If you lost an hour to YouTube last night, take comfort: so did the greatest investor alive. Gregory Zuckerman’s A-hed in Wednesday’s Journal reports that Warren Buffett — 96, recently retired as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) — spends nearly every evening in a recliner in Omaha, in front of an enormous television, watching Glenn Close clips, commercials from the 1950s, Paul Anka videos and speeches by people you’ve never heard of. The man who reads annual reports the way the rest of us scroll has, after dark, an algorithm problem like everyone else. “Warren’s range is broad,” says Sharon Osberg, a close friend who often watches with him. That’s one way to put it.
Broad undersells it. In August, Osberg visited his house and the two of them spent hours on YouTube: a documentary on Roy Cohn, then the Uzbek edition of America’s Got Talent, a channel with 34,500 subscribers (the Journal couldn’t establish whether he’s one). He goes down rabbit holes, then turns up at the office the next morning raving about an amateur rendition of My Way. The recurring themes are the ones that have run through his whole life — show tunes, railroads, the big-band era, Nebraska, early Sinatra from the 1930s — plus Berkshire’s own channel, whose performance he’s proud of. His friends’ running joke is that YouTube’s own executives could learn the site from him. Mornings are CNBC and filings; evenings almost never touch finance.
Which raises the question Zuckerman can’t resist: over the past year or so Berkshire has built a stake in YouTube’s parent, Alphabet (GOOGL), worth about $38 billion. Secret motive? Nah, say the friends — he just likes the clips. Buffett handed over the CEO job in January and still weighs in on investments, so the stake is his call either way. For the record, both names sit in the house books — BRK.B in 22, GOOGL in 28 — held at weight, nothing added, and we don’t own Alphabet because its most famous shareholder has a recliner.
Two to the eighth
The detail that gives him away as not quite like us: he forgot where Turner Classic Movies sat on his cable box, thought for a moment and said “2 to the 8th.” Channel 256. TCM runs 12 Angry Men, a lifelong favorite starring Henry Fonda, another Omaha product; he’s also partial to Bill Murray — a longtime Berkshire shareholder — in Lost in Translation. Charlie Munger, who died in 2023, used to close the day with Seinfeld and a book. These days Buffett uses the platform to visit with Munger, too — pulling up old speeches, a 2018 University of Michigan talk among them — and friends say he still marvels at the wit. “It’s really quite something,” Osberg says of watching him watch Charlie.
Our read
This is Retirement (M10) with a Behavioral lesson stitched in. Look at the shape of his day: a fixed window for the markets and the reading, then a hard stop, then show tunes. The retirees we talk with tend to fail at one of two extremes — the portfolio becomes the evening’s entertainment, checked between innings, or the whole subject gets shoved in a drawer. Buffett’s routine is the middle: give the money its hours, do the work inside them, and spend the evening on something that can’t be marked to market. There’s a quiet estate note in here too — he’s using the platform to spend time with a partner who’s gone, which is its own kind of compounding.
For the books, nothing changes: Berkshire and Alphabet stay at weight, and a nightly YouTube habit isn’t a thesis. The portfolio doesn’t need you at 9 p.m. It needs fifteen minutes with the plan every so often, in daylight — you check the umbrella on a dry day, not when the first drop hits the window.