OMAHA, Neb. — Warren Buffett revealed that he dumped Berkshire Hathaway’s entire Paramount stake at a loss.
“I was 100% responsible for the Paramount decision,” Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting. It was 100% my decision, and we’ve sold it all and we lost quite a bit of money.
Berkshire owned 63.3 million shares of Paramount as of the end of 2023, after cutting the position by about a third in the fourth quarter of last year, according to latest filings.
Berkshire first bought a nonvoting stake in Paramount in the first quarter of 2022. Since then the media company has had a tough ride, experiencing a dividend cut, earnings miss and a CEO exit. The stock declined 44% in 2023 and another 12% in 2023.
Just this week, Sony Pictures and private equity firm Apollo Global Management sent a letter to the Paramount board expressing interest in acquiring the company for about $26 billion. The firm has also been having takeover talks with David Ellison’s Skydance Media.
Paramount has struggled in recent years, suffering from declining revenue as more consumers abandon traditional pay-TV, continued streaming losses and rising interest rates. The stock is in the red again this year, down nearly 13%.
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