Warren Buffett speaks at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska on May 4, 2024.
CNBC
OMAHA, Nebraska. Warren Buffett revealed that he sold all of his Berkshire Hathaway shares. Paramount bet at a loss.
“I was 100% responsible for Paramount’s decision,” Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting. “It was 100% my decision and we sold it all and lost a lot of money.”
Berkshire owned 63.3 million Paramount shares at the end of 2023, according to the latest filings, after cutting the position by about a third in the fourth quarter of last year.
The Omaha-based conglomerate first bought a non-voting stake in Paramount’s Class B shares in the first quarter of 2022. Since then, the media company has fallen on hard times, with dividend cuts, falling earnings and the departure of its CEO. The stock is down 44% in 2022 and another 12% in 2023.
Paramount
Just this week, Sony Pictures and private equity firm Apollo Global Management sent a letter to Paramount’s board of directors expressing interest in acquiring the company for approximately $26 billion. The firm was also in takeover talks with David Ellison’s Skydance Media.
Paramount has been struggling in recent years, suffering from declining revenue as more consumers turn away from traditional pay TV and its streaming services continue to lose money. The stock is back in the red this year, down nearly 13%.
Buffett said Paramount’s boondoggle has made him think more deeply about what people do in their free time. He previously said there were too many players in the streaming industry trying to get money from viewers, leading to a brutal price war.