The $40 Billion Bet — Why Buffett Bought Japan's Oldest Companies

📈 Featured: The Five Trading Houses — Mitsubishi TYO: 8058 / Mitsui 8031 / Itochu 8001 / Marubeni 8002 / Sumitomo 8053 (all with US OTC ADRs) August 31, 2020: Warren Buffett, ninety years old as of yesterday, reveals he has spent twelve months secretly buying five percent of each of Japan's five sogo shosha — the least understood giants in world business, dismissed for two decades as obsolete. By 2026 the bet is worth more than $40 billion. Hosted by Kenji Mori ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open — August 31, 2020 1:31 Chapter 1 — The Oldest Money 4:29 Chapter 2 — The Machine That Fed an Island 7:07 Chapter 3 — The Sentence 9:31 Chapter 4 — The Reinvention 12:28 Chapter 5 — The Oracle Moves 15:48 Chapter 6 — The Payoff 18:27 The Company Today 19:03 Closing ⚠️ This is a documentary, not investment advice. 📚 SOURCES • Mitsui Echigoya / Iwasaki Yataro / sogo shosha history (Japanese-language primary research): https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B7%8F%E5%90%88%E5%95%86%E7%A4%BE • Berkshire Hathaway SEC filings (Schedule 13/Form 8-K), 2020–2026 (SEC EDGAR) • Fortune (Feb 2026), Nikkei Asia (May 2026), CNBC — Berkshire's Japan stake crossing 10% • Berkshire yen-bond issuance & annual letters (Berkshire Hathaway disclosures) 🎵 MUSIC: "Deliberate Thought" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 🖼️ ARCHIVE PHOTOS PUBLIC DOMAIN / CREATIVE COMMONS - Warren Buffett (2005) — Mark Hirschey / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0) - Warren Buffett, SelectUSA Investment Summit 2015 — U.S. International Trade Administration (Public Domain) - Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting 2025 — Good-investing / Wikimedia Commons (CC0) - Greg Abel (2025) — Tankforwin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) - Iwasaki Yataro, 1874 portrait photograph — Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain) - Mitsui Takatoshi, painted portrait — Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain) - "Suruga-cho" from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo — Uta

Added 27 Aug 2026