Finance

‘We lost quite a bit of money’

Published

11 months ago

May 4, 2024

Warren Buffett walks the floor ahead of the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska on May 3, 2024.

David A. Grogen | CNBC

OMAHA, Neb. — Warren Buffett revealed that he dumped Berkshire Hathaway’s entire Paramount stake at a loss.

“I was 100% responsible for the Paramount decision,” Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting. “It was 100% my decision, and we’ve sold it all and we lost quite a bit of money.”

Berkshire owned 63.3 million shares of Paramount as of the end of 2023, after cutting the position by about a third in the fourth quarter of last year, according to latest filings.

The Omaha-based conglomerate first bought a nonvoting stake in Paramount’s class B shares in the first quarter of 2022. Since then the media company has had a tough ride, experiencing a dividend cut, earnings miss and a CEO exit. The stock declined 44% in 2022 and another 12% in 2023.

Paramount

Just this week, Sony Pictures and private equity firm Apollo Global Management sent a letter to the Paramount board expressing interest in acquiring the company for about $26 billion. The firm has also been having takeover talks with David Ellison’s Skydance Media.

Paramount has struggled in recent years, suffering from declining revenue as more consumers abandon traditional pay-TV, and as its streaming services continue to lose money. The stock is in the red again this year, down nearly 13%.

Buffett said the unfruitful Paramount bet made him think more deeply about what people prioritize in their leisure time. He previously said the streaming industry has too many players seeking viewer dollars, causing a stiff price war.

Finance

Conservative cable channel Newsmax shares plunge more than 70% after a dizzying 2-day surge

Published

3 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Business Finance News

A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022.

Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.

The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors.

The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.

Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.

The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.