SPECIAL: Chris Bloomstran and The Flawed Bulb

Latticework by MOI Global

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SPECIAL: Chris Bloomstran and The Flawed Bulb

A program on the superinvestor from St. Louis who warned about Microsoft in January 2000 — and was still right fifteen years later

MOI Global Equity Research

Apr 22, 2026

We are delighted to share The Flawed Bulb, a special audio program on Chris Bloomstran, president of Semper Augustus Investments Group and one of the most rigorous, patient, and underheralded investors of his generation. The program is part of the MOI Global series on great investors whose lessons deserve a wider audience than the quarterly interview cycle allows.

The essay opens in the Grand Ballroom of the Yale Club of New York City at Latticework 2025, where Chris read a Joni Mitchell parody to a room of professional investors before walking them through the case that hyperscaler capex (on the order of $350-400 billion against less than $40 billion of corresponding revenue) is one of the largest bubbles in American history. From there, the piece moves backward to 1998, when a St. Louis patriarch who had bought GE for twelve cents a share in 1932 handed a 29-year-old Chris a family portfolio and the mandate that became Semper Augustus.

The through-line is a single word Chris has been defending for a quarter century: price. In November 2000 he wrote Price Matters and closed it with a sentence he has never really stopped arguing: the market has a way of fairly pricing stocks over long periods. Ten months earlier, in January 2000, he had written a related piece on Microsoft — predicting zero percent returns for fifteen years. Microsoft compounded earnings at 8.4% and sales at 10.1% over those fifteen years and still returned 0.6% annualized to shareholders. The company was always great. The price was the problem. When the price reset at 17× in late 2014, the same business compounded at 26.6% annualized for the next decade.

That is the argument, lived out across 26 years of client letters, letters that began at seven pages and have grown, without losing a single founding client, to 184. The essay and audiobook collect the ideas, cases, and stories — from the patriarch’s twelve-cent GE to the options-as-hidden-liability critique, from Ross Stores to the Berkshire Scorecard — into a portrait of a manager whose method is itself a kind of patience.

We are grateful to Chris for the wisdom and insights he has shared with the MOI Global community over many years.

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