(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can sign up here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)
Buffett talks about almost everything
Warren Buffett and Becky Quick covered too many topics in the interviews that aired in a two-hour special on CNBC Tuesday evening for me to write a cogent summary.
“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” included discussions about his inability to find a big company to purchase for Berkshire Hathaway as its cash pile moves toward $400 billion, new CEO Greg Abel, his company’s future and past, the difficulty of giving away billions of dollars, and the invaluable role of luck in his success. That’s not a comprehensive list.
Here, however, are some brief clips and quotes that caught my attention.
- Buffett on what’s needed to find good businesses: “It doesn’t take a genius, and it sure doesn’t take any Greek symbols or anything like that to figure out what a business is worth… If (Greg Abel) quit at high school like some of our managers have, he’d still be as smart as he is.”
- Buffett on the Sunday board meeting when directors considered his recommendation they name Greg Abel as next CEO: “(Director) Steve Burke finally said, you know, ‘We don’t need to sit around for three months and peer at our navel or anything on this. This is the right decision.’ And so they voted to do it.”
Greg Abel speaks during the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska on May 3, 2025.
CNBC
- Buffett on Berkshire’s future: “It’ll always be moving somewhat, but it’ll be mostly expanding. Occasionally, there will be things that disappear … We will have companies that 50 or 100 years from now will not be viable in the economy of that world. But we’ll have a whole lot more that developed over the years. And we can go wherever the country goes, and we can go with capital.”
- Why being on a corporation’s board of directors is the best job in the world:
“Being a director. I mean, it’s the best job in the world. You get 250, 300, even up to 500 thousand dollars a year for doing something that’s quite pleasant. Usually they give you the transportation, and they have cars waiting to take you around everything. And everybody’s polite. And everybody’d love that job. I mean, who wouldn’t?”
- Why he gave up betting on horses when he was in high school: “One of the first things you learn in horse racing is you can beat a race, but you can’t beat the races… I had a couple of horses in mind, but I lost the money on the first race. And then I did the dumbest thing you can imagine… I just kept betting every race. And when I went home, I was $50 poorer, which was all I’d taken with me…
I went to the Howard Johnson’s, and I had a couple of dollars left. I bought myself a fancy meal and just sat there and thought about it and thought about it on the train. And that was the end of horse racing.” - Buffett on running Berkshire for decades:
“Everything I wanted to have happen has worked out… Doesn’t mean that everything we’ve done has worked out. But I couldn’t imagine more fun than I’ve had running Berkshire. And Charlie and I would have more fun out of the things that didn’t work a lot of times than (if they) did.”
- On being a teacher on the side: “I loved it. It appealed to my didactic style, and I liked my own ideas… I just had fun teaching. And I still do, except I ran out of gas a few years ago.”
- Advice for new parents: “The only piece of advice I give to newlyweds is don’t ever use sarcasm with your children. I mean, it may be sarcasm to you, but it’s a lash across the back to them they’ll never forget.”
“You should be wiser in the second half of your life than the first half. And if you’ve — if things have worked well for you, you should be a better person in the second half of your life.”
- On being kind: “I would just ask anybody to challenge me on whether being kind could hurt them in any way, and whether the happiness of the world wouldn’t be better if … every morning they said to themselves, ‘I’ll have things that are good and bad happen to me today, but I can be kind to anybody.'”
Warren Buffett Watch’s exclusive clip
Even though the special was two hours long, there was more interview than time, forcing the producer to make some difficult decisions.
Here for Warren Buffett Watch readers is a clip that she wanted to get into the final cut. Buffett explains why he hasn’t been speaking out on politics in recent years:
BECKY QUICK: You haven’t commented as much publicly lately, either. You basically save it for the annual meeting when all the shareholders come into town.
WARREN BUFFETT: Right.
BECKY QUICK: Why is that?
WARREN BUFFETT: Well, for one thing, I made the statement a few years ago — maybe, I don’t know, five or six years ago — somebody asked about taking a political stance. And I said that you don’t put your citizenship in a blind trust. But —
BECKY QUICK: As a CEO.
WARREN BUFFETT: And — as a CEO, yeah.
You have three or four hundred thousand employees, and you have millions of shareholders, but nevertheless you were entitled — I took the position — to speak out.
But I think — I’ve revisited that opinion in my mind, because people will have — gotten so tribal. We saw it on our gifts program at one time.
But there’s no reason why somebody that’s answering a phone at GEICO or waiting on a customer at the Nebraska Furniture Mart should be dealing with people who have a negative opinion of the company because of something I’ve said.
And, you know, here I am — if I want to speak as a private citizen, I should resign from Berkshire.
But I don’t really want — I’ve got identified so much with Berkshire that I — as long as I’m speaking at the annual meeting or anything like that, people will associate it with the voice of Berkshire to some extent.
And the employees don’t deserve that. The companies don’t deserve it. And so I backed away from that.
Buffett’s children on philanthropy and growing up Buffett
Buffett has given his three adult children the extremely difficult talk of unanimously deciding how to give away his enormous net worth after he dies.
When she was in Omaha to interview their father, Becky sat down with Howard, Susan, and Peter Buffett to talk about that assignment, their own philanthropic efforts, and what it was like growing up in Buffett’s famously unassuming house.
An extensive portion aired in the special, but this is the entire conversation:
In this excerpt, they remember how their father got “clever” about giving them an allowance:
HOWARD BUFFETT: You know, we’d earn this allowance for cleaning out gutters and cutting the lawn and raking leaves and stuff.
But he — but Warren got pretty clever and he started giving it to us in quarters. And then he bought a slot —
SUSAN BUFFETT: Dimes!
HOWARD BUFFETT: Yeah.
SUSAN BUFFETT: It was a dime slot machine.
HOWARD BUFFETT: Yeah. And then he bought —
SUSAN BUFFETT: He got it all back.
HOWARD BUFFETT: And then he bought the slot machine, so he would get most of his allowance back. At least with me, he got a lot of it back.
In his Inside Wealth report on Wednesday’s “Squawk Box,” Robert Frank explained why Buffett’s children may have the most difficult job in philanthropy:
If you missed it
“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” will be shown again on CNBC this coming Sunday, January 18 at 3 PM ET and Monday, January 19 at 7 AM ET.
BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNET
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BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH
BRK.A stock price: $740,750
BRK.B stock price: $493.29
BRK.B P/E (TTM): 15.78
Berkshire market capitalization: $1,064,618,103,867
Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (Up 10.9% from June 30)
Excluding Rail Cash and Subtracting T-Bills Payable: $354.3 billion (Up 4.3% from June 30)
No Berkshire stock repurchases since May 2024.
(All figures are as of the date of publication, unless otherwise indicated)
BERKSHIRE’S TOP EQUITY HOLDINGS – Jan. 16, 2026
Berkshire’s top holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the U.S. and Japan, by market value, based on the latest closing prices.
Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on November 14, 2025, except for:
The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
If you aren’t already subscribed to this newsletter, you can sign up here.
Also, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. There are collected here on Berkshire’s website.
— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch
