(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can subscribe here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)
Buffett talks about almost everythingWarren Buffett and Becky Quick covered too many topics in interviews broadcast in a two-hour special on CNBC Tuesday evening so that I can write a convincing summary.
“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” included discussions about his inability to find a large company to buy for Berkshire Hathaway as its treasury approaches $400 billion, new CEO Greg Abel, the future of your business and beyond that, the difficulty of giving away billions of dollars and the inestimable role of luck in its success. This is not an exhaustive list.
However, here are a few brief excerpts and quotes that caught my attention.
Buffett explains what to do to find good companies: “It doesn’t take a genius, and it certainly doesn’t take Greek symbols or anything like that to understand what a company is worth… If (Greg Abel) had dropped out of high school like some of our managers did, he would still be as smart as he is.”
Buffett at Sunday’s board meeting when directors considered his recommendation to name Greg Abel as the next CEO: “(Director) Steve Burke finally said, you know, ‘We don’t need to sit around for three months and look at our navel or anything about this. This is the right decision.’ And so they voted to do it. »
Greg Abel speaks at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, May 3, 2025.
CNBC
Buffett on the future of Berkshire: “It will always move a little, but it will mostly expand. Sometimes there will be things that disappear… We will have companies that, in 50 or 100 years, will not be viable in the economy of this world. But we will have many more that have developed over the years. And we will be able to go wherever the country goes, and we can go there with capital.”
Why being a board member of a company is the best job in the world:”Being a director. I mean, it’s the best job in the world. You get paid $250, $300, even up to $500,000 a year to do something pretty enjoyable. Usually they provide you with transportation and they have cars waiting to take you everywhere. And everyone is polite. And everyone would love that job. I mean, who wouldn’t?”
Why he stopped betting on horses when he was in high school: “One of the first things you learn in horse racing is that you can beat a race, but you can’t beat races… I had a few horses in mind, but I lost money in the first race. And then I did the stupidest thing you could imagine… I kept betting on every race. And when I went home, I was $50 down, that was all I took with me me…
I went to Howard Johnson’s and had a few dollars left. I bought myself a fancy meal and sat there thinking about it and thinking about it on the train. And that was the end of horse racing. »
Buffett on running Berkshire for decades:”Everything I wanted to do worked…That’s not to say everything we did worked. But I couldn’t imagine more fun than having run Berkshire. And Charlie and I would have more fun with the things that didn’t work out often than (if they) did.”
Be a teacher on the side: “I loved it. It appealed to my teaching 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 advice I give to newlyweds is to never use sarcasm around your kids. I mean, it might be sarcasm to you, but it’s a slap in the back that they’ll never forget.”Learn and evolve:”You should be wiser in the second half of your life than in the first. And if you’ve done well for yourself, you should be a better person in the second half of your life.”
To be kind: “I would just ask anyone to challenge me to find out if being kind could hurt them in some way, and if the happiness of the world wouldn’t be better if… every morning he said to himself: ‘Good and bad things will happen to me today, but I can be kind to anyone.'”The exclusive clip from Warren Buffett WatchEven though the special was two hours long, there were more interviews than time, forcing the producer to make difficult decisions.
Here for Warren Buffett Watch Readers is a clip she wanted to include in the final cut. Buffett explains why he hasn’t spoken out on politics in recent years:
BECKY FAST: You also haven’t made many public comments lately. You basically save it for the annual meeting when all the shareholders come to town.
WARREN BUFFETT: RIGHT.
BECKY FAST: Why then?
WARREN BUFFETT: Well, first of all, I made this statement a few years ago — maybe, I don’t know, five or six years ago — someone asked if we should take a political stance. And I said you don’t put your citizenship in a blind trust. But —
BECKY FAST: As CEO.
WARREN BUFFETT: And — as a CEO, yes.
You have three or four hundred thousand employees, and you have millions of shareholders, but you nevertheless had the right — I took the job — to speak.
But I think — I revisited this opinion in my mind, because people will have — I became so tribal. We saw it on our one-time gift program.
But there’s no reason why someone answering the phone at GEICO or waiting for a customer at the Nebraska Furniture Mart should be dealing with people who have a negative opinion of the company because of something I 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 identified so much with Berkshire that I — As long as I speak at the annual meeting or something like that, people will associate it with the Berkshire voice to some extent.
And employees don’t deserve that. Businesses don’t deserve it. And so I backed away.
Buffett’s Kids Talk Philanthropy and Growing Up BuffettBuffett has given her three adult children the extremely difficult speech about the unanimous decision to decide how to give away his enormous net worth after his death.
When she was in Omaha to interview their father, Becky sat down with Howard, Susan and Peter Buffett to talk about that mission, their own philanthropic efforts and what it was like growing up in Buffett’s famously unassuming household.
A long portion aired in the special, but here is the entire conversation:
In this excerpt, they remember how their father was “smart” by giving them an allowance:
HOWARD BUFFET: You know, we would earn this allowance for cleaning the gutters and mowing the lawn and raking the leaves and all that.
But he… but Warren got pretty smart and started giving it to us in quarters. And then he bought a place —
SUSAN BUFFETT: Ten cents!
HOWARD BUFFET: Yeah.
SUSAN BUFFET: It was a slot machine.
HOWARD BUFFET: Yeah. And then he bought —
SUSAN BUFFETT: He got everything back.
HOWARD BUFFETT: And then he bought the slot machine to get most of his spending money back. At least with me he got a lot of it back.
In his Inside the wealth In a report published Wednesday in “Squawk Box,” Robert Frank explained why Buffett’s children might have the toughest job in philanthropy:
If you missed it“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” will air again on CNBC on Sunday, January 18 at 3 p.m. ET and Monday, January 19 at 7 a.m. ET.
BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNETBERKSHIRE STOCKS WATCHFour weeks
Twelve months
BRK.A stock price: $740,750
BRK.B stock price: $493.29
BRK.BP/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 subtraction of Treasury bills payable: $354.3 billion (up 4.3% compared to June 30)
No Berkshire share buybacks since May 2024.
(All figures are as of publication date unless otherwise noted)
MAIN PARTICIPATIONS FROM BERKSHIRE – January 16, 2026Top holdings of Berkshire publicly traded stocks in the United States and Japan, by market value, based on latest closing prices.
The holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as shown in Berkshire Hathaway Filing 13F November 14, 2025, except:
Itochuwhich is from March 17, 2025, And Mitsubishiwhich is from August 28, 2025. Tokyo Stock Exchange prices are converted to US dollars from the Japanese yen.The complete list of stocks and current market values is available at CNBC.com. Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTSPlease send me any questions or comments regarding the newsletter at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
If you are not already subscribed to this newsletter, you can subscribe here.
Additionally, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. He collected there here on the Berkshire website.
— Alex Crippen, editor-in-chief, Warren Buffett Watch
