Warren Buffett has traded his old flip phone for Apple’s iPhone
- The legendary investor had previously used a Samsung-made flip phone
- His company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns a 5.6 per cent stake in Apple – worth more than US$70 billion
Apple’s most famous investor, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, has finally got rid of his old flip phone.
“My flip phone is permanently gone. The number’s been changed,” Buffett said during an interview that aired Monday on CNBC.
“You’re looking at an 89-year-old guy who’s barely beginning to be with it.”
His new phone? An iPhone, of course.
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Buffett said he’s using “the latest model”, but he’s not using it to play Fortnite or lazily scroll through his Instagram feed.
“I don’t use all its facilities like most people – most people are living their lives around it,” he said. “I use it as a phone.”
Buffett’s phone use has been a subject of interest across the last decade as smartphones have become ubiquitous.
His company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns a 5.6 per cent stake in Apple – worth more than US$70 billion. Even though his financial interests with Apple are clear, Buffett has resisted the move to smartphones.
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Instead, he stuck with a Samsung-made flip phone as the world adopted smartphones.
Buffett is a billionaire many times over, worth US$88.9 billion, according to Forbes, but he told CNBC that he didn’t actually have to buy his iPhone. That’s because Apple CEO Tim Cook, among other people, gifted Buffett with an iPhone.
“I’ve been given several of them, including by Tim Cook,” Buffett said.
The Apple CEO has tried to convince Buffett for years to give up his flip phone for an iPhone.
“I told him I’ll personally come out to Omaha and do tech support for him,” Cook told Bloomberg TV in June 2018.
Buffett also teased a clip that will be shown at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting in Omaha this May: “It will probably show me crushing with my foot my old flip phone while cosying up to the new smartphone,” he said.
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