Billionaire Warren Buffett’s firm Berkshire Hathaway has been purchasing shares in Amazon, and Buffett said he has underestimated Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to a report by Bloomberg. Berkshire is a $531 billion company with businesses ranging from Geico to Dairy Queen.
The share purchases will show up in the company’s regulatory filing later in the month. When asked who made the purchase, Buffett told CNBC it was “one of the fellows in the office that manage money,” in reference to the company’s investment managers, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler.
Buffett has given credit to both men for purchases of both airline stocks and Apple, and said the men help in more than just picking stocks. Buffett is 88 and his longtime partner in business Charles Munger is 95. Both men praise the younger set and Munger says they give the firm “younger eyes.”
Amazon stock has been performing well; it’s up 27 percent this year as of Thursday (May 2) and on Friday morning it was up 2.2 percent. In the CNBC interview, Buffett said he was a “a fan” of Amazon and “an idiot for not buying” shares previously.
The billionaire has stayed away from most tech-related stocks over the course of his tenure, explaining that he didn’t feel like he understood the industry well enough.
However, he did invest $10 billion in IBM in 2011, a move that ended with losses to the company. The firm sold most of the stock off by 2018.
Berkshire Hathaway, in 2016, bought shares in Apple and built the stake it holds to upwards of $50 billion, and the company bought Apple when it wasn’t at its cheapest. The same thing holds true for Amazon.
Amazon closed at $1,900.82 on Thursday and Apple at $209.15. At the end of 2018, Berkshire’s Apple investment was valued at more than the cost of acquiring the shares.
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