America’s most famous investor now owns a piece of the Atlanta Braves.
Berkshire Hathaway, the massive holding company owned by Warren Buffett, purchased around $8M in shares of Atlanta Braves Holdings.
Back in the summer, the Major League Baseball team was spun off into its own company by parent Liberty Media, along with Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta, the commercial complex that surrounds the ballpark.
Liberty, which purchased the team from previous corporate media parent Time Warner (now part of Warner Bros. Discovery) back in 2007, had recently undergone a reorganization of its holdings, including the Braves’ spinoff.
The investment probably comes at a peak time for the franchise. The Braves drew nearly 3.2M fans to the ballpark in 2023, a year where they shockingly came up short in the playoffs despite a 101-win season. Additionally, their local television ratings were strong, up more than 18% from 2022 despite concerns about the future of Bally Sports South due to Diamond Sports Group’s bankruptcy.
With the core players of the team locked into team-friendly deals for the foreseeable future, Berkshire’s investment could be a bargain if the Braves play for at least one more World Series in the coming years.
Yahoo! Finance senior reporter David Hollerith put a spotlight on Buffett’s relationship with baseball, citing how his love affair with the game began with the late Ted Williams. Buffett once owned a share of a minor league team in his native Omaha, Nebraska, where his investment firm is based.
Buffett’s other major sports connection relates to Omaha’s other beloved son, undisputed welterweight champion Terence “Bud” Crawford. For several years, Buffett would attend Crawford’s fights when the boxer would have a card in his hometown. The two have long maintained a friendship, as shown by this hilarious Instagram post.
Berkshire Hathaway also made news on Wednesday with its decision to pull its investments from several companies, including General Motors and Johnson & Johnson.
Those moves are notable since each GM had recently worked out a deal with autoworkers after those unions went on strike, and Johnson & Johnson is under massive amounts of litigation as a result of talc products that contained asbestos.
