Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who campaigned for Hillary Clinton, has seen his net worth increase by $7.8 billion, or nearly 12 percent, since Donald Trump was elected president.
That post-election surge is enough to make the 86-year-old business magnate the second richest person in the world. The Oracle of Omaha, as Buffett is called, is now worth $74.2 billion, just behind Bill Gates.
The spike is ironic given Buffett’s very public support for Clinton — and criticism of Trump — during the campaign. Though Buffett donated relatively little cash to Clinton’s campaign, he joined her on the campaign trail and also lent the Democratic candidate the backing of one of the most respected businessmen in the world.
According to Forbes, which tracks billionaires’ net worth, shares of Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, rose six percent in the two days after Trump’s Election Day win. That gave Buffett $3.6 billion boost in net worth.
As with the stock market in general, Berkshire stock has increased even more since then, from $221,484 per share on Nov. 8 to around $247,600 as of press time on Tuesday. That 12 percent surge is slightly higher than the nearly nine percent in the Dow Jones Industrial average.
Trump suggested on Monday that stocks are on the upswing because he was elected president. And while it is difficult to determine whether that is true, the increase has defied widespread pre-election predictions that a Trump win would be disastrous for the stock market and economy.
Buffett himself has criticized those prognostications.
In an interview with CNN several days after the election, Buffett said that predictions of a Trump-linked lull in the market was “silly.”
“The stock market will be higher 10, 20 and 30 years from now and it would have been with Hillary and it would have been with Trump,” Buffett said during the interview.