In the mornings he watches CNBC, as he always has. But when the day is done in Omaha, the man who assembled a trillion-dollar fortune by reading balance sheets sinks into a recliner in front of an enormous television and watches YouTube — and, friends say, he “can’t get enough.” The portrait comes from a Wall Street Journal article this week, relayed by Alex Crippen in CNBC’s Warren Buffett Watch newsletter. Buffett, now 96, is “hardly ever” looking at anything related to investing or finance, the friends say — though he is a “fan of Berkshire Hathaway’s own content” and “proud of how it performs on the video platform.”
The rabbit holes
What he watches instead is a museum of the America he came from, and much that lies far outside it: “Glenn Close clips ... commercials from the 1950s ... Paul Anka videos ... speeches by complete unknowns ... show tunes, railroads, the big-band era, Nebraska and early Frank Sinatra performances from the 1930s.” He will also wander down what friends call random rabbit holes, and has been known to come into the office “gushing about a moving amateur rendition of ‘My Way.’”
His frequent viewing companion, the Journal reports, is Sharon Osberg — the three-time world bridge champion who long ago taught Buffett and Bill Gates the finer points of the game. “Warren’s range is broad. It can be the silliest things,” she says: a “really good documentary on Roy Cohn” one night, the Uzbekistan version of America’s Got Talent the next.
Charlie on the screen
Osberg says Buffett has also been watching clips of his late friend and business partner, Charlie Munger, among them a 2017 appearance at the University of Michigan. “You feel the bond between the two of them as he watches Charlie. It’s really quite something.” The old partnership, dissolved only by death, runs now on a screen in a living room in Omaha.
The Journal is careful to knock down the theory that Wall Street would inevitably construct: that the viewing habit had something to do with Berkshire’s big investment in Alphabet, YouTube’s corporate parent. “He just really likes watching the clips, friends say.” There is an irony the tape-watchers might note anyway. Buffett is famously slow to adopt new technologies, yet on this one he has drifted in with the crowd — YouTube is now the most-watched video provider on televisions in the United States, as viewers shift from streaming services to short clips. The contrarian, for once, is the trend.
The builder’s wager
The buying, meanwhile, continues in daylight, by the old methods. Berkshire Hathaway added another $192.6 million to its bet on the homebuilder Lennar late last week, reporting in an SEC filing Monday that it bought 2.4 million shares of Lennar Class A at an average price of $79.65 and 15,000 shares of Lennar Class B at an average of $78.33 on Thursday, October 1 and Friday, October 2. Since the stake passed 10 percent in mid-September, SEC rules have required Berkshire to disclose further purchases within two business days; no filing has appeared so far this week, which suggests no new buying through at least Tuesday.
In total, Berkshire has added $595.3 million of Lennar shares across 11 trading days since September 17. Its disclosed 12.2 percent stake — 29 million shares — is valued at $2.2 billion at today’s closing prices. At the end of last year it owned just 7.2 million shares, then worth $742 million. Over that same stretch Lennar’s stock has dropped more than 25 percent as rising interest rates have made homes less affordable. It is the oldest pattern in the Buffett ledger: the crowd selling a sound business because the season is bad, and an old man in Omaha buying. The rabbits in his evening holes change; the arithmetic does not.