William Green

Christopher Begg teaches Ben Graham’s Security Analysis course at Columbia, the same class Graham taught Warren Buffett in 1951. He also runs East Coast Asset Management, and is invested in Tesla. To a lot of people those two things do not belong in the same sentence. In a conversation with @WilliamGreen72, he used Tesla to explain what he and others have started to call Value 3.0 — a way of looking at a business that would leave a traditional value investor in disbelief. 1️⃣ Value 1.0, Graham: a collection of assets worth a dollar, bought at 50 cents. The question is the floor. How do I lose? 2️⃣ Value 2.0, Buffett and Munger: a great business at a reasonable price. Maybe 10 or 12 times earnings, owned for a long time, so you do not have to sell and reinvest. The cheapness is still optically there. 3️⃣ Value 3.0 is the step many investors will not take. Nick Sleep was already doing it with Amazon in the Nomad letters. Optically Amazon did not look cheap. You had to add back the investments it was making and underwrite the margin potential before the earnings were staring you in the face. In hindsight it was one of the cheapest companies of the period, compounding at about 47% from that point. That is the part people have trouble with. A company gets labeled overvalued because today’s earnings do not show the value, and the work stops there. Investing is often more than what is optically in front of you. The same lens Sleep used on Amazon is the one Begg says Google and Meta later required, and the one he now applies to Tesla: not a coin flip, but an underwriting of what the business can earn once the investments and the platform are understood. Asymmetry still has to be there. The floor still matters. The difference is that the cheapness is not always visible in the multiple. $TSLA $SPCX ___ 🎙️ The Investor’s Podcast | How to Find Hidden Investment Treasures w/ Christopher Begg (07/25/2026)