Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett said Monday he likes Apple stock so much he would love to own all of it.
"I clearly like Apple. We buy them to hold," Buffett said on CNBC's "Squawk Box." "We bought about 5 percent of the company. I'd love to own 100 percent of it. ... We like very much the economics of their activities. We like very much the management and the way they think."
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett appeared from Omaha, where his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate held a weekend of events around Saturday's annual shareholder meeting.
Buffett also supported Apple's plan to buy back more of its own shares. On Tuesday, the smartphone maker announced a new $100 billion stock buyback program.
"When I buy Apple, I know that Apple is going to repurchase a lot of shares," he said. "We own about 5 percent. But I know I don't have to do a thing and probably in a couple of years we'll own 6 percent without laying out another dollar. Well, I love the idea of having 5 percent go to 6 percent. The cheaper the stock is the more they will get for their money. There is no reason at all for me to encourage other people to buy Apple."
Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire, and his longtime investing partner and vice chairman, Charlie Munger, spoke to the tens of thousands attendees on a wide range of topics from their massive stake in Apple to missing out Google and Amazon to bashing bitcoin as "rat poison."
— Buffett joins "Squawk Box" for three hours, 6 a.m. ET to 9 a.m. ET, with special guests Munger and Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.
With Berkshire's 2018 annual meeting in the books, users can revisit the highlights in CNBC's Warren Buffett Archive, which houses searchable video from 25 full annual meetings, going back to 1994, synchronized to 2600 pages of transcripts. The Warren Buffett Archive also includes 500 shorter-form videos arranged by topic, CNBC interviews, a Buffett Timeline, and a Berkshire Portfolio Tracker.
