Warren Buffett says he has sold all of his shares in Paramount Global at a significant loss.
Speaking at the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, his company, today in Omaha, NE, the billionaire investor took full ownership of the bad call. Despite speculation to the contrary, he said, “It was 100% my decision” to invest in Paramount in 2022. “We sold it all and we lost quite a bit of money. That happens in this business.” (Watch a clip of him above.)
As of the end of 2023, Berkshire owned 63.3 million Class B, or non-voting shares, which had a value of about $800 million at the time. The stake, which represented about 10.1% of the company’s equity, helped boost the stock when Buffett initially invested in 2022. He then went on to make public comments criticizing the companies pursuing Netflix in subscription streaming, a cohort that includes Paramount, given the economics of the emerging sector.
Known as the Oracle of Omaha, Buffett has made plenty of missteps over his decades of investing. Owning Paramount stock, Buffett mused, “made me think even further … harder, even, about the whole question of what people do with their leisure time and what the governing principles are of running an entertainment business of any sort.” He dryly added, “I think I’m smarter than I was a year or two years ago. But I also think I’m poorer because I acquired the knowledge in the manner I did.
Class B shareholders in Paramount have recently been up in arms about the company’s merger negotiations with Skydance Media due to fears of dilution. Shari Redstone controls almost 80% of the voting, or Class A, shares in the company and had favored a two-step, all-stock deal with Skydance. An exclusive negotiating window between the companies expired at midnight Friday and a special committee of the board of directors met today to consider an alternative, all-cash merger proposal from Sony Pictures Entertainment and private equity giant Apollo. That deal has a preliminary pricetag of $26 billion and would likely see all shareholders paid a premium.
Wall Street has generally approved of the Sony/Apollo deal, but Redstone has been more reluctant to embrace it because it would likely entail the breakup of the company and the combination of Paramount’s film studio with Sony’s. Redstone’s father, Sumner Redstone, regarded Paramount Pictures, which he acquired after a fierce battle with Barry Diller, as the centerpiece of his media empire.