About Robert Kotick
In a July 2023 interview, Kotick discussed the pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, noting that 98% of shareholders approved the transaction and describing it as a "great deal." He stated that the company extracted "significant additional value" through a short extension, a dividend, and a termination fee he characterized as one of the largest in history. Kotick expressed personal concerns about the economy, citing interest rate increases and a deficit substantially greater than GDP, and said he did not believe any business is recession-proof. He also identified Chinese companies like Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba, along with Nintendo, Sony, and Netflix, as major competitors in the video game industry.
Earlier, in 2016, Kotick described the acquisition of King Digital, the maker of "Candy Crush Saga," as an opportunity to enter the fastest-growing mobile game market and to attract a female audience, noting that 60% of King's audience was female. In 2010, he stated that over 60% of Activision Blizzard's profits came from online-related games and described Facebook as a "great platform for gaming" that could grow to be significant over five years, though he noted it was then too small to influence the company's operating profit. He also said the company was "platform agnostic," aiming to make its games playable on any device with a display and microprocessor.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Robert Kotick's recent appearances.
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Transcript (8 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
All right. So, that's what you're hearing from the Berkshire managers who are actually on the front lines trying to deal with all of this. There's been a lot more to talk about with them this time around and we will continue to hear pieces about how they're managing with all of this. Joining us right now to talk more about Berkshire and what we've been seeing over the years is Activision founder Bobby Kotick. He is a longtime Berkshire watcher and been coming here for more than 30 years, I think, Bobby, which is really hard to imagine.
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Robert Kotick0:27
I don't know exactly when I started. It was when I bought my first Berkshire share. I think that was in '94, but I don't remember exactly.
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Interviewer0:36
Why'd you start coming and what brings you back every year?
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Robert Kotick0:38
For me, you know, this is probably the most important event that's a reminder of how important capitalism is as the foundation of democracy. And so that's, you know, it's almost like a religious experience from that perspective, just the constant reminder of how integral to our democracy capitalism is.
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Interviewer1:04
Do you learn something every year when you're here or is it a resetting of what you already know?
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Robert Kotick1:09
Well, you know, I think probably the greatest insight I just took away from the last couple of hours is there's this great perception of market volatility that's existed over the, you know, let's say the last three or four months, but as Warren pointed out, the S&P is down 3%. That's not much volatility. And I think it takes someone like Warren with the clarity of thought to actually remind us that there's been historically a lot more volatility in markets than what we've seen in the last five years.
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Interviewer1:46
I have to admit I'm throwing out all these shareholder questions I had as a result because it was what's going on with the treasury markets? Are they going to dump foreign ownership of these things? What's going to happen with the... like all these questions that were so kind of petrified as to what was happening, like got to throw all these out now. They were relevant three weeks ago and now they're not almost all the way back.
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Robert Kotick2:04
Yeah. Although at the same time, as much as you want to take a big picture perspective and say that we've been through these crises and trials and challenges before, it does seem there's certain extraordinary things happening right now. If you were running a business, to say there's such a wide range of potential policy outcomes and what it's going to mean for the economy, right, with the tariffs. So, I guess that's, you know, the message is we're all in suspense for a few months and Warren saying, you know, he doesn't really feel like this is the way to wage that fight. I think the greater challenge though is if you think about where we are fiscally as a country, you know, 37, 38 trillion and growing of debt for now more than five years, a debt to GDP ratio at 120% or more. You know, I think one of the things that we have to start to come to terms with is you can't have successive years of a trillion and a half and two trillion dollars of deficits, a debt at 37.5 trillion with a trillion dollars a year of interest and not address spending. And it's not just federal spending. It's going to be municipal spending, state spending, but spending has gotten out of control. And you know when you think about 5% of individual taxpayers contributing 66% of taxes and 20 companies contributing 25% of corporate taxes, we need to do a better job of making sure that we're not actually putting a greater tax burden on the US. I don't know that it's sustainable, but we have to start addressing spending. But neither one of the political parties seems to have a huge appetite for really going after spending. DOGE is trying to make things more efficient, but if you don't go after some of the big ticket items, whether that's Social Security, whether it's Medicare, whether it's defense spending, if you don't go after some of the big nuts out there, not to mention interest on what we pay on all these things, you're not going to be able to bring that down. Well, think about it. Medicaid and Medicare in the last four years are up 45 to 50%. That's just not sustainable. And then you look at the things that nobody wants to talk about. You know, K through 12 US expenditures are something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. But we're now at a place where kids are graduating at 30% of their grade level expectation. Graduating in math and science and reading at 30% of grade level. And I think the, you know, let's say there's 50 million plus people in the K through 12 system, but in almost every grade in every subject, if you're averaging 30%. And that's now two generations.
