To say Warren Buffett is not a fan of gold would be an understatement. His basic beef is that gold does not produce much of practical value. His instincts have always been to buy businesses that generate steady and growing cash by producing goods or services that people need or want – – businesses like railroads, beverage makers, and insurance companies.
Here are some quotes on the subject from the Oracle of Omaha, where I have bolded some phrases:
“Gold … has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end” — Buffett, letter to shareholders, 2011
“With an asset like gold, for example, you know, basically gold is a way of going long on fear, and it’s been a pretty good way of going long on fear from time to time. But you really have to hope people become more afraid in the year or two years than they are now. And if they become more afraid you make money, if they become less afraid you lose money. But the gold itself doesn’t produce anything” — Buffett, CNBC’s Squawk Box, 2011
This from when the world’s 67-cubic foot total gold hoard was worth about $7 trillion, which by his reckoning was the value of all U.S. farmland plus seven times the value of petroleum giant ExxonMobil plus an extra $1 trillion:
“And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67-foot cube of gold … and the alternative to that was to have all the farmland of the country, everything, cotton, corn, soybeans, seven ExxonMobils. Just think of that. Add $1 trillion of walking around money. I, you know, maybe call me crazy but I’ll take the farmland and the ExxonMobils” – – Cited in https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/3-things-warren-buffett-has-said-about-gold
And my favorite:
“Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head“. – – From speech at Harvard, see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/05/25/bury-gold/
One thing Buffett did NOT say is that gold is “barbarous relic”. That line is owned by John Maynard Keynes from a hundred years ago, referring to the notion of tying national money issuance to the number of bars of gold held in the national vaults:
“In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic. All of us, from the Governor of the Bank of England downwards, are now primarily interested in preserving the stability of business, prices, and employment, and are not likely, when the choice is forced on us, deliberately to sacrifice these to outworn dogma, which had its value once” – Monetary Reform (1924)
Has Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Beaten Gold as an Investment?
Given all that trash talk from the legendary investor, let’s see how an investment in his flagship Berkshire Hathaway company (stock symbol BRK.B) compares to gold over various time periods. I will use the ETF GLD as a proxy for gold, and will include the S&P 500 index as a proxy for the general U.S. large cap stock market.
As always, these comparisons depend on your starting and ending points. In the 1990s and 2000s, BRK.B hugely outperformed the S&P 500, cementing Buffett’s reputation as one of the greatest investors of all time. (GLD data doesn’t go back that far). In the past twelve months, gold (up 41%) has soundly beaten SPY (up 14 %) and completely trounced BRK.A (up 9%), as of last week. A couple of one-off factors have gone into these results: Gold had an enormous surge in January-April as the world markets digested the implications of never-ending gigantic U.S. budget deficits, and the markets soured on BRK.A due to the announced upcoming retirement of Buffett himself.
Stepping back to look over the past ten years shows the old master still coming out on top. In this plot, gold is orange, S&P 500 is blue, and BRK.A is royal purple:
Over most of this time period (through 7/21/2025), BRK.A and SP500 were pretty close, and gold lagged significantly. Gold was notably left behind during the key stock surge of 2021. Even with the rise in gold and dip in BRK.A this year, Buffett’s company (up 232%) still beats gold (198%) over the past ten years. BRK.A pulled well ahead of SP500 during the 2022 correction, and never gave back that lead. In the April stock market panic this year, BRK.A actually went up as everything else dropped, as it was seen as a tariff-proof safe haven. SP500 was ahead of gold for nearly all this period, until the crash in stocks and the surge in gold in the first half of 2025 brought them to essentially a tie for the past decade.
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