Warren Buffett recently shocked Berkshire Hathaway loyalists with news that he’ll retire at the age of 94 after decades as history’s most successful value investor.
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One of only a handful of centi-billionaires, Forbes has estimated Buffett’s personal fortune at $168.2 billion, just four spots behind Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, whose reinvented image as a MAGA firebrand and federal budget hatchet man has impacted Buffett — but only indirectly.
According to Business Insider, Buffett was active in politics prior to the Trump era, but had a change of heart that seems to have foreshadowed Musk’s current self-induced corporate toxicity.
At his annual shareholder meeting in 2022, Buffett stated he was staying out of politics because his company would suffer regardless of his position. “Instead of ‘Warren Buffett says,’ it will say, you know, ‘Berkshire Hathaway,’ or ‘Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway,’” he said. “…So, I’ve decidedly backed off, I don’t want to say anything that’ll get attributed, basically to Berkshire, and have somebody else bear the consequences of what I talk about.”
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In denouncing protests that led to vandalism of Tesla vehicles and property, Musk seemed to lack Buffett’s awareness that the public could not or would not separate a company from a controversial leader, even as Musk’s political ascent made him what Newsweek called Tesla’s “most destructive asset.”
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Beyond his own Tesla stock (TSLA) — which is down 25% since President Donald Trump took office and was off roughly 40% at the height of Musk’s rampage through the federal workforce — Musk can’t take credit or blame for the stock market’s performance. Analysts are more likely to cite President Donald Trump’s tariff policy as the catalyst for the S&P 500’s nosedive than Musk’s purported mission to reduce government waste. Either way, the DOGE era has not been unkind to Buffett.
The S&P 500 was down more than 3% on the year as of May 2 — a sharp recovery from its ghastly sub-5,000 April lows. However, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway stock (BRK.B) gained 20% over the same period, dramatically outperforming the market.
In May 2024, Investor’s Business Daily reported that Musk urged Buffett to add Tesla to Berkshire’s massive stock portfolio. His pitch was that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology would reduce accidents so dramatically that insurers like Berkshire-owned Geico would go out of business.
