General
Warren Buffett was interviewed by Becky Quick today
I watched it live on CNBC... unfortunately, they haven't shared it on YouTube just yet, but Barron's covered it:
My biggest takeaways:
Buffet still believes the prices are high in the market. “We aren’t finding things”, he told Becky.
Asked by CNBC anchor Becky Quick about the market decline, Buffett said, “This is nothing,” adding that the market had been down 50% three times during his tenure at Berkshire, dating back to 1965.
Buffett added that Berkshire would deploy capital if there is a big decline in the market. He noted that Berkshire has more than $350 billion of cash, mostly in Treasury bills. Buffett said Berkshire had purchased $17 billion of T-bills at the weekly auction on Monday.
On philanthropy, Buffett was cautious. He said he is taking a wait-and-see approach on future donations to the Gates Foundation, especially as fresh scrutiny around Bill Gates’ past association with Jeffrey Epstein continues to surface. Buffett noted he has not spoken to Gates since the latest Epstein files came out. He also repeated that his giving plan has changed: the Gates Foundation will no longer receive Berkshire-related donations after his death, with most of his roughly $140 billion fortune instead going to family foundations run by his children.
Buffett was especially blunt on Epstein. He said he never met him and was grateful Epstein never passed through Omaha, because even a single photo could have created a problem. He described Epstein as someone who preyed on human weakness and said the files are now “ruining one person after another.” At the same time, Buffett made clear that Gates had treated him well personally, so he avoided going much further than that.
On investing, Buffett said Apple is still Berkshire’s biggest stock position even after Berkshire slashed the stake by more than 75% from its peak. He hinted that concentration risk was a major reason for trimming it, saying he was not comfortable with Apple becoming bigger than everything else combined. Still, he praised Tim Cook heavily, calling him a fantastic manager and saying Apple is better than any of Berkshire’s wholly owned businesses. Berkshire, he added, has made over $100 billion in profit from Apple sales alone... that's wild.
Finally, Buffett said Berkshire is still looking for deals, but not seeing much worth buying at current prices. Abel gets most of the calls from bankers, and Buffett joked he could reject most of them in five seconds. One exception was Berkshire’s January purchase of Occidental Petroleum’s OxyChem business for under $10 billion, which Buffett suggested could be a strong long-term holding.