Warren Buffett on parenting, horse racing betting and why he stopped talking politics

(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can subscribe here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)

Warren Buffett and Becky Quick covered too many topics in interviews that aired on a two-hour special on CNBC Tuesday night for me to write a convincing summary.

“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” included discussions of his inability to find a big company for Berkshire Hathaway to buy as its cash pile approaches $400 billion, new CEO Greg Abel, the future and past of his company, the difficulty of giving away billions of dollars and the invaluable role of luck in its success. This is not an exhaustive list.

However, here are a few brief excerpts and quotes that caught my attention.

• Buffett explains what to do to find good companies: “It doesn’t take a genius, and it certainly doesn’t take Greek symbols or anything like that to understand what a company is worth… If (Greg Abel) had dropped out of high school like some of our managers did, he would still be as smart as he is.”
• Buffett at Sunday’s board meeting when directors considered his recommendation to name Greg Abel as the next CEO: “(Director) Steve Burke finally said, you know, ‘We don’t need to sit around for three months and look at our navel or anything about this. This is the right decision.’ And so they voted to do it. »

• Buffett on the future of Berkshire: “It will always move a little, but it will mostly expand. Sometimes there will be things that disappear… We will have companies that, in 50 or 100 years, will not be viable in the economy of this world. But we will have many more that have developed over the years. And we will be able to go wherever the country goes, and we can go there with capital.”
• Why being a board member of a company is the best job in the world:

• Why he stopped betting on horses when he was in high school: “One of the first things you learn in horse racing is that you can beat a race, but you can’t beat races… I had a few horses in mind, but I lost money in the first race. And then I did the stupidest thing you could imagine… I kept betting on every race. And when I went home, I was $50 down, that was all I took with me me…
  I went to Howard Johnson’s and had a few dollars left. I bought myself a fancy meal and sat there thinking about it and thinking about it on the train. And that was the end of horse racing. »
• Buffett on running Berkshire for decades:

• Be a teacher on the side: “I loved it. It appealed to my teaching style and I liked my own ideas…I just had fun teaching. And I still do, except I ran out of gas a few years ago.”

• Advice for new parents: “The only advice I give to newlyweds is to never use sarcasm around your kids. I mean, it might be sarcasm to you, but it’s a slap in the back that they’ll never forget.”

• To be kind: “I would just ask anyone to challenge me to find out if being kind could hurt them in some way, and if the happiness of the world wouldn’t be better if… every morning he said to himself: ‘Good and bad things will happen to me today, but I can be kind to anyone.'”

Even though the special was two hours long, there were more interviews than time, forcing the producer to make difficult decisions.

Here for Warren Buffett Watch Readers is a clip she wanted to include in the final cut. Buffett explains why he hasn’t spoken out on politics in recent years:

Buffett gave his three adult children the extremely difficult speech of unanimously deciding how to give away his enormous net worth after his death.

When she was in Omaha to interview their father, Becky sat down with Howard, Susan and Peter Buffett to talk about that mission, their own philanthropic efforts and what it was like growing up in Buffett’s famously unassuming household.

A long portion aired in the special, but here is the entire conversation:

In this excerpt, they remember how their father was “smart” by giving them an allowance:

In his Inside the wealth In a report published Wednesday in “Squawk Box,” Robert Frank explained why Buffett’s children might have the toughest job in philanthropy:

“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” will air again on CNBC on Sunday, January 18 at 3 p.m. ET and Monday, January 19 at 7 a.m. ET.

Some links may require a subscription:

BRK.A stock price: $740,750

BRK.B stock price: $493.29

BRK.BP/E (TTM): 15.78

Berkshire market capitalization: $1,064,618,103,867

Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (up 10.9% from June 30)

Excluding rail cash and subtraction of Treasury bills payable: $354.3 billion (up 4.3% compared to June 30)

No Berkshire share buybacks since May 2024.

(All figures are as of publication date unless otherwise noted)

Top holdings of Berkshire publicly traded stocks in the United States and Japan, by market value, based on latest closing prices.

Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as shown in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing dated November 14, 2025, except:

The complete list of holdings and current market values ​​is available on CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

Please send me any questions or comments about the newsletter at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)

If you are not already subscribed to this newsletter, you can sign up here.

Additionally, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. They are collected here on the Berkshire website.

— Alex Crippen, editor-in-chief, Warren Buffett Watch