I was in the room when Warren Buffett gave a surprise interview at Berkshire's annual conference. The mood swung from excited to gloomy, then hopeful. [Business Insider]

I was in the room when Warren Buffett gave a surprise interview at Berkshire's annual conference. The mood swung from excited to gloomy, then hopeful.

OMAHA, Neb. — I have been covering Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder weekend for six years. I thought I had seen every trick the Oracle of Omaha pulls out of his sleeve. I was wrong.

This year, the main event was scheduled to be a standard Q&A with Vice Chairman Greg Abel and a few portfolio managers. The official program listed no appearance by 94-year-old Warren Buffett. Most of us expected him to skip the stage, perhaps sending a video message from his home in Omaha. The whispers in the media center were polite but resigned: *He’s getting older. This is the transition.*

Then, at 9:47 a.m. local time, something changed.

I was sitting in the third row of the press section, laptop open, coffee lukewarm, when a Berkshire PR staffer walked on stage, leaned toward Greg Abel, and whispered something. Abel nodded, stood up, and walked off stage left. The crowd murmured. I checked my phone. Nothing on the wire.

Thirty seconds later, the lights dimmed slightly. And Warren Buffett walked out, unescorted, wearing a gray suit and a tie that looked looser than usual. He did not use the stairs. He used the ramp. He moved slowly, but with intention. The room erupted. People stood. Some gasped. I heard a woman behind me say, “Oh my God.”

Buffett sat down, adjusted the microphone, and said, “Well, I guess I owe you all an explanation.”

The initial mood was pure euphoria. The crowd clapped for nearly two minutes. Buffett smiled, but it was not his usual broad, mischievous grin. It was tighter. He looked tired. The applause finally died down, and he took a sip of water.

“I told Greg I would do this short,” he said. “So I’m going to do this short. And then I’m going to answer some questions. But I want to be honest with you, which is something I’ve tried to be for sixty years.”

That was when the mood shifted.

Buffett began to speak about the current state of the U.S. economy. He did not sugarcoat it. He described what he called “a slow bleed in consumer confidence” that Berkshire’s retail and industrial businesses have been feeling since February. He mentioned that See’s Candies, a classic Buffett holding known for steady earnings, had seen a “notable dip” in foot traffic in March and April. He said that Berkshire’s railroad, BNSF, was moving fewer consumer goods than in any first quarter since 2020.

“I am not predicting a recession,” he said, his voice growing softer. “I am saying we are in one. We just don’t have the official sticker yet.”

I watched the faces around me. The same journalists who had been grinning moments earlier were now scribbling furiously, their expressions grim. A trader in a yellow jacket dropped his pen. The room felt heavy. Buffett paused, looked down at his notes, and then looked back up.

“But here is the part I really want to say,” he continued. “I have been through twelve recessions, two world wars, a depression, a pandemic, and a whole lot of bad decisions. And every single time, the American economy has come back stronger. Not because of magic. Because people adapt.”

He then did something I had never seen him do before. He pulled out a small, folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket. He read a quote from his late partner, Charlie Munger, who passed away in 2023.

“Charlie once told me: ‘The market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term.’ The votes right now look bad. But the weight of America? The weight of this country? It is heavier than any recession.”

He folded the paper, put it back, and leaned forward.

“I am not selling a single share of Berkshire right now. I am not selling the country. And I am not selling hope. So if you came here looking for a reason to panic, you won’t get it from me. You’ll get the truth, and then you’ll get a plan.”

The mood swung again. I saw people nodding. The fear in the room did not disappear, but it transformed. It became something quieter, more resolute. A man in a Berkshire hat near the front stood up and shouted, “Thank you, Warren!” Buffett waved him off, but he smiled—this time, the real smile.

He then took questions for about thirty minutes. He admitted that Berkshire had trimmed its positions in some consumer stocks. He said cash holdings were at an all-time high, not because he was bearish, but because he wanted “dry powder for when the world panics.” He joked that he had no plans to buy a social media company. “I don’t understand how anyone makes money on a platform where people argue about lunch,” he said. The room laughed, the tension finally broken.

As he stood up to leave, he turned back to the microphone. “One more thing. I’m not retiring. So stop writing those stories. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

The crowd roared. He walked off, slowly, the same way he came. The interview lasted exactly fifty-two minutes.

After the session, I spoke to a longtime Berkshire shareholder from Ohio who had been attending since 1988. “I was scared when he started talking about the recession,” she told me. “But then he did what he always does. He made me feel like we’re going to be okay. That’s why I keep coming back.”

I walked out of the arena into the Nebraska sun. The parking lot was full of RVs and families. The mood outside was different from the gloom inside just an hour earlier. People were talking, laughing, buying Berkshire-themed T-shirts. The stock might drop on Monday. But in Omaha, on that Saturday afternoon, hope was back on the menu.

Warren Buffett did not solve the economy. But he did something perhaps more important. He told the truth, and he stayed in the room.

Ahmed Abed – News journalist