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Warren Buffett has just spoken again and he has left no one indifferent. At 95 years old, Warren Buffett gave an interview of almost an hour to Becky Quick on CNBC where he spoke candidly about the current state of the markets and for the very first time about his massive investment in Alphabet. So this is a decision that has fueled rumors for months because no one really knew if it came from him or his successor.
So today we're going to look at all of that . We're going to dissect everything he revealed: his vision of the market today, the reasons behind the billions injected into Google, the strategy that has allowed him to beat the market for six decades, and finally the results that Google has just published.
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I checked earlier , there are almost 200 of you who have benefited from it. That's great, 200 people benefited from it for free. So don't hesitate, you have the link in the description. Let's begin. So on July 15th, Warren Buffett sat down in Omaha opposite Becky Quick, the journalist who interviewed him more often than anyone else in her entire career.
Basically, to put it simply, she's privileged. A full hour of discussion on CNBC. And the timing, well, it's not insignificant. ? Well, because Buffett has just announced that he is accelerating the redistribution of his fortune. He even joked that this kind of interview might become increasingly rare in the future.
We understand why. So, it goes without saying that every word he uttered that day took on a special value. We'll start with the most uncomfortable topic he addressed. So, according to him, everyone is betting. And the choice of words is very important. He didn't say that people invest badly, he said he was betting.
For Buffett, there is a fundamental difference between the two. Those who bet buy hope, cross their fingers and check the price of their asset every 5 minutes. The investor, on the other hand, has analyzed a company, calculated its real value, then waits calmly, then waits patiently. He didn't mention any specific names, but it's easy to understand who he's referring to.
Traders who buy one-day options, stocks that move 40% in a single session without the company behind them changing anything, trendy companies, artificial intelligence that attracts almost cult-like investors, fiercely defending totally different valuations. [grunt] And Buffett went even further by directly attacking Wall Street.
According to him, Wall Street deliberately pushes investors to bet in the short term rather than to invest in the long term. Simply because Wall Street doesn't make money when people invest intelligently, but when money circulates constantly. There is much more money to be made by cultivating bettors who buy and sell constantly than by supporting patient investors who hold their positions for years.
Now, where it gets really interesting, if Buffett himself acknowledges that the market is full of gamblers and that it is becoming difficult to find real value, a question we can ask ourselves, why has he just injected a colossal sum into a company? Well, that's exactly the most interesting, the most fascinating part of this interview.
Today, Berkshire Hathaway holds more than $31 billion of shares in Alphabet, Google's parent company. The position began to be built up in the third quarter of 2025. But the bulk of the purchase took place this year, including a $10 billion transaction last month during a private placement of shares organized directly by Alphabet.
So from the first day of this investment, everyone said the same thing. This investment, this decision, must come from Greg Abel, the new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. It comes from Greg Abel, who is currently leaving his own mark on the portfolio. And this hypothesis, well, it made sense since Buffett had repeated for decades that he would never invest in tech.
The result? Well, no, it was wrong. Becky Quick asked him the question directly and Buffett dropped the bombshell. His position on Alphabet was his own idea at 95 years old. The man who for 60 years carefully avoided technology companies has just made Google his new big bet. Afterwards, he still wanted to clarify how Berkshire Hathaway now operates.
He doesn't do anything without Abel's agreement. And Abel does nothing without Buffett's agreement, he does nothing without his . They talk on the phone every day , but it is Greg Abel who makes the final decision. And so, in just a few months, Buffett has moved Alphabet up to one of his top positions, right behind Apple, American Express and Coca-Cola.
A company that didn't even exist in the portfolio a year ago, a little less than two years ago. Well, a position which now occupies the podium of the most famous portfolio in the world with a total weight close to 9%. But the question now that we can ask ourselves is, wasn't Buffett supposed to be fleeing from it?
And that's where the most valuable insight of the entire interview comes in. Buffett never said that technology was a bad business. He always said he didn't invest in what he didn't understand. And the message he delivered on this subject is particularly interesting, even particularly powerful. He acknowledges that he did not buy Google when the company was a low-asset business, a real money-printing machine thanks to its search engine without needing capital.
[grunt] Well, that was a mistake. He admits it was a mistake. Wall Street loved the company at the time, and unfortunately, he let it slip away. But what's interesting is that he doesn't stop at simply acknowledging this past mistake. Today, Buffett believes that Google has a better chance of winning than 90 to 95% of everything that is traded daily on Wall Street.
And that's why he went almost all-in, I'm exaggerating a little, that he decided to invest massively in it even if the business seems less attractive on paper than before. So, at first glance, well, it makes no sense, it makes no sense. Alphabet is what we will call a hyper scaler that spends historic sums on investment and, like other tech giants, will generate negative cash flow for the next two years.
So it makes no sense. The company is burning through cash. It's clearly more of a capital-light business . There's a lot of money behind it. And yet, all this negativity, all this slightly uh, all this side that can be scary, well Buffett sees it, sees exactly the opposite. See it as something positive.
For him, it is no longer about digital business with infinite advertising margins but about deploying physical capital in real assets exactly as he has always done with his Burlington Northern Railway, excuse me. And that's a game Buffett masters better than anyone else. And so once again , there is a paradox, there is a real irony in that .
Back when Google was an ultra-light business and the market loved it, Buffett did n't want it, he didn't want to buy it. [grunt] And today, while the company is spending billions and part of the market is doubting, well, he's buying massively. And in this case, it's not a contradiction, it's simply that Buffett never buys stories that are told to him.
He buys concrete returns. To fully understand this reasoning and the justification behind this massive investment in Alphabet, we need to revisit Buffett's investment philosophy, the one that has made him so consistent for decades. Let me explain. So, in the middle of the interview, almost without attaching any particular importance to it, Buffett summarized the very essence of his entire investment philosophy, which is the investment philosophy that has allowed him to generate approximately 20% annual returns since 1965.
The question is very simple. According to him, what is a good one? A good business, well, it's a business with which he earns significantly more than with the safest and simplest possible alternative. A good business, therefore, means earning significantly more than this risk-free alternative and having the ability to continue doing so for a very long time.
That is its true unit of measurement. Because the stock does the stock last month, but what the business actually earns on the capital it uses. And he gave a very simple example: American Express. If you ask anyone how much a traditional bank earns on its capital, the answer will probably be around 13 to 14%.
This is the norm for the majority of banks. American Express generates approximately 30% of its 30% return on capital without taking more risks than these same banks. And that's exactly the kind of anomaly Buffett has been hunting for for 60 years. Now, the question we can ask ourselves is, what is the connection with the ?
Well, absolutely everything actually. When Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Meta, these companies invest hundreds of billions in capital expenditures, the real question is not how much they spend, but what return they will generate on that invested capital. To give you an idea, Alphabet will spend approximately $350 billion on investment in 2027 and $375 billion in 2028.
These sums are monstrous. But it's not the amount that counts, it's the return that this colossal sum will produce. So, at the moment, while the returns on all these investments are not yet fully generated, let's say, I'll choose my words carefully, well, the hyperscalers are already showing returns of more than 20% on operating profits that are nevertheless compressed by these massive expenses.
So, Buffett, well, he analyzed all of that and his response was, well, he came to the conclusion that Alphabet needed to be bought aggressively. ? Well, not because it's tech, not because it's artificial intelligence, but because he thinks that this capital will generate babies, will generate returns far above the market average, around, well, around those famous current 20% or more.
So the reality is that Buffett is applying exactly the same reasoning that he used with his railroad, with Coca-Cola 45 years ago, or with American Express. The label of the sector changes, but the selection criterion, well , that never changes. We'll quickly finish with the results that Alphabet has published in recent weeks.
Well, the results perfectly illustrate everything I just said, everything we just saw, the company beat expectations on almost all indicators. Quarterly revenue exceeds $120 billion, a 24% increase; operating profit rises by 30%; operating margins expand to 34%; and yet the stock immediately after publication had fallen by 6%.
The reason is always the same: capital expenditure (capex). Capex, the management raised its capital expenditure forecasts for the rest of the year by $15 billion, bringing the total forecast to between $195 billion and $205 billion . Exactly the same short-term logic that Buffett denounced in his interview.
The market only looks at what the company spends in the quarter instead of looking at the return that all that spending will generate in the future. And this additional return, it is visible in the presentation of the results at Google Cloud showed a growth of 82%, an enormous figure, an absolutely enormous figure for a business of this size with an operating margin that jumped from 20.7% just a year ago to 35.6% today, it is still relatively significant and that is exactly what return on capital is, and is now appearing concretely, there you go, we see it before our eyes and that is why everyone is revising upwards the growth prospects of the company even though the stock is falling on the stock market.
Now what we are seeing with Alphabet is the huge transformation of one of the best businesses in the world, once a bit fragile in terms of assets, which is becoming a much more capital-intensive business but is building something as fundamental as the highways of the future – maybe I'm exaggerating, but I'm not afraid to say it – the highways of the future alongside the other tech giants that you all know.
? And because the future of this revolution will not depend on who has the best artificial intelligence model at any given moment, but on who has the infrastructure necessary to develop these models and absorb the great technological revolution of history, and these highways are precisely these companies, the hyperscalers, that are building them.
Today's toll, but especially tomorrow's, will pass through these players, will pass through her, and well, the market doesn't reward that yet. He even punishes it disproportionately, and so we are clearly facing the greatest economic and entrepreneurial transformation in the entire modern history of financial markets, my friends.
That's all for today's video, a little different. Let me know if you want more and more topics like this, leave a comment and I'll do what's necessary. Take care, see you tomorrow.
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