"[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" — speech at Harvard University in 1998 "Its a lot better to have a goose that keeps laying eggs than a goose that just sits there and eats insurance and storage and a few things like that" — comparing companies like Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo to gold in a CNBC interview in 2009 "Neither of much use nor procreative ... if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end" — 2011 letter to shareholders "We could buy all US cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the worlds most profitable company, earning more than $40 billion annually) [and] have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money — arguing in his 2011 letter to shareholders that gold is incredibly expensive as the global stock of the metal would fit in a baseball infield and produce nothing, but still carry a price tag of $9.6 trillion "The magical metal was no match for the American mettle" — comparing the returns from a gold bet and an investment in a S&P 500 index fund in 1942 in his 2018 letter to shareholders "If you bought gold at the time of Christ and you figured the compound rate on it, it may be a couple tenths of 1%" — Berkshire annual meeting in 2018 "For every dollar you have made in American business, you would have less than $0.01 of gain by buying [gold]" — comparing a $10,000 investment in a cross-section of US stocks in 1942, which would be worth about $51 million in 2018, with a gold bet of the same size that would be worth about $400,000, at the annual meeting in 2018.
