Gold has been on an extraordinary run. Spot prices touched an all-time high of $5,589 an ounce on Jan. 28, 2026, before retreating, and are now running again, putting the metal on pace for its eighth straight monthly gain. Central banks, ETF investors and retail buyers are all piling in.
Yet Warren Buffett, arguably the world’s most celebrated investor, continues to sit it out entirely.
Berkshire Hathaway carries zero direct exposure to gold even as prices hover near $5,100 per ounce. Buffett handed the chief executive role to Greg Abel in late 2025, but his investing philosophy still governs the firm. And that philosophy has never had room for gold.
So why does the man who built one of history’s greatest fortunes keep passing on the trade everyone else seems to be making?
Buffett’s case against gold is long, consistent and well-documented. In his 2011 shareholder letter, he placed gold in the category of assets that “will never produce anything.”
The buyer’s only hope, he argued, is that someone else will pay more for it later. He wrote that owners “are not inspired by what the asset itself can produce” since “it will remain lifeless forever,” but rather by the belief that others will want it even more in the future.
At the 2018 Berkshire annual meeting, he made the math plain. A $10,000 investment in an S&P 500index fund in March 1942 would have grown to $51 million by 2018. The same $10,000 in gold returned roughly $400,000. His conclusion: for every dollar made in American business, gold buyers captured less than a penny.
He also called out gold’s emotional appeal directly.
“What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow,” he wrote in that same 2011 letter.
Fear is not a foundation for a long-term investment thesis, in his view. Farms feed people. Apartments house them. Companies ship goods and print earnings. Gold just waits for the next buyer.
In the second quarter of 2020, Berkshire surprised Wall Street by quietly buying a $562 million stake in Barrick Gold, one of the world’s largest gold miners. Barrick’s shares surged more than 10% on the news.
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But the position was small, less than 0.3% of Berkshire’s portfolio at the time. Most analysts attributed the move to portfolio managers Todd Combs or Ted Weschler rather than Buffett himself. Berkshire exited Barrick entirely by the end of 2020, within two quarters of buying in, per SEC filings.
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Miners are businesses, bullion is not. Berkshire bought a company with earnings, cash flow and dividends, not metal sitting in a vault.
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It was a hedge, not a conversion. At less than 0.3% of the portfolio, this was a tactical move, not a shift in philosophy.
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They exited fast. Selling within two quarters signals this was opportunistic, not a long-term conviction play.
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Buffett likely did not drive it. Most evidence points to Combs or Weschler making the call, consistent with Buffett’s stated aversion to gold.
Buffett is not allergic to precious metals across the board. In 1997, Berkshire purchased 129.7 million ounces of silver, roughly 25% of annual global production at the time, according to a 1998 Berkshire release. The purchase cost around $650 million and represented less than 2% of the portfolio.
Silver attracted him for a specific reason: a verifiable supply and demand imbalance. Industrial users were consuming more silver than mines were producing. That is a classic value setup he could model and quantify. Buffett told shareholders the position produced a pre-tax gain of $97.4 million in 1997.
In his 1997 shareholder letter, he wrote that buying silver was “a return to the past,” noting that three decades earlier he had bought silver in anticipation of the U.S. government’s demonetization of the metal.
Berkshire sold the full position by 2006. At that year’s annual meeting, Buffett quipped about it: “I bought very early. I sold very early. Except for that, everything I’ve done has been perfect.”
Gold never offered the same setup in his eyes. It has no significant industrial use at scale. Its price is driven by sentiment, not fundamentals he can put in a spreadsheet. That distinction is everything to a value investor.
Gold bulls have strong arguments right now. Central banks bought 863 tonnes in 2025, per the World Gold Council, well above the 2010 to 2021 annual average of 473 tonnes.
Geopolitical tensions are keeping safe-haven demand elevated. Gold surged roughly 65% in 2025, its strongest single year since 1979, setting 53 all-time highs along the way.
Buffett shrugs.
His framework zooms out to decades. From 1942 to 2018, gold turned $10,000 into $400,000. The S&P 500 turned the same stake into $51 million.
Short-term outperformance does not move him. Productive assets win over full cycles because they compound, while gold simply waits.
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No earnings, no dividends. Gold generates nothing while you hold it. You pay storage and insurance costs, and you wait for the next buyer.
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Driven by fear, not fundamentals. As Buffett wrote in 2011, if the ranks of the fearful grow, you win. If they shrink, you lose. That is speculation, not investing.
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Stocks win over time. From 1942 to 2018, Buffett calculates the S&P 500 outperformed gold by roughly 127-to-1 on the same starting stake.
Critics counter that Buffett missed gold’s entire run since 2000, during which the metal has outperformed Berkshire on a price basis. He has acknowledged as much, saying he makes no attempt to forecast gold. He simply skips what does not fit his circle of competence.
Berkshire’s portfolio backs his worldview. The conglomerate owns railroads, utilities, insurance businesses and consumer brands. Apple remains its largest holding, a cash machine that compounds earnings and returns capital. No gold bars clutter the balance sheet.
As gold hovers near $5,100 today, Buffett’s decades-old verdict has never sounded more contrarian. But then again, contrarian is exactly where he has always made his money.
Related: Warren Buffett shares the late-life money lesson you can’t ignore
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Feb 24, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.