Ballmer Divests From Fossil Fuels

Plus, Harvard magazine antisemitism letter, and more

Billionaires Ballmer and Buffett are taking different approaches when it comes to investing in oil and gas companies. Photo credit: The Editors.

Deep in a Wall Street Journal interview with former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who is one of the richest people in the world, comes this from Ballmer: “We did decide to not own oil and gas stocks anymore. That’s a decision we made in the last year or so as we’ve gotten more involved in climate. It’s not going to change the world of valuations for those stocks, but it feels more value consistent.”

When Ballmer says “value consistent” he appears to mean his own values about what is important and moral and good, not value in the economic sense of the price of the stock representing fairly a share of future earnings. If people like Ballmer are selling oil and gas stocks for non-economic reasons, it might at the margins create opportunities for buyers making investment decisions not on the basis of “feels” but rather on the basis of more narrowly rational judgments about price and earnings.

If you look at Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway’s latest 13-F filing, he reports about $13 billion worth of Occidental Petroleum and about $17 billion worth of Chevron. It’s possible Buffett/Berkshire may have sold some of that since then or bought more, and the value may have changed based on the market prices since the report date. It’s interesting to see Buffett taking a different approach from Ballmer. Perhaps Buffett feels an obligation to his shareholders to maximize their financial returns rather than to allow non-financial considerations to enter in, while Ballmer, who is running his own money outside the context of public-company investors, is less constrained.

Some people might says that Buffett, who is 94, has a shorter-term investment horizon than does Ballmer, who is 68. If fossil fuels are eventually eliminated and it hurts Chevron and Oxy P, Buffett may be off the scene by the time that happens, while Ballmer could be young enough to see it happen. Personally, I doubt it, but some people might say that. Yet even as a young investor Buffett was known for investing in what he called “cigar stubs,” businesses that the market thought didn’t have many puffs left and were accordingly priced as bargains. My sense of it is that Buffett’s age has less to do with it than does his investing approach.

As of this morning, Ballmer was no. 9 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, at $148 billion, while Buffett was no. 10, at $142 billion, though I have some doubts about the precision of those sorts of estimates.

Harvard magazine antisemitism letter: Harvard magazine has published a letter to the editor I wrote. As published, it reads as follows:

“An Academic Agenda,” the 7 Ware Street column in the November-December 2024 issue (page 4), reports that “members of Congress and of the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance have recycled factually preposterous reports that billions of dollars of contributions from foreign entities (‘Middle Eastern anti-democratic governments’) have warped Harvard’s policies and positions.”

Harvard is being sued and investigated for antisemitism, which many students, professors, and alumni acknowledge is a serious issue. The University’s alumni magazine might play a more constructive role by investigating and reporting on the foreign funding, rather than by attacking the Jewish alumni volunteers and members of Congress who are raising the alarm.

The Harvard Gazette reported in 2005 a $20-million gift from a Saudi prince for “the creation of a University-wide program on Islamic studies.” In 2008 the Gazette reported a $2-million gift from a Qatari sheikh. In 2011, a subsidiary of the Qatar Foundation “commissioned Harvard University to undertake a multi-year research study to establish a holistic framework by which to document, analyze, and decipher the principles of urban sustainability among selected case-study cities in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Iran, and Iraq.” In 2012 Harvard Law School announced that the Qatar Foundation had become “a leading sponsor” of the Institute for Global Law and Policy. The Crimson reported in 2023 that Harvard had disclosed $4,387,575 from Saudi Arabia, $3,305,984 from Qatar, and $1 million from Kuwait for a period of January 2022 to April 2023. In November 2018, the Qatar Foundation’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University announced a “groundbreaking” agreement with edX, then jointly owned by Harvard and MIT, to be the first Middle Eastern university to provide courses through the online platform. It’s not clear from the column what precisely rises to the level of “preposterous”—that the totals from these and similar agreements might mount over the years into the billions, especially including other Ivy League universities such as Cornell, which has opened a full campus in Qatar, or that Harvard’s policies and positions might have been warped by the money. What’s really preposterous is the persistence of the reflexive tendency by Harvard officials and publications to lash out at the Jewish alumni and the members of Congress. A better approach would be to listen and act to address the concerns raised, which are legitimate and went unaddressed for far too long.

Ira Stoll ’94
Boston

Harvard magazine includes a condescending response that repeats the error of defensively attacking the Jewish alumni, proving my point rather than rebutting it. If you are interested, you can check it out at Harvard magazine, though you are almost certainly better off using your time more productively.

Recent work: “New York Times Campus ‘Middle-of-the-Road’ on Israel Is Actually Pretty Far Out” is the headline over my latest article for the Algemeiner. “Maybe they look like ‘middle of the road’ from the vantage point of the New York Times newsroom. Not so, though, from the perspective of the Israeli or American public.” Check it out there if you are interested in that sort of thing.

Bloomberg warns on debt: A pair of recent Bloomberg articles have highlighted the risks around the U.S. deficit and debt picture.

One news article cites “worry about the potential for the type of breakdown in Treasury market functioning that happened at the start of the pandemic, when investors rushed to sell bonds as panic set in. US government debt sold off sharply until the Fed implemented emergency backstop measures to limit the damage. The fear is that a confluence of pressures could strain liquidity and spur dislocations even without an obvious fundamental trigger.”

And an opinion piece by Jonathan Levin reports, “the situation suddenly feels more perilous as we embark on yet another year of outsized budget shortfalls...Our political leaders don’t need to balance the primary budget next year or the year after. But they need to set out a realistic path and a credible timeline. Before the US, the British had the world’s premier currency and bond market, and before them was the Dutch. Fiscal deterioration stripped both of that advantage.”

We’ve been following this issue here because we share the concerns. In a rosy scenario Trump “DOGE” spending discipline, the end of the Ukraine and Middle East wars, and economic growth improve this problem. The less rosy scenario is that tariffs, curbs on immigration, and high interest rates slow growth, entitlements go unaddressed, and the situation worsens rather than improving.

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