Famed investor Warren Buffett has long been a fan of Amazon but never invested in the tech giant, until now. His company Berkshire Hathaway finally took the plunge and bought shares in the Seattle tech giant, except it wasn’t Buffett himself who made the deal.
Berkshire Hathaway has been buying up Amazon recently, but it was “one of the fellows in the office that manage money” who made the purchases, Buffett told CNBC, a likely reference to investment managers Todd Combs and Ted Weschler.
Buffett has been vocal about not investing in Amazon, which has become a financial juggernaut with a stock sitting close to $2,000 per share. In 2017, he had a one-word answer for why he didn’t invest in Amazon in the early days: “stupidity.”
“I was impressed with Jeff (Bezos) early,” Buffett said at the time. “I never thought he could pull off what he did. The remarkable thing about Jeff, is he’s done it in two industries almost simultaneously that really don’t have that much connection. I’ve never seen any person develop two really important industries at the same time.”
Missing out Amazon hasn’t exactly hurt Buffett, the world’s fourth richest person, per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $88.7 billion. He trails only Bernard Arnault, chair of leading luxury goods maker LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Bezos.
Buffett has been averse to investing in tech stocks, with the exception of Apple. Berkshire Hathaway owns roughly 250 million shares in the tech giant, valued at roughly $52.7 billion, per a CNBC tracker of the company’s portfolio. When asked by Yahoo Finance this week about not investing in Amazon, as well as fellow Seattle-area tech giant Microsoft, Buffett responded “those just aren’t my games.”
Per the CNBC portfolio tracker, Berkshire Hathaway’s biggest holdings are in Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Coca Cola and Heinz.
