(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter with news and analysis about Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Friday evening.)
Buffett talks about almost everything
Warren Buffett and Becky Quick covered too many topics in interviews that aired in a two-hour special on CNBC Tuesday night for me to 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 his cash pile approaches $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. This is not a comprehensive list.
However, here are some short clips and quotes that caught my attention.
- Buffett on what it takes to find good companies: “It doesn’t take a genius, or even Greek symbols or anything like that, to figure out what a company is worth…If (Greg Abel) dropped out of high school like some of our managers, he would still be as smart as he is.”
- Buffett on Sunday’s board meeting when directors considered his recommendation and named Greg Abel as the next CEO: “(Director) Steve Burke finally said, ‘We don’t have to sit around staring at our navels or anything else for three months. This is the right decision.’ And so they voted for it.”
Greg Abel speaks during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting on May 3, 2025 in Omaha, Nebraska.
CNBC
- Buffett on Berkshire’s future: “There will always be something moving, but for the most part it will be expanding. Occasionally there will be things that disappear… We will have companies that will not be viable in the world’s economy in 50 or 100 years. But we will have a whole lot more that have developed over the years. And we can go wherever the country goes, and we can go with capital.”
- Why being on the board 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 $250,000, $300,000, even up to $500,000 a year for something that’s pretty comfortable. They usually do transportation for you and there are cars ready to take you anywhere. And everyone’s polite. And everyone would love this job. I mean, who wouldn’t?”
- Why he gave up betting on horses when he was still in high school: “One of the first things you learn in horse racing is that you can win a race, but you can’t beat the races… I had a few horses in mind, but I lost the money in the first race. And then I did the dumbest thing you can imagine… I just bet on every race. And when I went home I was $50 poorer, that’s all I took with me…
I went to Howard Johnson and still had a few dollars left. I bought myself a fancy meal and just sat there thinking about it and thinking about it on the train. And that was the end of horse racing. - Buffett on his decades-long leadership of Berkshire:
“Everything I wanted to do worked out…That doesn’t mean everything we did worked out. But I couldn’t imagine running Berkshire being more fun. And Charlie and I would have more fun doing the things that often didn’t work out than (if they did).”
- About being a teacher on the side: “I loved it. It appealed to my teaching style and I liked my own ideas… I just enjoyed teaching. And I still do, except I ran out of gas a few years ago.”
- Advice for new parents: “The only advice I give newlyweds is to never use sarcasm towards your children. I mean, to you it may be sarcasm, but to them it’s a slap in the face they’ll never forget.”
“You should be smarter in the second half of your life than you were in the first. And if so – if things worked out well for you, you should be a better person in the second half of your life.”
- On kindness: “I would simply ask everyone to ask me whether kindness could harm them in any way and whether the happiness of the world would not be better if… they would say to themselves every morning: ‘Good things and bad things are happening to me today, but I can be kind to everyone.'”
Exclusive clip from Warren Buffett Watch
Although the special was two hours long, there were more interviews than time, forcing the producer to make some difficult decisions.
For Warren Buffett Watch readers, here’s a clip that she decided to include in the final cut. Buffett explains why he hasn’t commented on politics in recent years:
Becky quickly: You haven’t commented much publicly lately either. They basically save it for the annual meeting when all the shareholders come to town.
WARREN BUFFETT: Right.
Becky quickly: 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 — Someone asked about a political stance. And I said that you should not trust your citizenship blindly. But —
Becky quickly: As CEO.
WARREN BUFFETT: And — as CEO, yes.
You have three or four hundred thousand employees and millions of shareholders, but you were still entitled — I took over the position — to speak up.
But I think — I reconsidered this opinion in my head because people will have done it — become so tribal. We saw it once in our gift program.
But there is no reason why anyone answering the phone at GEICO or waiting for a customer at the Nebraska Furniture Mart should have to deal with people who have a negative opinion of the company based on what I say.
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 to — I identified with Berkshire so much 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 the employees don’t deserve that. The companies don’t deserve it. And so I walked away from it.
Buffett’s Children on Philanthropy and Buffett’s Growing Up
Buffett has given his three adult children the extremely difficult task of deciding unanimously how to give away his enormous fortune after his death.
While in Omaha to interview her father, Becky sat down with Howard, Susan and Peter Buffett to talk about this assignment, her own philanthropic efforts and what it was like growing up in Buffett’s famously modest home.
A detailed portion was aired in the special, but here is the entire conversation:
In this excerpt, they recall how their father was “wise” to give them pocket money:
HOWARD BUFFETT: You know, we would earn this pocket money for cleaning the gutters, cutting the lawn, raking leaves, things like that.
But he – but Warren got pretty smart and started giving it to us in fifteen minutes. And then he bought a slot —
SUSAN BUFFETT: Dimes!
HOWARD BUFFETT: Yes.
SUSAN BUFFETT: It was a dime slot machine.
HOWARD BUFFETT: Yes. And then he bought —
SUSAN BUFFETT: He got everything back.
HOWARD BUFFETT: And then he bought the slot machine to get most of his pocket money back. At least for me he got a lot in return.
In his Inside Wealth report in Wednesday’s “Squawk Box,” Robert Frank explained why Buffett’s children may have the toughest jobs in philanthropy:
In case you missed it
“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” will be shown again on CNBC next Sunday, January 18th at 3:00 pm ET and Monday, January 19th at 7:00 am ET.
Enlarge symbolArrows point outwards
BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE ON THE INTERNET
Some links may require a subscription:
BERKSHIRE STOCK CLOCK
Enlarge symbolArrows point outwardsEnlarge symbolArrows point outwards
BRK.A share price: $740,750
BRK.B share price: $493.29
BRK.BP/E (TTM): 15.78
Berkshire market cap: $1,064,618,103,867
Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (up 10.9% from June 30)
Excluding Rail Cash and deducting T-Bills payable: $354.3 billion (up 4.3% from June 30)
No Berkshire share buybacks since May 2024.
(All figures are as of the date of publication unless otherwise stated)
BERKSHIRE’S TOP STOCK HOLDINGS – January 16, 2026
Enlarge symbolArrows point outwards
Berkshire’s largest holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the US and Japan, by market value based on recent closing prices.
Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reflected in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing dated November 14, 2025, except for:
For the full list of holdings and current market values, visit CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send me questions or comments about the newsletter to alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (We’re sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
If you have not yet subscribed to this newsletter, you can sign up here.
Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are also highly recommended reading. They are collected here on Berkshire’s website.
– Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch