In 2010, Warren Buffett named the dumbest stock he ever bought. It was Berkshire Hathaway, the company whose name appears in every headline written about him, and he put the cost of that decision at $200 billion.

Eight cases follow, two of them decisions not to invest, all of them errors Buffett has described as errors, mostly in letters and remarks to his own shareholders.

Buffett Called Berkshire Hathaway the Dumbest Stock He Ever Bought

It began in 1962, when Buffett started buying shares in a textile company that had already been sliding for years. He kept accumulating. A Berkshire manager later offered to buy his stake, and the two settled on a price. When the formal offer arrived, the number had been nudged down.

"He chiseled me," Buffett recalled. So he bought a controlling interest in the company and fired the manager, which left him holding the thing he had been trying to sell. "The truth is, I had now committed a major amount of money to a terrible business," he said. "And Berkshire Hathaway became the base for everything pretty much that I've done since."

By his own estimate, the decision cost him $200 billion, with the company spending years "carrying this anchor of all these textile assets."

Dexter Shoes Cost Shareholders $3.5 Billion

Buffett bought Dexter Shoes in 1993, paying with $433 million in Berkshire Hathaway stock. The company underperformed. By the time Berkshire moved on from the investment, it had cost shareholders $3.5 billion.

Two problems compounded. One was the business itself: "What I had assessed as durable competitive advantage vanished within a few years," Buffett wrote in a 2007 letter to shareholders. The other was the currency. Paying in Berkshire stock rather than cash meant the sellers received something that kept appreciating, which is why the eventual tally runs so far above the original price tag.

Precision Castparts: "I Paid Too Much for the Company"

Berkshire acquired the metal fabrication firm Precision Castparts in 2016, drawn to its standing in aerospace. Then 2020 arrived, aviation demand collapsed during the pandemic, and the company posted an $11 billion loss.

Buffett's account to shareholders was blunt about where the fault sat. "I paid too much for the company," he wrote. "No one misled me in any way — I was simply too optimistic about PCC's normalized profit potential."

He Bought ConocoPhillips Near the Top of the Oil Market

In 2008, with oil and gas both getting more expensive, Buffett put Berkshire's money into ConocoPhillips shares. Crude topped out that summer somewhere around $150 a barrel. Then energy prices reversed hard, and the stock went with them.

"I bought a large amount of ConocoPhillips stock when oil and gas prices were near their peak," he wrote in 2009. "I in no way anticipated the dramatic fall in energy prices that occurred in the last half of the year." He said the timing of the purchase cost Berkshire Hathaway several billion dollars.

He Held Tesco Too Long and Estimated a $444 Million Loss

Berkshire at one point owned 415 million shares of the UK grocery chain Tesco. As Buffett's view of the company cooled, Berkshire sold 114 million shares, then held the rest longer than he thought wise in hindsight.

"An attentive investor, I'm embarrassed to report, would have sold Tesco shares earlier," he wrote in his 2014 letter to investors. "I made a big mistake with this investment by dawdling." Berkshire eventually exited the position entirely, and Buffett put the cost of the delay at $444 million.

Lubrizol Came With a Conflict Buffett Didn't Know About

Berkshire acquired the chemical manufacturer Lubrizol for $9 billion in 2011. The business was not the problem. David Sokol was. Sokol, at the time widely seen as a leading candidate to succeed Buffett eventually, already owned Lubrizol shares when he brought the acquisition idea to Buffett; he made money when the deal went through and resigned from Berkshire afterward.

At the 2011 shareholders meeting, Buffett described it as "sad for Berkshire, sad for Dave, still inexplicable in my mind." As of 2022, Lubrizol was still listed among Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiary companies.

Passing on Amazon Was a Decision He Repeated for Years

Some mistakes are purchases. This one was a decision not to buy, made over and over.

"Obviously, I should have bought it long ago, because I admired it long ago," Buffett said of Amazon in 2017. "But I didn't understand the power of the model as I went along. And the price always seemed to more than reflect the power of the model at that time. So, it's one I missed big time."

The admission is unusually precise about the mechanism. He liked the company. He looked at the share price, judged it to already account for everything he admired, and passed. That reasoning is internally consistent, and it produced what he calls one of his largest misses.

March 2020: "I Totally Messed Up"

The coronavirus closed classrooms and businesses in March 2020, and stock prices went down with them; the S&P 500 sat roughly 34% under its previous record. Some investors bought aggressively into that low.

Buffett didn't. Speaking at Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting in April, he told the crowd: "I totally missed that opportunity, I totally messed up in March of 2020."

Holding cash and waiting is itself a market call, and it can be the wrong one. An investor who went to cash that spring intending to buy back in "once things settle" still had to pick the day.

The Eight Errors Fall Into Five Patterns

Grouped by what actually went wrong, the eight cases come down to five recurring patterns:

  • Overpaying for a decent business. Precision Castparts and Lubrizol were sound companies; the price or the process was the issue.
  • Extrapolating a boom. He bought ConocoPhillips while energy prices were near a peak.
  • Misjudging durability. Dexter Shoes' competitive edge disappeared faster than expected.
  • Acting slowly. Tesco was a conviction that changed before the selling did.
  • Sitting out. Amazon and March 2020 were both costs of inaction.

One more thread runs through all of it: every item here is public because Buffett wrote it down. Annual shareholder letters that catalog errors by name are not standard practice, and the record only exists because he chose to keep it.

The Reasoning Behind the Numbers Is Ordinary

The dollar figures attached to these decisions are enormous. The thinking behind them is not: too optimistic about future profits, too confident in a competitive moat, too slow to sell, too sure a stock was already fully priced. Investors working with far smaller sums make the same calls for the same reasons.

What sets the Buffett record apart is that the reasoning is available at all, in his own words, attached to specific outcomes. Most investors never reconstruct why a losing position looked good at the time.