After stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway last month, 96-year-old Warren Buffett has officially entered his retirement years. But instead of spending his evenings at the beach or traveling the world, Buffett’s nights can look surprisingly familiar: sitting in front of the television, watching YouTube.
“Warren’s range is broad,” Sharon Osberg, one of Buffett’s closest friends who often visits and watches with him, told the Wall Street Journal. “It can be the silliest things.”
But Buffett isn’t spending his nights scrolling through AI slop on YouTube Shorts or watching clips of CNBC, either. His viewing tastes are decidedly more eclectic: clips featuring Glenn Close, a documentary about attorney Roy Cohn, commercials from the 1950s, and Uzbekistan’s version of America’s Got Talent.
It’s a hobby Buffett, who has a net worth of $143 billion, appears to have embraced even before stepping away from Berkshire. He handed the CEO reins to Greg Abel in January and chairmanship to his son Howard in September. But even while he was still running the over $1 trillion conglomerate, his evenings were largely his own.
Buffett has long made time for hobbies—he used to spend 8 hours a week playing bridge, including with Bill Gates
Buffett’s YouTube habits are especially notable considering he has long been known for his reluctance to embrace technology. Even as a longtime Apple investor, he waited until his late eighties to swap his flip phone for an iPhone.
But what isn’t unusual about Buffett is his reluctance to spend every waking hour thinking about business. Reading books and newspapers, for example, has long been one of his favorite pastimes. At one point, he said he spent as much as 80% of his working day reading.
“Read 500 pages like this every day,” he said. “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
And when he wanted to put business aside completely, he’d often pick up a deck of cards and play bridge—including with his former longtime friend Bill Gates. Buffett played as many as eight hours a week.
“I play a lot,” Buffett told the Washington Post in a 2017 interview. “At least four sessions a week, about two hours a session.”
The card game, he said at the time, kept him on his toes.
“You can play a hand every six or seven minutes every day for the rest of your life, and you will never see the same hand,” Buffett said. “It’s a game you can enjoy when you are in your nineties, and you are seeing a different intellectual challenge every seven minutes.”
Buffett found work-life balance later in life. Gen Z want it now
The desire to step away from work from time to time—but still be successful—is a balance many young people are trying to figure out much earlier in their careers.
For Gen Z, that means putting work-life balance ahead of the traditional markers of career success. According to a 2025 report from Randstad, Gen Z workers ranked work-life balance as a higher consideration than salary when evaluating their current or future jobs.
Buffett became a millionaire at 32. And his advice to young people who want to emulate his success is simple: Find a career that feels less like a chore, and more like a hobby that you’re working on every day.
“I tell the students, look for the job that you would take if you didn’t need a job,” Buffett told PBS in 2017. “I mean, it’s that simple.”