Billionaires for Bernie? Warren Buffett Praises Sanders Despite Backing Hillary

Image by Getty Images

By Luciana Lopez and Jessica DiNapoli September 8, 2015

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett on Tuesday praised the presidential campaign of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, even though Buffett said he still backs Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

“I think we all have lessons to learn from him (Sanders),” Buffett said in an interview with Reuters.

“There are very few candidates that have – not just this election but in past elections – that have campaigned like Bernie Sanders,” Buffett continued.

“You know exactly what he feels on everything. He’s articulate, and he doesn’t go around knocking the other candidates.”

Buffett, the head of sprawling conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, is known as the Oracle of Omaha for his investing acumen.

Upstart Sanders has been drawing increasing support and eroding the lead of Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination for the November 2016 presidential election.

Nevertheless, Clinton still leads Sanders 43 percent to 28 percent in a Reuters/IPSOS five-day rolling poll on Tuesday.

But Sanders has drawn crowds of thousands nationwide with his fiery populism, including calls to break up big banks, increase social safety nets and boost taxes on the rich.

Buffett – the world’s third-richest person, according to Forbes magazine, with a personal fortune of $72.7 billion – said that while he agrees with Sanders about the need to help those left behind by the market economy, “I disagree with him very much on the production side.”—Reuters

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO