Billionaire Charlie Munger, who was the investing sage who made a fortune on his own before he became Warren Buffett’s right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, died Tuesday at 99.

In addition to being Berkshire vice chairman, Munger was a real estate attorney, chairman and publisher of the Daily Journal Corp., a member of the Costco board, a philanthropist and an architect.

In early 2023, his fortune was estimated at $2.3 billion — a jaw-dropping amount for many people but vastly smaller than Buffett’s unfathomable fortune, which is estimated at more than $100 billion.

During Berkshire’s 2021 annual shareholder meeting, the then-97-year-old Munger apparently inadvertently revealed a well-guarded secret: that Vice Chairman Greg Abel “will keep the culture” after the Buffett era.

Munger, who wore thick glasses, had lost his left eye after complications from cataract surgery in 1980.

Munger was chairman and CEO of Wesco Financial from 1984 to 2011, when Buffett’s Berkshire purchased the remaining shares of the Pasadena, California-based insurance and investment company it did not own.

Buffett credited Munger with broadening his investment strategy from favoring troubled companies at low prices in hopes of getting a profit to focusing on higher-quality but underpriced companies.

An early example of the shift was illustrated in 1972 by Munger’s ability to persuade Buffett to sign off on Berkshire’s purchase of See’s Candies for $25 million even though the California candy maker had annual pretax earnings of only about $4 million. It has since produced more than $2 billion in sales for Berkshire.

“He weaned me away from the idea of buying very so-so companies at very cheap prices, knowing that there was some small profit in it, and looking for some really wonderful businesses that we could buy in fair prices,” Buffett told CNBC in May 2016.

Or as Munger put it at the 1998 Berkshire shareholder meeting: “It’s not that much fun to buy a business where you really hope this sucker liquidates before it goes broke.”

Munger was often the straight man to Buffett’s jovial commentaries. “I have nothing to add,” he would say after one of Buffett’s loquacious responses to questions at Berkshire annual meetings in Omaha, Nebraska. But like his friend and colleague, Munger was a font of wisdom in investing, and in life. And like one of his heroes, Benjamin Franklin, Munger’s insight didn’t lack humor.

“I have a friend who says the first rule of fishing is to fish where the fish are. The second rule of fishing is to never forget the first rule. We’ve gotten good at fishing where the fish are,” the then-93-year-old Munger told the thousands of people at Berkshire’s 2017 meeting.

He believed in what he called the “lollapalooza effect,” in which a confluence of factors merged to drive investment psychology.

Charles Thomas Munger was born in Omaha on Jan. 1, 1924. His father, Alfred, was a lawyer, and his mother, Florence “Toody,” was from an affluent family. Like Warren, Munger worked at Buffett’s grandfather’s grocery store as a youth, but the two future joined-at-the-hip partners didn’t meet until years later.

At 17, Munger left Omaha for the University of Michigan. Two years later, in 1943, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, according to Janet Lowe’s 2003 biography “Damn Right!”

The military sent him to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena to study meteorology. In California, he fell in love with his sister’s roommate at Scripps College, Nancy Huggins, and married her in 1945. Although he never completed his undergraduate degree, Munger graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1948, and the couple moved back to California, where he practiced real estate law. He founded the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson in 1962 and focused on managing investments at the hedge fund Wheeler, Munger & Co., which he also founded that year.

“I’m proud of being an Omaha boy,” Munger said in a 2017 interview with Dean Scott Derue of the Michigan Ross Business School. “I sometimes use the old saying, ‘They got the boy out of Omaha but they never got Omaha out of the boy.’ All those old-fashioned values — family comes first; be in a position so that you can help others when troubles come; prudent, sensible; moral duty to be reasonable [is] more important than anything else — more important than being rich, more important than being important — an absolute moral duty.”

In California, he partnered with Franklin Otis Booth, a member of the founding family of the Los Angeles Times, in real estate. One of their early developments turned out to be a lucrative condo project on Booth’s grandfather’s property in Pasadena. (Booth, who died in 2008, had been introduced to Buffett by Munger in 1963 and became one of Berkshire’s largest investors.)

“I had five real estate projects,” Munger told Derue. “I did both side by side for a few years, and in a very few years, I had $3 million — $4 million.”

Munger closed the hedge fund in 1975. Three years later, he became vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

In 1959, at age 35, Munger returned to Omaha to close his late father’s legal practice. That’s when he was introduced to the then-29-year-old Buffett by one of Buffett’s investor clients. The two hit it off and stayed in contact despite living half a continent away from each other.

“We think so much alike that it’s spooky,” Buffett recalled in an interview with the Omaha World-Herald in 1977. “He’s as smart and as high-grade a guy as I’ve ever run into.”

“We never had an argument in the entire time we’ve known each other, which is almost 60 years now,” Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick in 2018. “Charlie has given me the ultimate gift that a person can give to somebody else. He’s made me a better person than I would have otherwise been. … He’s given me a lot of good advice over time. … I’ve lived a better life because of Charlie.”

The melding of the minds focused on value investing, in which stocks are picked because their price appears to be undervalued based on the company’s long-term fundamentals.

“All intelligent investing is value investing — acquiring more than you are paying for,” Munger once said. “You must value the business in order to value the stock.”

But during the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, when Berkshire suffered a massive $50 billion loss in the first quarter, Munger and Buffett were more conservative than there were during the Great Recession, when they invested in U.S. airlines and financials like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs hit hard by that downturn.

“Well, I would say basically we’re like the captain of a ship when the worst typhoon that’s ever happened comes,” Munger told The Wall Street Journal in April 2020. “We just want to get through the typhoon, and we’d rather come out of it with a whole lot of liquidity. We’re not playing, ‘Oh goody, goody, everything’s going to hell, let’s plunge 100% of the reserves’ [into buying businesses].” 

Munger donated hundreds of millions of dollars to educational institutions, including the University of Michigan, Stanford University and Harvard Law School, often with the stipulation that the school accept his building designs, even though he was not formally trained as an architect.

At Los Angeles’ Harvard-Westlake prep school, where Munger had been a board member for decades, he ensured that the girls bathrooms were larger than the boys room during the construction of the science center in the 1990s.

“Any time you go to a football game or a function there’s a huge line outside the women’s bathroom. Who doesn’t know that they pee in a different way than the men?” Munger told The Wall Street Journal in 2019. “What kind of idiot would make the men’s bathroom and the women’s bathroom the same size? The answer is, a normal architect!”

Munger and his wife had three children, daughters Wendy and Molly, and son Teddy, who died of leukemia at age 9. The Mungers divorced in 1953.

Two years later, he married Nancy Barry, whom he met on a blind date at a chicken dinner restaurant. The couple had four children, Charles Jr., Emilie, Barry and Philip. He also was the stepfather to her two other sons, William Harold Borthwick and David Borthwick. The Mungers, who were married 54 years until her death in 2010, contributed $43.5 million to Stanford University to help build the Munger Graduate Residence, which houses 600 law and graduate students.

Asked by CNBC’s Quick in a February 2019 “Squawk Box” interview about the secret to a long and happy life, Munger said the answer “is easy, because it’s so simple.”

“You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite,” he said.

“And staying cheerful … because it’s a wise thing to do. Is that so hard? And can you be cheerful when you’re absolutely mired in deep hatred and resentment? Of course you can’t. So why would you take it on?”

Honda is recalling 303,700 2023 and 2024 Accords and HR-Vs because of a defect that could stop some front seat belts in the vehicles from tightening properly in a crash.

The automaker is recalling Accords built between Oct. 4, 2022, and Oct. 14, 2023, as well as HR-Vs made between April 26, 2022, and Oct. 14, 2023, it said in a filing last week with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. All of the vehicles being recalled are gas-powered, rather than hybrids.

Honda said the front seat belt pretensioners in a fraction of those vehicles were assembled without a rivet that secures the quick connector and wire plate. It said the installation of that rivet was skipped during assembly but did not explain why or how.

Without that rivet, the seat belt will not tighten to properly restrain occupants and get their bodies into a safe position in the event of a crash, making harm more likely.

The company estimated that 1% of the vehicles being recalled are defective. It said it has had seven warranty claims related to the problem and no reports of injuries or deaths.

Honda said in a statement that the owners of all affected vehicles will be contacted by mail and told to take their vehicles to authorized Honda dealers, who will replace the defective part. Customers who have already had those repairs done at their own expense may be eligible for refunds.

The company said in its filing that it received its first complaint about the problem May 23. On Sept. 20, it received the affected parts and began to investigate, and on Nov. 16 it identified a defect that necessitated the recall.

The late crush of holiday travelers is picking up steam, with about 2.7 million people expected to board flights on Wednesday and millions more planning to drive to Thanksgiving celebrations.

Airline officials say they are confident that they can avoid the kind of massive disruptions that have marred past holiday seasons, such as the meltdown at Southwest Airlines over last Christmas.

Airlines have added tens of thousands of employees in the last couple years, and Southwest says it has bought more winter equipment to keep planes moving even during sub-freezing temperatures.

Security lines at airports could be long because of the crowds. Delta Air Lines is telling passengers to arrive at the airport at least two hours before their flight if they are traveling within the United States, three hours early if they’re flying overseas — and maybe earlier on Sunday and Monday.

The holiday will also test the Federal Aviation Administration, which faces shortages of air traffic controllers at key facilities that caused reductions in flights to the New York City area this summer and fall.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said during a news conference Monday that the government has prepared for holiday travel by hiring more air traffic controllers, opening new air routes along the East Coast and providing grants to airports for snowplows and deicing equipment.

Nearly three-fourths of flight delays are caused by weather, according to the FAA. The agency’s figures indicate that the rate of canceled flights is down this year from last year, when airlines didn’t have enough staff to handle the strong recovery in travel after the pandemic.

The Transportation Security Administration predicts that it will screen 2.7 million passengers Wednesday and a record 2.9 million on Sunday, the biggest day for return trips. That would narrowly beat TSA’s all-time mark set on June 30.

“We are ready for the holidays. We’re confident we have enough agents,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

He urged travelers to give themself extra time to get through busy airports and be considerate of TSA agents, gate agents and flight crews and others who are giving up their holidays.

“I just ask passengers to thank people for what they’re doing. They’re making sure the system is safe and secure. That’s a tall order,” he said.

AAA predicts that 55.4 million people will travel at least 50 miles from home between Wednesday and Sunday, the third-highest forecast ever by the auto club. AAA says most of them — 49.1 million — will drive.

Drivers will get a break from last year on gasoline prices. AAA says the nationwide average for gas was down to $3.29 a gallon on Tuesday, compared with $3.66 a year ago.

Air travelers will enjoy lower prices too. Airfares in October were down 13% from last year, according to government figures, and fares around Thanksgiving have been about 14% lower than a year ago, according to the travel site Hopper.

Even so, the high cost of rent, food, health care and other expenses were weighing on people’s travel plans.

Jason McQueary, a 25-year-old social worker and graduate student said rent and other essentials eat up most of his paycheck and he was grateful for his credit card points, which brought down the cost of his roundtrip flight from Denver to Chicago from $450 to $150.

“I was just like, ‘man, I’m glad I only come home once a year,’” said McQueary, who was waiting to get picked up Tuesday after arriving to Chicago O’Hare International Airport to spend Thanksgiving with family in his hometown of Byron, Illinois.

Qualyn Margain consulted with their children and decided to skip Thanksgiving this year.

Margain, a life insurance agent and barista based in Seattle, told NBC News the savings from skipping a Thanksgiving feast will let their family more comfortably celebrate Christmas along with the childrens’ birthdays, which also fall over the end-of-year holidays.

Challenges like rising rents and higher food prices made marking every holiday impractical this year. There will also be slightly fewer toys and more essentials this season, they added.

“Everything is just too expensive, and you have to work twice as hard to survive in a less enjoyable way,” Margain said. “We’re just going to have a normal, relaxing day, and that way we are going to have the ability to do Christmas.”

Margain is just one of many shoppers who are trying hard to make their dollars go further this season. There are some indications the holiday shopping period got off to a slow start ahead of Black Friday on Nov. 24.

Consumer spending is responsible for about 70% of all economic activity in the U.S., and consumers have continued to spend at a surprising pace despite the upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But now, shoppers are getting squeezed by multiple factors at once. Rents continue to rise and housing prices are near record highs. The steep rise in interest rates over the last two years has pushed credit card rates much higher, and that has helped drive up credit card debt as well.

The pandemic-era student loan pause has finally ended, and the expanded child tax credit is long gone.

Most people have spent their Covid-era savings and stimulus cash as well, although people who have higher incomes have held on to more of those funds.

Just as important are changes in people’s spending habits. Ted Rossman, who covers credit and retail spending and consumer finance trends for Bankrate, said people are still shopping, but they’re less interested in traditional holiday gifts than they were in the past.

The effect is that holiday-season spending has just kept pace with inflation over the last couple of years, even as retailers have launched big promotions in October instead of waiting for Black Friday. Rossman says that’s likely to be the case again — and while retailers might find that disappointing, it’s far from a disaster for the economy.

“When we’re talking about physical retail, clothing, toys, a lot of the holiday favorites, a lot of those sales have been lackluster over the last year,” he said.

That has to do with the famous adage that millennials prefer to spend on experiences, like travel or concerts, instead of material goods. This hasn’t hurt overall consumer spending, but spending has shifted away from the holiday period.

The National Retail Federation, a trade group of retailers, says sales will rise 3% to 4% in November and December, to a total of around $960 billion.

The financial pressures on consumers have also caused credit card delinquency rates to rise over the last few years. In the third quarter, almost 3% of cards had late payments, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s the highest rate since 2012.

Lindsey Tallent told NBC News that she’s scaling back her holiday shopping after she unexpectedly lost her warehouse job this month. She said she’s picking up work when she can and looking for a new job, but she’s still had to make some difficult calls.

“I was planning a bunch of things. A lot of nieces and nephews I was hoping to buy for that I wasn’t able to buy for last year,” said Tallent, who lives in Washington state. “I’m going to buy gifts for my child who is still at home out of the two, and probably not friends or family beyond that.”

Similar strains have more people using buy now, pay later loans to make major purchases. Buy now, pay later, or BNPL, programs are short-term, zero-interest installment loans that allow customers to get items immediately and pay for them over time.

Adobe Analytics estimates consumers made $4.9 billion in purchases on those loans between Nov. 1 and Nov. 20.

According to a 2021 survey by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the five leading firms in that business originated 180 million loans in 2021, an increase of 900% from 2019.

While retailers and shoppers have both found something to like in those loans, they still come with risks. Eden Iscil, public policy manager for the National Consumers League, a consumer advocacy group, said that the BNPL industry is new and regulated far less stringently than the credit card industry.

While banks and credit cards have to be strict about how much they let people borrow, Iscil said BNPL programs are less stringent and users are sometimes allowed to borrow more than they can afford. They can also be tripped up by items like unusual repayment periods, resulting in additional fees and damage to their credit scores.

“It’ll be concerning if we see consumers go beyond their means to pay for extra holiday shopping,” Iscil said.

Rossman agrees that it’s a bad time to overspend, as credit card interest rates are at all-time highs thanks to repeated interest rate hikes. Bankrate data shows the average interest rate on a card is now above 20%.

“People are being more thoughtful about their spending and being worried about the state of the economy,” he said.

There’s good news buried in there as well, Rossman says: Because inflation has come down and supply chains and inventory management have improved, shoppers will be able to find better deals in 2023 than they have in the last few years.

Qualyn Margain said they are looking for positives this season as well. While they’re not having friends over for Thanksgiving, they said they’ve seen a lot of people coming together via food and clothing swaps or mutual aid groups in response to the struggles of the season.

“I think it’s really beautiful how many people are coming together to support each other,” they said. “It’s really cool that the human spirit is so resistant.”

CORRECTION (Nov. 24, 2023, 5:43 p.m. ET) A previous version of this article misstated Qualyn Margain’s last name. It is Margain, not Morgan.

Popeyes is expanding its menu beyond chicken sandwiches — and it’s a permanent change this time.

The fast-food chain announced Wednesday it’s adding five chicken wing flavors to its menu nationwide, with three debuting at Popeyes for the first time, beginning Wednesday. The flavors include Honey BBQ, Roasted Garlic Parmesan, Signature Hot, Ghost Pepper and Sweet ’N Spicy.

“At Popeyes, we like to challenge the status quo and are consistently redefining what’s expected from fast food brands,” said Sami Siddiqui, president of Popeyes North America, in a statement. “We know our guests want even more bold Louisiana-inspired wing flavors to choose from and are excited to see our new wings line-up take flight.”

Siddiqui added that the Ghost Pepper wings were an “overnight success” when tested at locations earlier this year, and the Sweet ’N Spicy wings have been the chain’s best-performing product since its chicken sandwich.

Popeyes said it has been working on perfecting the wings recipes for three years. The new wings will be available starting at $5.99 for a six-piece.

Last month, Popeyes overtook KFC to secure its spot as the No. 2 chicken chain in the U.S., behind Chick-fil-A.