Nobody expected Warren Buffett to take the stage at the first Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting since stepping down as CEO. But in a quick interlude, the Oracle of Omaha gave an interview to CNBC live on stage. Here’s what we learned.
Buffett sat down with CNBC’s Becky Quick at the 2026 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in his hometown of Omaha over the weekend. The conversation covered the company’s massive US$380 billion cash hoard, the bull market, AI deepfakes, Jerome ‘Jay’ Powell, and what he wants his shareholders to do next.
Buffett, now 95, offered the kind of unguarded reflections that only come when there is no longer a quarterly earnings call to anchor the language to. Buffett took the microphone briefly from his seat to praise his successor. He said the board “couldn’t have made a better decision” and that Abel is “doing everything I did and then some”.
Here are the takeaways for investors.
Prices are too high on the market right now
Berkshire is sitting on roughly US$380 billion in cash. Asked whether the size of that cash pile reflected an inability to find anything worth buying, Buffett did not soften the answer.
“It isn’t our ideal surrounding area or environment, I should say, in terms of deploying cash for Berkshire,” he said. The framing was telling. The infrastructure of Berkshire — the management, the structure, the autonomy — is in place. What is missing is opportunity.
Quick pressed him on whether the issue was simply that prices are too high. He answered with a single word: “Yeah.”
Buffett isn’t bearish. Instead he sees a market in which the businesses he understands are priced beyond what their cash flows justify. It’s a call for patience rather than panic.
The market has tilted from the church to the casino
Buffett’s most quotable quote (which he’s always so good at) came when CNBC’s Becky Quick asked him for a macro read on the current environment.
“It feels like, you know, I’ve compared the markets to a church with a casino attached. And people can move between the church and casino. And I would say there are more people in the church and more people in the casino, but the casino has gotten very attractive to people. If you’re buying one day options, or selling them, I mean that is — that’s not investing, it’s not speculating, it’s gambling. Just totally.”
His broader point is not that investing has become impossible. It is that the speculative end of the market has grown so loud that it is distorting prices for the long-term investor.
“That doesn’t mean that investing is terrible,” he added. “It does mean that prices for an awful lot of things will look very silly.”
“The best opportunities arrive when no one is answering the phone”
Asked what would constitute a “juicy year” (a phrase Buffett used to describe the five or so genuinely strong years he has had in 60 years of investing) he gave perhaps the most actionable answer of the interview.
“It’s a phone call. In many cases,” he said, before expanding on what conditions produce those calls. “The most likely time to buy things is when nobody else will answer their phones. You know, everybody else talks about their wonderful trading departments and everything. Just try them out. Sometimes, when markets are collapsing, they don’t answer the phones.”
For Australian investors, the message is one Peter Switzer has long made central to his approach: the best returns come to those who are buying when others are selling, and who have cash and conviction at the moment when both are scarce.
Buffett more concerned about AI deepfakes than about AI itself
The annual meeting itself opened with a deepfake of Buffett that the audience initially mistook for the real man taking a question from the rafters. Asked about it in the interview, Buffett’s concern was specific and political rather than technological.
“The worst thing would be to have a really good imitator of any president that came along,” he said. “What you can do — well, if you convince people to lend you money, you shouldn’t be borrowing it. It’s scary, and it’s particularly scary when you have nine countries or so with nuclear weapons and people working on it.”
His framing put the deepfake question alongside Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, which Quick raised herself — the original example of mass-mediated misinformation triggering real-world panic. The point Buffett landed on was simple: the technology is not the problem. The capacity it creates for malicious actors to impersonate decision-makers is.
“We haven’t dealt with this. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
The “Jay” Powell endorsement, and a warning about US fiscal credibility
Buffett used the interview to reaffirm his support for outgoing Fed Chair Jeroome “Jay” Powell, who held his last FOMC meeting as chairman last week but will remain on the Fed board for the foreseeable future. Asked about Powell, Buffett was direct.
“I’ll feel better when he’s there better than when he’s not. I mean, you know, I just felt better when Volcker was there.”
Buffett has long held up Paul Volcker, the Fed Chair who broke the inflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the standard for central bank credibility. Aligning Powell with Volcker is high praise indeed.
But the more pointed comment came when Buffett turned to the broader question of US fiscal credibility. Asked about current US inflation running at around 3 per cent, he gave a measured answer about the manageable nature of the present cycle, then pivoted to a sharper warning.
“We have a lot of control over whether rates may go up a half a point or down a half a point, but what we may have less control over is whether they go up 50 points.”
Staying true to his golden rule
Quick gave Buffett the last word, asking what he would say to the shareholders and partners who had followed him for decades. His answer was characteristically simple and direct.
“The number one rule I give them is just — give them the golden rule. Do unto others. I’m not a religious guy, but nobody said it any better in a couple thousand years than that.”
From a legendary investor who built one of the most valuable corporations in the world over six decades, the closing instruction to his shareholders was not about portfolio construction, asset allocation, or where to find the next compounder. It was about how to behave.
“It doesn’t cost you anything. In fact, it’s reflected in better behavior [sic] toward you. So I mean, it’s a very selfish sort of thing in one sense, but I’ve never seen anybody that’s unhappy that behaved that way.”
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