters
"Well, of course, Peter Kaufman has tried to do that in that book that he stitched together out of my old speeches plus a lot else."
"And I didn't want to do it. And he went and saw Warren, and Warren got enthusiastic. And Warren suggested this ridiculous name, 'Poor Charlie's Almanack.'"
"It was really Peter Kaufman's idea. He did the whole damn thing, and he paid for it himself, being a rich and eccentric man."
"Peter Kaufman is always telling me if the crooks only knew how much money you could make by being honest, they'd all behave differently."
Referenced In
Source: Charlie Munger Knowledge Base — Munger speeches, Wesco Financial annual letters, DJCO annual meeting transcripts