Did American billionaire Warren Buffett criticize former President Donald Trump for "begging for money" on X? No, that's not true: What appeared to be a screenshot of Buffett's account was a 2022 recycled meme. It was first published by a parody account.
The claim resurfaced in a post (archived here) published on Threads on July 30, 2024. It said:
Everyone's thoughts on this.
The post shared an image that looked like a screenshot of a tweet supposedly posted by the @WarrenBuffett account that read:
I don't like to get mixed upin politics but I wonderhow the Former Presidentwas ever a billionaire. Imean, he spends moretime begging for moneythan most bums.
This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Thu Aug 1 14:30:04 2024 UTC)
A reverse image search shows that the image of the supposed X post has been circulating on the internet since at least since August 2022 (archived here). One of the earliest examples (archived here) published that month showed a parody label. The account additionally said in the bio line (archived here):
Most of the images we share are parodies.
Buffett is Berkshire Hathaway's CEO. As of this writing, he is 93 years old.
In 2017, Buffet told CNBC that, to him, making economic decisions motivated by "political feelings" is "not the way to do it."
Buffet has an account on X, formerly known as Twitter (archived here), but it does not contain many entries. The most recent one is from 2016.
His account did not display the post in question.
A Google search for the first sentence from the purported tweet (archived here) showed 2022 fact checks by Reuters and CheckYourFact. Both cited Buffet's representative who refuted the claim. It was also reviewed by USA Today in 2022.
Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Buffet are here.
