Warren Buffett’s gold investment: Why the Oracle of Omaha still won’t bet on gold — even at $4,300 an ounce
Gold’s meteoric rise in 2025 has stunned global markets. The yellow metal has crossed $4,321 per ounce, soaring more than 64% this year and outperforming the S&P 500 by a wide margin. This parabolic move — the sharpest since the 2008 financial crisis — has reignited debate among investors and strategists about gold’s role in portfolios.
The recent rally has been breathtaking. Between October 2009 and January 2024, gold doubled from $1,000 to $2,000. It then took only 14 months to reach $3,000, and just 210 days to leap from $3,300 to $4,300 — a testament to the scale of current demand. Global uncertainty, inflationary pressures, and the ease of investing through gold ETFs have pulled in new investors. Wall Street strategists now argue that the old 60/40 portfolio model — 60% equities, 40% bonds — is outdated, advocating a 60/20/20 split, with gold and bitcoin together accounting for 20%.
But amid this gold fever, one legendary investor remains unmoved — Warren Buffett.
Buffett’s view
Throughout his career, Buffett has consistently dismissed gold as an inferior long-term investment. While investors around the world rush to hoard the metal, Buffett’s philosophy has stayed rooted in one principle — he prefers productive assets over speculative ones.
At Berkshire Hathaway’s 2011 annual meeting, Buffett famously explained his thinking by dividing all investments into three broad categories. The first, he said, includes anything denominated in a currency — like bonds or bank deposits — whose value depends on government policies. The second covers assets “that don’t produce anything,” such as gold, whose worth depends entirely on what someone else is willing to pay later.
He illustrated this vividly: if all the gold in the world were gathered into one cube, it would measure about 67 feet on each side — around 170,000 metric tonnes. You could polish it, admire it, or climb on top of it, Buffett quipped, but “it isn’t going to do anything.”
Unlike a business, a farm, or a productive enterprise, gold generates no income, no dividends, and no output. Its value is sustained only by sentiment and scarcity. Buffett argued that investors buy gold mainly because they hope “someone else will pay more for it later,” not because it produces anything of intrinsic value.
Rising prices
Buffett has also cautioned against the psychology of chasing momentum. He acknowledged that “rising prices create their own excitement,” but reminded investors that such behaviour “has not been the way to get rich.” His long-time partner, the late Charlie Munger, once called it “peculiar to buy an asset that only goes up if the world goes to hell.”
The Buffett contrast
While Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns billions in energy, railroads, insurance, and technology, it has never made a lasting commitment to gold. The company’s brief 2020 investment in Barrick Gold — which it later exited — was widely interpreted as a rare tactical move, not a shift in philosophy.
Even with gold at all-time highs, Buffett’s message remains unchanged: invest in businesses that produce, not in assets that sit idle. For him, the world’s growing fascination with gold is yet another reminder that while markets move in cycles, the laws of compounding productive capital never go out of style.