The Washington Post: Why Jeff Bezos and Not Warren Buffett?

Among the many questions about the sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, here are a couple I haven’t seen discussed much, except in a post at Fortune on Tuesday: Why didn’t Warren Buffett buy the paper? And what does it mean that he passed it over?

Once the Graham family decided to sell, it’s unthinkable that the legendary investor didn’t get a chance to put in a bid. After all, he served on the board of the Washington Post Company for more than two decades, and the huge conglomerate he runs, Berkshire Hathaway, has been the largest outside shareholder in the Post Company since the nineteen-seventies. (The value of Berkshire’s stake in the company rose to about a billion dollars after the news of the sale, from which Berkshire reportedly stands to make about fifty million dollars.) And in recent years, Berkshire has bought a bunch of newspapers, including Buffett’s local one, the Omaha World-Herald. In his annual letter to Berkshire’s shareholders this year, Buffett wrote, “I love newspapers and, if their economics make sense, will buy them even when they fall far short of the size threshold we would require for the purchase of, say, a widget company.”

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