Claim:
In May 2024, U.S. billionaire investor Warren Buffett said, “If you don’t like paying taxes, make billionaires pay their fair share and you would never have to pay taxes again.”
Rating:
Misattributed (About this rating?)
On May 13, 2024, a viral post on Reddit featured a video of Warren Buffett claiming that the Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO had said that if billionaires paid their fair share in taxes, no one else would have to:
The post had gained 35,000 upvotes and garnered 3,500 comments as of this writing. Another post by the same user appeared on another subreddit with the same video and wording, and had garnered 1,500 upvotes and 200-plus comments.
In the video clip, Buffett said:
We don’t mind paying taxes at Berkshire, and we are paying a 21% federal rate. If we send in a check like we did last year, we sent in over $5 billion to the US federal government. And if 800 other companies had done the same thing, no other person in the United States would have had to pay a dime of federal taxes, whether income taxes, no Social Security taxes, no estate taxes, no… . It’s open down the line.
The video didn’t confirm the exact quote, so we searched for where the clip came from, seeking more context and the exact wording. We found it was part of the livestream of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting, which took place on May 4, 2024 (the quote starts at 24:24 mark). We also found the full transcript of the meeting.