Business
How Warren Buffett Changed the Way Investors Thought of Investing
Warren E. Buffett’s approach to investing is deceptively simple.
“Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices,” he once wrote to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, his business conglomerate.
This method — known as value investing — had existed long before Mr. Buffett, now 94, began his career. But no one did it as well — or for as long — as he did. And in the process, he influenced generations of financiers, including Wall Street hedge fund moguls, and promoted the now-common advice about investing for the long term.
Over the 60 years that Mr. Buffett has controlled Berkshire Hathaway, he used value investing to turn a failing textile manufacturer into a $1.1 trillion conglomerate, corporate takeover machine and microcosm of the U.S. economy. One of America’s largest railroads? Owned by Berkshire. The biggest shareholder in American Express and Coca-Cola? Berkshire, too.
Mr. Buffett amassed a Midas-like personal fortune, valued at about $168 billion, and along the way became the avuncular avatar of American-style capitalism who was called upon for help by both corporate executives and government officials in the 2008 financial crisis.
That unparalleled success earned Mr. Buffett millions of admirers around the world. Tens of thousands of them were on hand at Berkshire’s annual meeting in Omaha on Saturday when he declared he finally planned to step down as chief executive.
His announcement was greeted with surprise and then minutes of thundering applause from shareholders — many of whom became millionaires by owning Berkshire stock and hang onto his every financial aphorism.
“I tell people everything I know about investing I learned from Warren Buffett,” Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who was in the crowd, said in an interview after Mr. Buffett’s announcement.
Mr. Buffett has acknowledged that his enormous fortune owes no small debt to pure luck. As he has put it, he won “the ovarian lottery” by being born in the United States, when stock markets were primed to create one of the biggest economic booms in modern history.
He learned about stock picking from a pioneer of value investing, Benjamin Graham, who was his professor at Columbia University. With crucial advice from Charles T. Munger, a fellow Nebraskan who became his longtime business partner, Mr. Buffett turned Berkshire, which he bought control of in 1965, into the best-possible argument for the discipline.
But few lived and breathed the discipline as he did, reading corporate balance sheets for research — and fun — from dawn to dusk.
Mr. Buffett then put that knowledge to work in several ways. Berkshire bought a vast array of successful businesses, including See’s Candy, Fruit of the Loom and the private jet service NetJets. But the most transformative were the acquisitions of insurers like National Indemnity and Geico, which sat on premiums that customers paid but hadn’t yet claimed.
That cash, known as the “float,” became the first financial engine of Mr. Buffett’s deal machine. He used that money, along with profits from the company’s other businesses, to buy what is now a collection of 189 companies. Among the biggest are the BNSF railroad, acquired in 2010 for about $26 billion; and the electricity producer Berkshire Hathaway Energy, purchased in 2000 for $2 billion that was then expanded via its own acquisitions.
As of March 31, that cash pile, which Mr. Buffett has called his “elephant gun,” was nearly $348 billion.
Those who have sat across from Mr. Buffett at negotiating tables over the years have said that he is friendly and courteous — but unyielding when it comes to the numbers. When he is involved, rounds of haggling over price are not in the cards; he is ready to walk away.
“Warren is the most disciplined investor and the clearest thinker I’ve ever known,” said Byron Trott of the merchant bank BDT & MSD, who as a Goldman Sachs deal maker became one of the few bankers Mr. Buffett said he trusted. “His ability to distill complexity into clarity, and to lead with humility and conviction, is unmatched.”
Mr. Buffett also used Berkshire’s cash to buy an array of stocks, with a portfolio that includes American Express, Bank of America, Coke, Chevron and — in one of his most profitable investments — Apple. For those companies, Berkshire’s ownership has tended to be the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of approval.
And with Berkshire’s huge balance sheet and Mr. Buffett’s unparalleled control, the conglomerate has been able to swoop in at opportune times, buying when others must sell.
Mr. Buffett has been “an extraordinary investor in American Express and a personal friend to me,” Stephen Squeri, the chief executive of American Express, said after the Berkshire announcement.
Another key to his success was holding onto investments for ages — “our favorite holding period is forever,” he has said — letting returns compound again and again, a process that he has compared to a snowball rolling downhill. (A biography that Mr. Buffett cooperated with, but later critiqued, is named after the phenomenon.)
Berkshire’s other advantage for its investors is that it charges no fees, unlike mutual funds or hedge funds. In fact, Mr. Buffett has criticized the size of the fees charged by Wall Street vehicles.
That said, Mr. Buffett has admitted that he made plenty of mistakes over the years. One was passing up opportunities to invest early in technology giants like Amazon and Microsoft, whose businesses he said he didn’t understand at the time.
Still, despite several periods of underperformance, especially in recent years, Mr. Buffett’s track record is astounding. According to his calculations, Berkshire gained 5,502,284 percent from 1964 through 2024, compared with the S&P 500’s 39,054 percent over the same period. His average annual gain was 19.9 percent, while the S&P’s was 10.4 percent.
Mr. Buffett’s approach has inspired countless other financiers, including Mr. Ackman and the mutual fund mogul Mario Gabelli. (Others have sought to copy it more directly, including Sardar Biglari, whose own financial vehicle, Biglari Holdings, shares Berkshire’s initials, website design and investing focus.)
Yet Mr. Buffett transcended business renown and attained actual celebrity, drawing on a folksy Nebraska persona that eschewed the usual trappings of plutocratic wealth. Fans make pilgrimages to his longtime house in Omaha and favorably cite his preferences for mainstream products like Cherry Coke, Dairy Queen Blizzards and See’s fudge. (All, notably, are associated with Berkshire.)
He also became known in pop culture, via cameo appearances on television shows including “All My Children” and “The Office.”
He poked fun at what he saw as the failing of the business world and Wall Street, in particular, regularly deriding professional brokers and traders for turning the markets into a “gambling parlor” that could lure average investors into financial ruin.
He took a more serious stand against Wall Street’s excesses in 1991 when as a major shareholder of Salomon Brothers, he was forced to bail out the investment bank after a trading scandal. It was a low moment in Mr. Buffett’s career.
Called to testify before Congress about Salomon, Mr. Buffett delivered a steely message to the firm’s employees: “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”
His fame also gave him unique sway in Washington, adding weight to his pronouncements on political and fiscal issues. Mr. Ackman said that policymakers also closely followed Mr. Buffett’s comments and annual letters, and acted on his ideas like treating stock options for executives as a corporate expense.
Though a Democrat who endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and whose name graced an Obama-era proposal for higher taxes on the wealthy, Mr. Buffett advised presidents from both parties. That was most visible in 2008, when he was beseeched by corporate executives and the George W. Bush administration to help the global financial system from melting down.
Mr. Buffett eventually agreed to invest billions in Goldman Sachs and General Electric, moves that Mr. Ackman compared with J.P. Morgan’s efforts to save banks early in the 20th century. True to form, however, he charged both companies a then-astronomical interest rate of 10 percent — a burden executives have said they were willing to pay to gain his imprimatur and survive.
“Warren Buffett represents everything that is good about American capitalism and America itself,” Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said after Saturday’s announcement.
While the future of Berkshire appears financially solid, with Mr. Ackman calling the company “the Rock of Gibraltar,” longtime Buffett followers say that it may not retain its seemingly mythical status without its chief architect.
Berkshire’s next chief executive, Gregory Abel, is regarded as an excellent operator of businesses and a savvy deal maker, and Mr. Buffett hired Todd Combs and Ted Weschler as high-level investment executives more than a decade ago.
To Lawrence Cunningham, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware and a shareholder, Mr. Buffett has “given Berkshire the best possible chance for the next chapter.”
But other investors worry that the company will become a bit less special, and won’t revolve around the stock picking that put it on the map. Bill Smead, whose investment firm owns Berkshire stock and who attended this year’s annual meeting, said the conglomerate has already become less ambitious, eschewing potentially transformative deals.
“It’s the end of an era,” Mr. Smead said.
Layoffs have continued with another tech company saying it was cutting people to enable it to use more artificial intelligence.
Groupon announced in a security filing this month that it will cut up to 400 jobs, or nearly 25% of its worldwide workforce, as part of a broader restructuring plan to make the platform AI-native. The Chicago company plans to carry out the layoffs in the coming months.
Earlier the company’s Chief Executive Officer Dušan Šenkypl had said the company “fell short of our expectations” last quarter.
Since 2022, more than 800,000 tech workers have been laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts.
The surge in pink slips started in 2023, when companies that had gone on hiring sprees during the COVID-19 pandemic began to cut back. From January to April this year, U.S. tech employers announced 85,411 job cuts, up 33% from the same period last year, according to global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Groupon said in the filing that the decision to shift toward an AI-based company is to “better deliver on our mission, serving both customers and merchants.”
The company said the layoffs will cost it as much as $13 million, but save it more than $20 million per year.
This announcement comes as many e-commerce companies are shifting their business models to AI to reduce costs by automating many roles.
Artificial intelligence has also triggered fierce competition for top talent and is also fueling tens of thousands of layoffs this year. The result is that the class divide is widening in Silicon Valley as a tiny group of employees are landing unprecedented packages for AI skills, while many others struggle to find work.
The have-nots are doing everything that used to guarantee great jobs — refreshing resumes, optimizing LinkedIn profiles and doing interviews — but companies are much more picky these days. The tech jobless are rethinking their lives. Some are taking pay cuts, while others are leaving tech. Some are going back to study or launch startups. Some have retired.
Groupon shares, which have fallen 27% over the last 12 months, slipped 1% on Thursday to $21.20.
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC has filed renewal applications with the Federal Communications Commission “under protest” after an order mandating a years-early review of the network’s eight television station licenses.
The criticism was part of the network’s applications for the FCC review, which were filed ahead of a deadline Thursday. In an objection to the early renewal, Disney’s New York station WABC called the FCC order “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional” and said it was “legally indefensible.”
“The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades,” the station wrote in its filing. “And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The order has no legitimate purpose.”
The licenses for the eight ABC-owned TV stations, including KABC in Los Angeles, were originally scheduled for renewal between 2028 and 2031.
The FCC order came shortly after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow” days before a gunman tried to breach the White House Correspondents’ Assn. gala last month that President Trump attended.
Trump has frequently threatened to have TV station licenses pulled when he is unhappy with their coverage, but the order is the first time the government has acted on his wishes, sparking anger from free speech advocates. The FCC has said the order is part of an investigation into whether Disney’s diversity and inclusion policies violate federal law and the agency’s rules against “unlawful discrimination.”
In its response, WABC said the “only plausible reason” to issue the order was to “punish the station for speech the government does not like.”
“The ultimate injury here is not to the station or its parent company. It is to the public,” WABC wrote. “When a broadcaster must weigh regulatory retaliation before making editorial decisions, the public loses access to journalism that is free from government influence.”
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement Thursday that Disney filed its applications to renew its broadcast licenses only after the company was told its previous answers were “disingenuous, deficient and improper.”
“Contrary to Disney’s claim that the FCC called in their broadcast licenses for early renewal for no reason, the record shows something very different,” Carr said. “Broadcast licensees have a unique obligation to operate in the public interest. The FCC will follow the facts and law wherever they may lead.”
FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, the panel’s only Democrat who has backed Disney in its fight, cheered the Burbank media and entertainment company’s filing, saying in a post on X that she was “glad to see them expose the FCC’s actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”
Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.
Andrew here. Warning: If you bet on prediction markets about things you could know about from your work, it may be insider trading. That’s the lesson from new charges against an employee of Google.
Also, Jamie Dimon is thinking about spending $20 billion on acquisitions; we go through some possible targets. And take our quiz about the U.F.C. fight scheduled to take place at the White House.
Gaming prediction markets
In the public’s view, prediction markets are a way to bet on the N.B.A. playoffs, the Texas Senate race or what Costco executives will say on their next earnings call.
They’re also often seen as a hive of insider trading, a view reinforced by charges filed on Wednesday against a Google employee who made more than $1 million on Polymarket. The case raises more questions about how these platforms are policed — and who should do the policing.
What happened: The Google employee, Michele Spagnuolo (who used the handle AlphaRaccoon), was accused of betting on what people were searching for on Google — wagers he was sure to win because he had access to internal search data.
“Spagnuolo correctly predicted virtually all of the outcomes on these positions,” the Commodity Futures Trading Commission wrote in its complaint.
A Google representative said in a statement that using confidential information for making these kinds of bets was “a serious breach of our policies.”
Spagnuolo isn’t the only person charged with insider trading on Polymarket. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan last month accused Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. Special Forces soldier, of betting on the capture of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, an operation he participated in.
Insider trading is an increasing problem for prediction markets. Polymarket has faced significant scrutiny because its unregulated offshore platform has long made it easy to bet anonymously. (Kalshi, which is regulated in the U.S., has also suffered from insider trading.)
Polymarket has started clamping down on that practice, according to The Information — though some longtime users have chafed at those efforts. “Polymarket will go down the drain if they make KYC mandatory,” one user wrote on the company’s Discord discussion forum, referring to “know your customer” practices.
What are policymakers doing? Critics have accused the C.F.T.C., the primary American regulator of prediction markets, of failing to adequately police the industry. (Mike Selig, the commission’s chairman, told ABC News that his agency actively patrolled for wrongdoing.)
Some lawmakers are seeking to crack down on insider trading, including Representative James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who leads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and several bipartisan groups of senators.
Why it matters: Prediction markets have become big businesses. (Kalshi was most recently valued at $22 billion.) But a growing perception that they’re rife with cheating could threaten their popularity.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to fund U.S. drone companies. Shares in Unusual Machines, a drone start-up in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor and advisory board member, are soaring in premarket trading after The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported on the potential investments. (The Times hasn’t independently confirmed the report.) The deals, aimed at bolstering domestic production, are still in the negotiation stage — equity stakes are a possibility — as the Pentagon vets the companies, The Journal adds.
Investors brace for Thursday’s inflation data. The Personal Consumption Expenditures report for April, which will be closely watched by the Fed, is expected to show on Thursday that headline inflation hit a three-year high of 3.9 percent. The wartime energy spike is a big culprit, and that’s likely to tie the Fed’s hands on interest rates. Lisa Cook, a Fed governor whom President Trump has tried to fire, is the latest policymaker to say that there’s even a rate increase in the cards.
Jensen Huang reportedly agrees to join the board of a Chinese university. Huang, the Nvidia C.E.O., is expected to be the latest U.S. business leader to join the advisory board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, The Financial Times reports. Tim Cook, Apple’s departing C.E.O., is the chairman, and Michael Dell and Elon Musk are members. (Nvidia is trying to jump-start business in China as the Washington-Beijing trade war continues.) Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator, quickly seized on the Huang news, calling it “a massive scandal!!!!” on social media, and a national security risk.
What might Dimon buy?
Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, is sitting on a pile of cash and says he’s open to a deal. He even put a number on it: up to $20 billion.
While that’s not a big sum relative to the bank’s assets, it got us thinking: Where could JPMorgan, whose last major acquisition was First Republic during the 2023 regional-banking crisis, go fishing for a company to buy? Brian O’Keefe asked Mike Mayo, a banking analyst at Wells Fargo.
Here are three possibilities:
Wealth management. Driven by solid margins and lucrative high-net-worth customers, this area of finance has experienced an M.&A. boom in recent years. (The First Republic deal already bolstered JPMorgan’s wealth-advisory ranks.) Such a move would tick a lot of boxes, Mayo said, adding, “It could be a high-end private bank, it could be kind of a mass-affluent brokerage firm, it could be wealth advisory.”
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Mary Erdoes, who runs JPMorgan’s wealth management division, told analysts in February that her unit had reviewed 25 potential deals last year and passed on all of them.
Payments. JPMorgan has invested heavily in new payment platforms, including in JPM Coin, a digital token it has tested with Coinbase and Mastercard. The bank handles between $5 trillion and $10 trillion in transactions daily, Mayo said. “There could be more opportunities to enhance the efficiency, the effectiveness, the timeliness or the geographic reach in the payments area,” he added.
Digital banking. Dimon recently singled out Revolut, the British banking app that is plotting expansion into the U.S., as an emerging competitive threat. “To the extent that an acquisition could help JPMorgan become the next Revolut outside the United States, that would seem to be attractive,” Mayo noted.
There are some big asterisks to consider. Because of its size, JPMorgan would most likely be barred from buying another U.S. lender on antitrust grounds. For that reason, Mayo thinks that a deal, if there is one, would probably happen abroad.
Dimon himself is being coy. The bank may have amassed ample capital for acquisitions, but “it’s not burning a hole in our pocket at all,” Dimon said on Wednesday at an investor conference. “If it sits there for a while, no problem,” he added.
Dimon did not suggest any potential targets on Wednesday.
Here are some guesses:
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Aberdeen Group, Invesco or Julius Baer in wealth management?
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Revolut is too big, but how about Wise or Toast in payments?
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Or what about Monzo or Bunq, fintech banks that have grown rapidly in Europe?
Meta will charge for its chatbot
Meta will begin charging customers for access to its A.I.-powered chatbot, a big change for a company best known for its free products — and the latest sign that even deep-pocketed companies are wrestling with the enormous cost of artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, we looked at how companies were reining in the costs of consuming A.I., including by switching to cheaper models. Meta’s move shows that the companies supplying A.I. models are also reckoning with ballooning costs, and seeking revenue to make up for those losses.
Meta is spending a fortune on A.I. Last month the company increased its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to as high as $145 billion, and Meta’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, said it would spend at least $600 billion on A.I. infrastructure in the next few years.
Some investors have looked skeptically on that plan. The company’s stock is down 2.3 percent this year.
Meta will use paid subscriptions to offset some of its A.I. investment. The basic tier of the chatbot, Meta One Plus, will be $7.99 per month. A premium version, Meta One Premium, will cost $19.99. From Bloomberg, which reported the subscription news earlier:
Meta has long argued that its A.I. investments are already paying off in the form of highly targeted and efficient advertising, which is improved thanks to A.I. models. But the company is also looking for other ways to recoup its A.I. spending, and consumer chatbot subscriptions have become popular with several other A.I. competitors, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI. Both rivals offer similarly priced subscription tiers.
The company has sought to expand its subscription business, testing plans for WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. It has also tried to cut costs in other corners of its business. This month, Meta laid off 10 percent of its employee base, about 8,000 workers.
Investors, eager to see revenue gains from A.I., cheered Meta’s subscription-chatbot plan. The company’s stock price was up 3.7 percent at the market close on Wednesday.
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Elsewhere, shares in the software maker Snowflake are soaring in premarket trading on Thursday after it reported strong quarterly results that suggested that A.I. agents weren’t clobbering its core subscription business. Salesforce’s analyst call on Wednesday, however, renewed fears that this sector was still vulnerable to A.I. disruption.
Quiz: U.F.C. on the South Lawn
This question comes from a recent Times article. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)
President Trump is getting ready to celebrate his 80th birthday — and America’s 250th — with an evening of mixed martial arts. Preparations are underway to host Ultimate Fighting Championship matches in an octagon on the White House’s South Lawn on June 14. Construction of the temporary arena, along with a 90-foot-tall arch known as “The Claw,” featuring LED lights and audio equipment, began this week.
U.F.C. plans to spend around $60 million on the event, said Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of TKO Group Holdings, U.F.C.’s parent company, on a recent earnings call. (He added that U.F.C. would lose about $30 million on the event but that it would be “an investment for the long term.”)
The expenses include about $700,000 to repair the lawn after the fight, Dana White, the U.F.C. president and chief executive, told Sports Business Journal.
How many people will the temporary arena hold for the U.F.C. event at the White House?
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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“SpaceX-Tesla Merger Is ‘Only a Matter of When,’ Early Investor Says” (Bloomberg)
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Shares in the European food-delivery company Delivery Hero are down sharply on Thursday after Uber, which is pursuing a takeover bid for the company, raised its stake to nearly 37 percent. (WSJ)
Politics, policy and regulation
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The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA over soaring World Cup ticket prices. (WSJ)
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Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said he would impose a 100 percent tax on payouts to state residents from the $1.8 billion fund tied to the Justice Department’s settlement with President Trump. (Politico)
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