Just five years after Berkshire Hathaway sold all 31 of its papers and Warren Buffett deemed the industry “toast,” the investor has rejoined a legion of billionaires with their money in media.
A quarterly update the conglomerate filed with the SEC just revealed that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway invested a whopping $351.7 million in the New York Times.
Buffett, the legendary “Oracle of Omaha,” purchased 5.07 million shares in the 175-year-old paper at the end of 2025, right around the time he stepped down as CEO after leading the company for nearly six decades. And it marked an investing change of heart on Buffett’s part.
“It’s a full-circle moment for Berkshire Hathaway in reinvesting in news and a huge vote of confidence by Berkshire in the business strategy of the New York Times,” said Tim Franklin, a professor and chair of local news at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
The 95-year-old investor, worth an eye-watering $149 billion, joins a legion of ultrarich businessmen pumping millions into traditional media. Whether it be Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s takeover of the Washington Post after a $250 million sale, or Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff buying up Time magazine, the wealthy are forking over chunks of their fortunes to have a foot in the media landscape.
The billionaires who have bought up entire media empires for millions
Bezos famously bought the prolific outlet the Washington Post back in 2013 for a quarter of a billion dollars. And after a decade of ups and downs under his ownership, the 148-year-old newspaper recently endured a massive blow, cutting a third of its staff earlier this month.
And just days after Bezos first acquired the Post back in the 2010s, another ultrawealthy investor entered the arena: Billionaire Red Sox owner John Henry purchased the heritage paper the Boston Globe for $70 million.
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is also well known for his investments and position across news outlets. The former CEO of 21st Century Fox, whose family fortune amounts to nearly $19 billion, has TV channel Fox News under his wing.
But his empire is also heavily intertwined with the publishing world; his son Lachlan Murdoch is the chairman of News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal, the Times, and the New York Post, among other outlets.
Alongside Buffett, the New York Times has another prominent billionaire backer: telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú, the richest man in Mexico. The businessman has millions of dollars invested in the publication, hitting a peak in early 2015 when he was the paper’s largest single investor, owning nearly 17% of the historic brand at the time.
Buffett once owned dozens of papers, but sold them off in 2020
Buffett’s recent $352 million investment in the iconic New York paper is a surprising change, as the billionaire exited the newspaper business just a handful of years before.
In 2020, Berkshire Hathaway sold all of its publications to Lee Enterprises for $140 million. The sale encompassed 31 papers across 10 states, including the Omaha World-Herald and the Buffalo News. While the prolific investor had a soft spot for the newspaper industry, he had grown weary of its decline. Buffett had observed that a drop in advertising had turned the newspaper world “from monopoly to franchise to competitive,” and predicted that most outlets were “toast.”
Despite selling off his newspapers at a tough time for the industry, Buffett said it wasn’t a massive blow since Berkshire had bought the papers at “reasonable” prices.
Investors who watch Buffett’s successful portfolio like a hawk took the sale as a grim sign of the industry’s future. Analysts believed that by pulling out, Buffett wasn’t convinced that the print newspaper business could ever return to its former glory. But more billionaires like Buffett funneling their fortunes into heritage publications—while the media world around them becomes ever more digital—may signal that not all bets are off for papers.
