Business

How Warren Buffett Changed the Way Investors Thought of Investing

Published

7 months ago

May 4, 2025

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.

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Business

Video: What the Jobs Report Tells Us About the Economy

Published

9 hours ago

November 21, 2025

Press Room

Video: What the Jobs Report Tells Us About the Economy

new video loaded: What the Jobs Report Tells Us About the Economy

What does the September jobs report, delayed by six weeks because of the government shutdown, say about the economy? Lydia DePillis, our economics reporter, describes how the report, which was better than expected, comes at a moment of deep uncertainty.

By Lydia DePillis, Claire Hogan, Stephanie Swart, Gabriel Blanco and Jacqueline Gu

November 21, 2025

Business

Consumers are spending $22 more a month on average for streaming services. Why do prices keep rising?

Published

11 hours ago

November 21, 2025

Press Room

Consumers are spending more a month on average for streaming services. Why do prices keep rising?

Six years ago, when San José author Katie Keridan joined Disney+, the cost was $6.99 a month, giving her family access to hundreds of movies like “The Lion King” and thousands of TV episodes, including Star Wars series “The Mandalorian,” with no commercials.

But since then, the price of an ad-free streaming plan has ballooned to $18.99 a month. That was the last straw for 42-year-old Keridan, whose husband canceled Disney+ last month.

“It was getting to where every year, it was going up, and in this economy, every dollar matters, and so we really had to sit down and take a hard look at how many streaming services are we paying for,” Keridan said. “What’s the return on enjoyment that we’re getting as a family from the streaming services? And how do we factor that into a budget to make sure that all of our bills are paid at the end of a month?”

It’s a conversation more people who subscribe to streaming services are having amid an uncertain economy.

Once sold at discounted rates, many platforms have raised prices at a clip consumers say frustrates them. The entertainment companies, under pressure from investors to bolster profits, have justified upping the cost of their plans to help pay for the premium content they provide. But some viewers aren’t buying it.

Customers are paying $22 more for subscription video streaming services than they were a year ago, according to consulting firm Deloitte. As of October, U.S. households on average shelled out $70 a month, compared with $48 a year ago, Deloitte said.

About 70% of consumers surveyed last month said they were frustrated the entertainment services that they subscribe to are raising prices and about a third said they have cut back on subscriptions in the last three months due to financial concerns, according to Deloitte.

“There’s a frustration, just in terms of both apathy, but also from a perspective that they just don’t think it’s worth the monthly subscription cost because of just fatigue,” said Rohith Nandagiri, managing director at Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Disney+ has raised prices on its streaming service nearly every year since it launched in 2019 at $6.99 a month. The company bumped prices on ad-free plans by $1 in 2021, followed by $3 increases in 2022 and 2023, a $2 price raise in 2024 and, most recently, a $3 increase this year to $18.99 a month.

Disney isn’t the only streamer to raise prices. Other companies, including Netflix, HBO Max and Apple TV also hiked prices on many of their subscription plans this year.

Some analysts say streamers are charging more because many services are adding live sports, the rights to which can cost millions of dollars. Streaming services for years have also given consumers access to big budget TV shows and original movies, and as production costs rise, they expect viewers to pay more, too.

But some consumers like Keridan have a different perspective. As much as some streaming platforms are adding new content like live sports, they are also choosing not to renew some big budget shows like “Star Wars: The Acolyte.” Keridan, a Marvel and Star Wars fan, said she mainly watched Disney+ for movies such as “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and shows like “The Mandalorian.” Now she’s going back to watching some programs ad-free on Blu-Ray discs.

While Keridan cut Disney+, her family still subscribes to YouTube Premium and Paramount+. She said she uses YouTube Premium for workout videos instead of paying for a gym membership. Her family enjoys watching Star Trek programs on Paramount+, like the third season of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” Keridan said.

Other consumers are choosing to keep their streaming subscriptions but look for cost savings through cheaper plans with ads, or by bundling services.

“Consumers are more willing today than ever to withstand advertising and for the sake of being able to get content for a lower subscription rate,” said Brent Magid, CEO and president of Minneapolis-based media consulting firm Magid. “We’ve seen that number increase just as people’s budgets have gotten tighter.”

Keridan said she’s already cutting other types of spending in her household in addition to quitting Disney+. The amount of money her family spends on groceries has gone up, and in order to save cash, they’ve cut back on traveling for the year. Typically, Keridan says, they would go on two or three vacations annually, but this year, they will only go to Disneyland in Anaheim.

But even the Happiest Place on Earth hasn’t escaped price hikes.

“Just as the streaming fees have risen, park fees have risen,” Keridan said. “And so it just seems every price of anything is rising these days, and they’re now directly in competition with each other. We can’t keep them all, so we have to make hard cuts.”

Business

Former Google chief accused of spying on employees through account ‘backdoor’

Published

1 day ago

November 20, 2025

Press Room

Former Google chief accused of spying on employees through account ‘backdoor’

When Columbia University law and MBA student Michelle Ritter met former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt in 2020, she said she wanted to pitch a potential investment in a sports tech startup she had been developing.

That dinner blossomed into far more, a romance and business partnership in which she says the 70-year-old billionaire invested in excess of $100 million into a jointly owned tech incubator — before it all fell apart.

Now, Ritter is accusing Schmidt of stealing business out from under her, sexually assaulting her twice during their relationship, and tapping his Google background to hack into her email and online computer files, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

“During their relationship, Schmidt confided that when he worked at Google, he built an insider “backdoor” to Google servers with a team of Google engineers in order to spy on Google employees. Accordingly, the backdoor enabled him to access anyone’s Google account and private information,” the lawsuit says.

Google is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit and is alleged to “knowingly acquiescing in, failing to remedy, and materially assisting the unauthorized access” into Ritter’s accounts despite being provided notice. Schmidt and the company are accused of violating the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, and a section of the state penal code that prohibits wiretapping.

Patricia Glaser, an attorney representing Schmidt, called the lawsuit “yet another desperate and destructive effort to publish false and defamatory statements to escape accountability from an existing arbitration over a business dispute.”

Glaser added: “The claims made here are directly contradicted by her own words … and are just a final Hail Mary to save her from the consequences of her own actions. We are confident that we will prevail on both the specific legal issue enforcing the arbitration and disproving these fabricated pathetic allegations.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The complaint is the latest filing in a legal dispute that stretches back to at least December 2024, when Ritter sought a domestic violence restraining order against Schmidt. She later withdrew it after reaching a financial settlement with Schmidt with whom she had started the high-tech New York incubator with offices in Los Angeles, according to court records.

In her new lawsuit, Ritter alleges that Schmidt has not honored the settlement due to false accusations she was behind a media leak. She is seeking to have the settlement, which requires arbitration of disputes, thrown out.

Schmidt’s attorneys have called her legal filings a “blatant abuse of the judicial system” and a “transparent hit piece intended to smear and defame” Schmidt, according to court records. He is seeking to have the dispute settled in arbitration.

Several records in the case are under seal and many filings are heavily redacted. The lawsuit seeks at least $100 million in damages, with the next hearing set for Dec. 4. She is being represented by the law firm of prominent Los Angeles attorney Skip Miller.

Schmidt served as Google chief executive from 2001 to 2011 and later as the chairman of the Silicon Valley company and its parent, Alphabet Inc., until 2017. He retains shares in parent Alphabet worth about $14 billion giving him a net worth of about $34 billion, according to Forbes. He owns multiple homes in greater Los Angeles.

In the application for the December 2024 restraining order, Ritter alleged she lived in an “absolute digital surveillance system” and that Schmidt had directed affiliates to steal her corporate website, take control of her digital business records and have personal investigators follow her parents, according to a court filing.

The restraining order request also asked the judge to order Schmidt to not assault her “sexually or otherwise.”

The lawsuit filed on Wednesday provides more details about their business ventures and alleges a personal relationship that developed to the point that Schmidt made promises to marry her and have children, despite their 39-year age gap.

The lawsuit states their Steel Perlot venture was a success, with Schmidt investing more than $100 million into the accelerator and its startups in AI, crypto and other industries — prompting Schmidt to wrest control of the venture and its businesses from her.

Media reports suggest otherwise. Forbes has written the venture ran out of money in 2003 and needed millions from Schmidt to meet payroll and other expenses.

The lawsuit alleges that Schmidt became abusive as the relationship progressed and he “forcibly raped” her while on a yacht off the coast of Mexico in November 2021 and had sex with her without her consent during the Burning Man festival in Nevada in August 2023.

Schmidt, who has been married more than 40 years, has been linked romantically in the media with a series of much younger women.

The bitter dispute with Ritter echoes another business disagreement he had with public relations executive Marcy Simon, with whom he had a two-decade relationship that ended in 2014. It also involved a troubled joint business venture, according to a New York Times report. The report did not involve sexual assault claims.

Schmidt has achieved a certain gravitas in Silicon Valley, serving as tech advisor to the Obama administration and the military, testifying about artificial intelligence on Capitol Hill and giving away more than $1 billion in charity.

He’s also a part owner of the Washington Commanders football team and has amassed a real estate portfolio estimated to be worth several hundred million dollars.

Schmidt is reported to have spent $110 million this year on the 56,000-square-foot mansion in Holmby Hills built by the late producer Aaron Spelling. In 2021, he acquired a 15,000-square-foot Bel Air estate previously owned by the Hilton family, where court records indicate Ritter lived at the time she filed the restraining order.

Schmidt earlier this year took a controlling interest in Relativity Space, a Long Beach startup founded in 2015 with the intent to bring 3-D manufacturing to rocketry.

However, it has since shifted its focus and Schmidt indicated in a social media post that his interest may have to do with launching AI data centers into space due to their huge power needs.