Berkshire’s Latest Interview: Buffett Criticizes Today’s Market Speculation Wave, Admits He Personally Drove the Google Investment

On July 16, in his latest interview, “Oracle of Omaha” Warren Buffett shared his views on multiple topics, including the market environment, technology investments, and Federal Reserve staffing.

Criticizing the Current Market Environment as Hard to Discover Value

Buffett criticized that today’s market is increasingly driven by speculative trading rather than long-term investing principles. “When everyone prefers gambling, it is hard to find anything of value.”

Earlier this year, he also described the stock market as a church with a casino attached, and specifically pointed out that single-day options trading is a form of gambling.

This year, despite the Iran-Iraq conflict bringing an energy shock, the three major US stock indexes have continued to hit new highs. Stocks related to AI infrastructure have been accused of being over-speculated, and retail investors have rushed in at large scale to targets such as Micron Technology and SpaceX.

On this, Buffett, who has long practiced value investing, said that truly meaningful investment opportunities are not common and require patience and discipline. “Sometimes opportunities come so quickly that you can’t catch them, but other times, being lucky enough to find one within a few years is already a win. Because humans love gambling so much, the money raised by cultivating gamblers is more than the money raised by cultivating investors.”

Buffett Acknowledges His Personal Role in the Google Investment

Buffett said that Berkshire’s recent large-scale investment in Google was driven by him personally rather than led by Greg Abel, the CEO successor, but “I’m not going to do anything he doesn’t approve, and he’s not going to do anything I don’t approve. In the end, the decision-maker is him.”

Berkshire has continued to increase its holdings of Google since the third quarter of 2025, and earlier this year it also participated in its $10 billion private placement. Buffett candidly said: “The trick to investing is to find companies that can consistently generate high returns on capital over a very long period of time,” and admitted that he “made a mistake”—not investing in Google earlier.

He looked back and said that in 2018, he saw the success of Google’s advertising business through Geico, but at the time he wasn’t sure whether it could become a long-term winner. However, he also said Google was not one of his most beloved holdings: “My degree of love for it is not as high as for at least four or five other businesses we hold,” and noted that the tens of billions of dollars in capital investment in the AI field is a key issue facing Google and all competitors—“When they developed software in the past, they weren’t playing a game like this.”

“Worthwhile Option”

When discussing the newly appointed Federal Reserve chair Kevin Wosch, Buffett described him as a “worthwhile option.” When Wosch first chaired meetings in June, he already showed his policy style: while keeping interest rates unchanged, he proposed adjusting the central bank’s policy framework, and in a congressional hearing he promised to push the Federal Reserve to “change direction” and to tackle inflation.

Buffett said: “I think he’s going to do his very best to accomplish the assigned task—to achieve the 2% inflation target and maintain maximum employment. He can’t do it perfectly, just as I also know that I can’t manage someone else’s money perfectly and consistently generate above-average returns. Wosch cares about this country. That doesn’t mean his decisions are always right, but the reason is that sometimes making these decisions is really very difficult.”

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