🪑 Buffett Just Left The Chair

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Warren Buffett just stepped down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. The stock moved 0.1%.

Sixty-one years of one man's judgment, handed over on a Friday, and the market shrugged like someone swapped the office coffee brand.

Buffett, 96, is now chairman emeritus and stays on the board.

His son, Howard G. Buffett, takes the chairman's seat. He's already been a Berkshire director for 33 years, so he's not exactly new to the building. Susan Decker stays on as lead independent director.

"Father Time always wins," Buffett told shareholders. He added that Father Time has been unusually generous with him.

The handover started less than a year ago, when Greg Abel took the CEO job Buffett had held for 60 years. This is the last piece clicking into place.

Most companies treat succession like a cliff edge. Berkshire turned it into an escalator, and everyone's been watching it move for years.

Buffett says Abel has been making the decisions that matter for some time already, and that he hasn't had to second-guess a single one of them. He set the bar sky high for Abel and reckons Abel cleared it.

Abel, for his part, called Buffett's impact on American business unmatched and said Howard's job is to guard the culture.

Buffett took over a dying textile business in 1965.

Today Berkshire is an insurance powerhouse bolted to railroads, energy, aerospace components, retail, real estate, homebuilding, and yes, truck stops.

On top of that sits a ~$300 billion equities portfolio, roughly the entire GDP of Finland, stuffed with:

Not bad for a failing sock factory.

Three things worth filing away.

One: the real handover already happened. Abel has been running the business day to day. Friday was paperwork with a famous signature on it.

Two: there's a known seller. Buffett said in July he's speeding up his donations and plans to give away all his remaining Berkshire shares within about eight years. He's the largest shareholder. That's a steady, telegraphed flow of stock heading to foundations, and the market has years of warning.

Three: the "Buffett premium" is now a test. Berkshire has traded for decades on the assumption that one man was the best capital allocator alive. Does that assumption survive when he's the emeritus guy in the corner?

The next few years answer it. The 0.1% move says investors already think they know.

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Three news outlets just got banned from the White House by social media post.

CNN $WBD ( ▼ 1.56% ), MS NOW $VSNT ( ▼ 3.17% ) and Politico. Effective immediately, according to Trump's Friday post on Truth Social.

Two of the three come with ticker symbols attached. That's where a media story becomes a markets story.

Trump accused the three outlets of repeatedly publishing what he called "FAKE NEWS" about his administration and the country.

His line was that media outlets shouldn't be able to constantly report fiction and lies when covering the President, his administration, or the US.

He also said other outlets he considers fake news could be next.

What he didn't say: how any of this gets implemented, or which specific stories set it off. The post skipped the mechanics entirely.

Trump also went after Politico over what he described as an $8 million US government subscription signed under Biden.

He called the payment illegal and ridiculous, and said it looked like corruption to him.

No further detail was offered on that either. Consider it an accusation with a price tag and not much else.

He threw in a shot at MS NOW too, noting it recently rebranded from MSNBC and claiming the name change followed a slide in viewers and credibility.

Here's why that matters for anyone holding media exposure.

White House access isn't a line item on an earnings report, but it feeds directly into the thing that is: audience.

Political coverage drives traffic. Traffic drives ad revenue. Ad revenue is roughly the entire business model for a chunk of legacy media.

So a ban that removes reporters from the room is a headline-risk event for the parent companies. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN. Versant is the MS NOW side. Politico is privately held by Axel Springer, so no ticker to watch there.

The honest read: nobody knows the scope yet, because the post didn't define one. A restriction with no stated enforcement mechanism is very hard to price.

Markets tend to shrug at threats and react to specifics. Right now this is a threat.

Worth watching whether this stays a post or turns into an actual credentialing policy. Those are two very different stories for two very different stock charts.

An Anthropic safety lead just put the odds of AI killing every human on Earth above 10% within a decade.

That's Evan Hubinger, Alignment Science Lead, saying it publicly, in writing, backing up a colleague named Jacob.

One in ten is roughly the odds of flipping three heads in a row. People do that by accident, constantly.

A day later, California went looking for an off switch.

Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Friday with two teeth in it.

The first: AI companies must build a "kill switch for frontier models." And it has to actually work, with the efficacy verified on an ongoing basis by an independent verification organisation.

The second: a panel of experts inside the next two months to reinforce and strengthen the state's AI rules.

Newsom's framing was blunt. He called the federal government's failure to create meaningful AI oversight something that should alarm every American, especially when AI CEOs themselves are begging for regulation.

Which sounds like hyperbole until you look at the week he'd just watched.

Start with the begging. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said the pace of AI model improvement should be slowed down.

That's the guy selling the product asking someone to please slow down the product.

Then a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher went public warning civilisation about where frontier models are heading. Hubinger's ">10% within the next decade" was his reply to that.

And this is all landing after the Hugging Face attack, carried out by an army of AI agents running on OpenAI's own models. Not theoretical. Already happened, in July.

Trump watched the same week and reached a completely different conclusion, posting on Truth Social that there's a "SICK conspiracy" against AI and data centres and that the only winner is China. His summary: whoever wins AI, wins.

So Washington's message is full throttle. California's message is somebody find the brake pedal. Guess which one has the frontier labs sitting inside its borders.

Here's the part that touches your money.

An independently verified kill switch means engineering time, audit fees and a lot of lawyers. That's a new permanent line item for every frontier lab, and almost none of it is priced in today.

The AI selloffs so far have been arguments about valuations. Regulation has been background noise. Newsom is trying to make it foreground, and he said it out loud: California's policy should be the national baseline.

If that holds, compliance stops being a California problem and becomes an everyone problem. Chip and power suppliers sell into the buildout either way. The model builders are the ones writing the cheque.

What would change this view? An executive order is not a law. If the expert panel lands in two months with something vague, or the courts get involved, this stays a press release with good branding.

Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:

After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.

The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.

“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”

Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.

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